The main thing that helped me: my insatiable desire to learn everything.
However, tons of whales upvoted me when I first joined in June 2016. Steemed, roadscape, jamesc, so many whales gave me their vote. Back then, though there was way less competition.
Another thing that helps me blog daily: I am fairly sure I've got some attention issues. I am a serial learner, and so I have the shiny object syndrome. I tend to hyper focus on a topic for days, weeks or months until I exhaust the obsession. This makes writing easy.
so my first love is reading, studying. Writing is just a a product of learning.
This forever learning syndrome could serve to illuminate others too rather than merely glorifying you as a person, hopefully :)