I agree with you that persistence in high-quality content and steempower accumulation are the keys to success on Steemit.
Shortly after joining, I understood it's motto "come for the money, stay for the community". I have summarized my thoughts about Steemit like this:
- I came here for the money
- Very soon I came to believe that there is no much money for me here
- I choose to stay anyway because I really enjoyed the opportunity to express my thoughts freely and get a lot of much-appreciated meaningful feedback to them
- After connecting with some like-minded Steemians, I came to realize that there actually is (and will be more and more) money for me here, too
- I choose to reinvest everything I earn on Steemit in powering-up my Steemit account
- I decided to decrease my freelance business plan writing activities (I increased my hourly rate and closed some old contracts in order to get fewer jobs) so that I can have more time for posting, commenting, upvoting, and above-all enjoying Steemit
I believe that Steem is much more prosperous that other cryptocurrencies because it provides real value - while Bitcoins are mined by powerful computers solving otherwise usefulness algorithms, Steem is mined mostly by people posting enjoyable/informative/thoughtful content and discussing with other people. It is also much more stable since you can't sell everything you have even if you wanted to.
Cheers! : )
That's an interesting history of how you came to steemit. I hope that many will follow in your footsteps.