Like perhaps many people who've joined Steemit, one of your first thoughts was This is too good to be true. Write about random stuff and get paid for it?

And then you notice how much some people are making. Jeez Louise! Would you look as that stuff on the Trending page! That dude's making 800 bucks off of that barely literate drivel? He's talking about his freaking cat! Gotta check this guy out, look at his wallet. 👀

What. The. Fuggetaboutit. His account value is One Point Two Million Dollars.

You just found a whale.

So you start cranking out literate (you do have some standards, after all) drivel about your cat. Three upvotes and seven days later, you've earned a big goose egg.

You put on your thinking cap (made out of tinfoil of course) and your little grey cells go to work. Pondering occurs on a truly epic scale. Eventually, one of your synapses takes a leap of faith. That One Point Two Million is not the total of monies he's earned from thousands of cat musings. He's an investor. He bought a buttload of Steem. Maybe he bought it when the price of Steem was higher than it is now. Maybe his account started out at Two Point Two Million Dollars and he's now a cool Million in the hole.

So your plan to become a whale gets scaled back. You read a few posts, check your wallet, and realize that with your 73.164 Steem Power, you are what's called Plankton. You vaguely hope that that's one step up from pond scum, but it's been a long time since you took high school biology and back then you were too busy checking out your lab partner's boobs to have learned much anyway.

You read in a few places that whether you're a Plankton or a Whale has something to do with Powers Of Ten. You also didn't learn much math in high school (who can blame you, there were boobies everywhere), but you eventually learn that once you have a million Vests, you'll become a Minnow.

You don't really understand Vests but you guess it's sorta like being fully vested in your company's 401k (you weren't paying attention in economics, boobie-related of course) but guess that The Powers That Be at Steemit, Inc. pulled that little euphemism out of thin air so they wouldn't have to fill out all kinds of paperwork in triplicate for demanding little sycophants at the SEC. You read some more posts and find more Powers Of Ten references. A million vests makes a Minnow. Lots of posters mention minnows. At ten million vests, a Dolphin is born. A bunch of posters talk about dolphins and how they want to become one. At a hundred million vests, an Orca arrives. Nobody talks about orcas. They who must not be named. And at one billion vests (or a thousand million vests for the English who seem to have something against the letter b), a whale springs to life.

You realize that you'll never be a whale. And orcas must not be named. So you set out on your quest to become a dolphin, one vest at a time.

And to not even mention your cat.

images: Pixabay

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