Nailed it!
It's easy to drastically underestimate the power of patience and compounding! This goes for skills as well as money. Its impossible to predict what steemit and the crypto markets will look like in 5 years time, buy I can absolutely guarantee that if you practice creating content you love consistently for 5 years you'll get pretty bloody good at it!
I'm willing to bet you didn't pick up a guitar in the hope that you'd earn 10 cents for every bar chord you learned then complained after a month that you weren't making any money and successful artists were gaming the system.
It's far more likely that you made music because you enjoyed it and money came later.
Good example with the guitar. Of course I never thought like that. I stayed focussed on the task at hand. Ambition is good. But it should always be married with real life action and attention to detail.