My "success" has been mostly intellectual. It's really interesting to see what kind of impact Steem will have to the world. To be part of this from early on is "once in a lifetime" opportunity.
Steem is yet another step in the evolution of blockchains. Unlike many other blockchains, Steem is actually doing something useful. Most blockchains are just a playfields for developers, but Steem has been able to attract real users – many of whom have never earlier used any other blockchains.
The Steem blockchain is really powerful. You can think of it as a creature that is existing in several computers around the world. Because it's existence is so widely distributed, it's really hard to kill it.
It has superpowers: it can remember everything perfectly. It has a built-in reward system that is paying humans to record stuff into it's memory.
Steemit.com is just a first application where Steem rewards humans to write blog posts. If you start to think, there are lots of different stuff that a reward system with a perfect memory could do.
A good sci-fi writer could get a nice novel out of this. A creature that nobody can kill starts to pay humans to do stuff. First it's very innocent, like blog posts. But then it starts to evolve... there will be more diverse stuff that it's rewarding humans to do. Someday it's so popular that people start to use the native tokens it has issued to replace their fiat-currencies.