@stellabelle Thinking a lot about this post and the great sentiment and empathy behind it. It reminded me a lot like parenting.
We want the best for our kids, we would do anything for them, we would make any sacrifice, we don't want life to hurt them, we don't want them to fall and cut their knee, we want all of them to achieve great success etc.
But you know the old adages. Give a person a fish, they eat for one day. But teach a person how to fish....WOW! Likewise, you can lead the horse to water, but you cannot make it drink.
I believe personal empowerment is the answer. You can provide the tools, but you can never make someone use them. Steemit has provided the platform and all the tools already. It continues to provide more.
Really, I believe the problem is neither the platform, the present tools, the lack of opportunity nor the reward system. It is how do you empower people to claim self responsibility for their own lives.
Coming back to the children analogy, the great question for every 'parent' to consider is: Do we prepare the road for our children? Or do we prepare our children for the road?
I'm willing to be way off beam here, to be totally wrong. But I am also an Educator and feel I have a responsibility to share my experience with others. Learn - Share/Teach - Reward. Repeat.
"how do you empower people to claim self responsibility for their own lives." I believe you are correct actually. I feel like I am providing band-aid solutions. But really, I am looking for a solution because I hear it constantly. It's noise that exists from real pain.
Teaching people to become self-sufficient, well, I believe it must be a combination of drive on the part of the person and also a mentorship situation. I had a good experience with a writing mentor and I really sought him out because I felt really passionate. Once he said, "Leah, I really like your writing", it was like gold to me. I felt that I could move on from being a student, to becoming independent. I feel that personalized attention is one of the greatest things lacking in the modern world as far as adults are concerned. At least that was what i experienced. But my passion led me into to the territory of "never giving up." I tried to turn my back on writing several times, and I literally was not able to. James Altucher became my inspiration to go down the path of discovery, mastery and self-reliance. It was important for me to find someone who was both successful and odd, eccentric. He's both of those qualities, and I am also eccentric, in some ways, so I had to find someone I identified with before I could properly emulate.
Agree with you 100%.
I would phrase it that the greatest gift you/I/we can ever give another person is simply our time, to sit and listen. The problem is that time is such a limited and precious commodity; and why I would suggest; (as both you and I have experienced the direct positive benefits of this) a mentoring/sponsorship/training programme via Whale to Dolphin to Minnow. That the first generation on Steemit teach the second and so forth.
I believe a band-aid approach is much preferable to letting someone just "bleed out" btw :)
I already took on a mentee during the first week. He found me and asked me. I said yes. Now I am asking to become someone's mentor. I have been doing this mentorship all along, quietly, behind the scenes.