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It is easy to get into the weeds of arbitrage. By arbitrage, I’m referring to spotting and exploiting methods of making money. This may sound bad, but as I often say: it’s not an inherently bad thing in and of itself. 

Everyone goes through phases in their life. I have been through many phases in terms of arbitrage versus building. At times, I have been one who spent 90% or more of my time on arbitrage and less than 10% on building. 

Other times, I have gone the opposite way and spent 90% or more of my time on building and less than 10% on arbitrage. There are many ways to spend one’s time and many different things that we can choose to focus on. 

I have learned that it’s important to take a step back and gain a macro perspective on what you’re doing. When I look at my time today, it is still a mix of arbitrage and building. I spend some of my time looking for opportunities to increase revenue and bring in more cash and I spend another portion of my time building something for a long-term future outlook. 

How I want to live my life comes into play as well. I’ve done a lot of thinking as to the way I wish to live my day-to-day life and the result that I often circle back around to is that I want to live my life building something I believe in and allow the arbitrages to take a much smaller role in the greater picture. 

Finding efficiencies and inefficiencies, exploits and investments is always fun. It’s a fun game to play.. especially when you make money at it. 

What is even more rewarding, however, is the sense of purpose that comes along with building something for the long-term. That sense of purpose is irreplaceable. It’s comes when you have a mission that you believe in and continually strive to bring it into reality. 

I also see this playing out on the Steem blockchain. You’ve got many people who play for the short-term gains. They look for ways to find little efficiencies and inefficiencies in the rewards pool. They’re looking to game the system and make a few bucks today from those efforts. 

As I said, there is nothing wrong with that. It’s a choice. Some may choose to do that and focus 100% of their efforts on it. Others though will choose to build long-term brand on Steem. 

They will spend the vast majority of their time looking for ways to increase the size of their audience, the engagement of their followers, their name recognition across the blockchain and a whole slew of other core concepts. By building brand, they’re cementing their place in the social game of Steem which has a multitude of rewards in it’s own right. 

Similarly, a community or business on Steem can focus on trying to maximize the amount of rewards they get from the rewards pool or they can focus on building their brand and looking for ways to bring in outside revenue. They can also do a healthy mix of the two. 

I think there is a happy medium. It’s going to be a different split for every person and every business/community on Steem. Some will choose a 95/5 split. Others may do a 80/20 split. Regardless, there is a split that works best for every situation and it simply needs to be tried and tested to be determined.

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