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Well, my holdings are taking a hiding today. How are yours holding up?

As always, it is not the end of the world, but it is always depressing and the neurons fire without being asked and o the calculations on "if I had sold yesterday, I could have..." 

The most annoying part is, I have always sucked at most levels of math, but simple math and approximations for things like percentages I have been pretty good at. I scraped through math by the skin of my teeth to get straight into university (it is a prerequisite for a business degree), but I struggled through course on statistics and accounting. I am pretty sure that if I was to go back now, I would do slightly better, although I don't think getting better marks at university would have made much of an impact on my life. So far, the extent of my  university degree benefits has been in job interviews.

Interviewer: "You studied business?" 
Me: *Yes.*
Interviewer: "Do you like dogs?"

The second question is the far more important one to get right. While having pieces of paper with university logos embossed on them are useful, I have found having skills and experience is far more useful. The company I work for actually doesn't put much regard in the degree, although in general, most people do have a degree anyway. However, they figure that for many of the available positions, what needs to be known is through on the job training and experience. Degrees are easy to come by, personality, work ethic and integrity are far harder to find bundled. 

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I don't have much of a personality, so I have to make up for it through work ethic and integrity instead. I think that integrity and the way I work is the last of my fallback positions, where I will "retreat" as I must when I get busy or stressed, peeling away other layers one by one in order to save bandwidth until all that is left is my core. While I can be a social person, when busy, I will find ways to avoid people so that I can focus on what needs to be done. I have never got to the point I have been entirely unable to work before and I don't plan on getting there either.

I think a lot of people hear the "invest in yourself" call and apply it far more to the way they feel than to what actually increases their capabilities to perform. Yes, health is a type of wealth, but generating income takes more than feeling good alone. Doing things like finding ways to *effectively* and *actively* manage stress, improving mindset and learning how to socially interact efficiently are important development points for pretty much anyone.

Now, some people will say, "important for an employee", but that is bullshit - Running a business as the owner requires these skills to a high degree too. Not only that, *work ethic* is vital for running a business. I know a lot of "entrepreneurs" who start some kind of consulting business so that they can have coffee and hand out business cards - yet few of them survive in their business long, as they do what they want to do and neglect what they need to do. Even people who work from home on the internet have to have a relatively good work ethic in order to generate enough business to survive and often, they also have to know how to build effective relationships too.

In general, the thing that "kills" people quick is that they are motivated by the wrong part of the gig - with most being motivated by the outcome of income. We see this a lot on Hive where some people get accustomed to getting a certain level of reward and when it changes, they quickly start kicking and screaming. This is the feeling of *entitlement* and it is a killer of work ethic and often, integrity, as people will start to chase the reward that motivates them *at any cost.*

I tried to explain this to someone who didn't quite get it the other day, when I said how people change their content to wherever they will get a reward, without recognizing the cost of the reward. There are two general outlooks here - short and long - aiming for reward alone is the short game and it fails to recognize that in the long term, there are costs to certain kinds of behavior. People who are obviously just chasing the reward will eventually lose the support, even if in the short-term, they might make gains. 

The thing with continually chopping and chasing wherever content is getting rewarded is not only does it make it hard to build a loyal audience, the loyal audience that might be there starts to turn away to the point they are gone completely. Loyalty is not a one way street, loyalty is like a trusted conversation and if participants start speaking a different language past each other, the relationship drifts apart toward estrangement, voluntary social distancing, even when there is no virus on the table. 

Over the years I have seen this many times in the community, where previous darlings have fallen out of favor for one reason or another, often with drama-laden aggression on the way out. And it is the way out, with very few coming back from it. It has something to do with the integrity of the person, and I don't mean the moral integrity alone here, I mean the ability to be untouched by the pressure, to remain whole and unbroken - to be resilient. As said, I have seen this many times in various ways and once the drama path is taken, very few have the types of personalities that can weather the storms, take the pain and return. However, those that have the work ethic to ignore the drama and just get on with the job, have a far easier time of it in the long run.

The problem is that we have created a world that encourages the reactive drama on immediate events, not one that sees that life is like trading, there are ups and downs, positives and negatives, gains and losses. Being able to accept conditions and fall back on solid process is a skill few possess. Instead, most fall into their defaults, untrained and out of control emotional and psychological positions that can't focus on work, fail to control their personality and therefore, lose their integrity, at least in the eyes of their supporters. 

For four years I have advised quite a few people who asked opinion not to get involved with the drama and out of them all, only the ones who listened or have the personality to absorb the drama without identifying with it are still here. The others just fall silent, their fifteen minutes of drama-fueled fame burned out. Some will get a taste for drama and keep trying to raise it in order to get a rise and a little more of that delicious attention - nearly all fade into some level of social obscurity in due time.

I think that this is is something that content creators on Hive have to think about in regards to their longevity on the platform. While everyone says "I am looking long" their actions don't necessarily support their words. I am not just talking about powering down and selling like so many have, it is also about not building their stake here, both in HP and social collateral. If a person wants to be a content producer who earns for the foreseeable future, it requires building a "business" around some level of reliance on personality, work and integrity. The audience needs to be able to trust.

Let me ask you a question.

Do you trust that friend who is always shilling some new get rich quick business? The one who is selling you some random network marketing scheme like Nutrilife one day and the next trying to get you signed up for a monthly order of cleaning products. Is that the person you turn to for advice and support? Is that the one you ask, "What should I do with my extra money?" 

They may be your friend, but you also recognize the limitations of their skills and will take any advice they give you outside of their knowledge with a grain of salt, because you *don't trust* them. Even if you like them. 

Trust is important in relationships, especially long-term relationships. And perhaps this is why there is so many problems in the digital world, as there is afar less relationship durability online, while there is far more relationship usage, where the value of a relationship is what they can give you in the hear and now and when that isn't apparent or will take too long to see an "ROI", the relationship is not continued. 

It sounds like a practical and utilitarian view of relationships, but it isn't, as it only considers what is happening now and the needs of this moment, not the continually changing conditions and needs of the future. Not thinking about the future isn't living in the moment, it is discounting and borrowing from that future moment so that once it arrives, we are unprepared with diminished potential. 

It is kind of like all the people who say, "if I had bought Bitcoin in 2013" but the truth is, most of the people who say this, didn't have any money they were willing to spend on Bitcoin then either. The price doesn't matter, the resources and mindset do. The funny thing is that often, the same people who said this three years ago are saying it again now, but haven't bought anything in between - but are eternally - *looking long.* 

Taraz
[ Gen1: Hive ]

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Posted Using [LeoFinance <sup>Beta</sup>](https://leofinance.io/@tarazkp/looking-long-but-always-short)