Yes, I realise it’s a bit premature, but consider my settings. I’m sipping my morning coffee at a coffee shop. My son has blissfully finished eating his breakfast and is engaged with playing his lion dance head. The girls in the family are at home. If I don’t reflect now, then when?

Madness was the perfect name for this event because it gave us all a jolt in the senses and might have left some of us scrambling to survive. Without the Daily Rewards incentive, how were we supposed to maintain our zapping habit?

Regardless of the position I end up with, I’m rather proud of the way I played this game. The sats are a nice bonus, but I learnt several things about myself that might be even more precious.

I saw an opportunity and seized it. I posted an ad on ~Agora to advertise my writing services.

It was unprecedented and I was a bit embarrassed about putting myself out there. But hey, three Stackers applied for my services, so I can safely say that I now have a track record on SN. Unfortunately, none of the three posts garnered more than a 1000 sats, so sorry to these Stackers haha. I learnt a lot from the comments on my posts nonetheless and I hope they did too.

Glad to be the first Stacker to try something novel here.

It was during MSM that I started the habit of posting a photo on ~Photography almost every day. Doing so enabled me to delete photos I didn’t really need on my phone. Suddenly, my mind and heart felt much lighter. I know it sounds silly but there is a marked difference in my mental state, knowing that I have drastically cut my photos from 3300+ to 2700+. It made me internalise the profound truth of something - everything we own is an sats-earning opportunity. We just need to find the right platform. Of course, I need to thank @TNStacker for keeping the posting fee so affordable.

Anyway, it was through this process of cleansing that I found a photo about how elephants are afraid of chilli. Posted it for Fun Fact Friday.

And guess what? That photo that I had taken a year ago won me Fun Fact Friday! Yippie yay! 🎉

These 10k sats empowered me to run my first bounty ever. Besides figuring out the ins and outs of organising a bounty, I realised one crucial thing. I could actually profit from organising a bounty! Here’s how:

I already announced that the top photo would be given 1000 sats. However, my post itself gained 2596 sats. So while I have already set aside 1000 sats for this bounty, I could technically use 1000 sats from the earnings - and still withdraw 1596 sats into my own pockets.

So what should we do when we feel poor in the future? We can place a gamble, organise a bounty and hope that we earn some revenue from it haha.

Anyway, for the record, I gave out 3300 sats in total. I didn’t feel right profiting from this bounty. Unfortunately, due to the MSM, people could be mistaken that I am giving out zaps in order to secure a higher position on the leaderboard. Haha. But Sensei is genuine, okay!

For better or for worse, the Leaderboard hypersensitised me to Stackers’ zapping habits. Let’s just say that I was bothered enough about it to write about it.

It made me realise that most Stackers spend their time and energy typing long form comments without the explicit expectation of being zapped. It seems that they leave it to the will of other Stackers. If they find V4V, they can zap. If not, they don’t care either.

It was a huge relief honestly. Half the time, I was stressing myself out about not having enough sats to zap people. Particularly so for some posts like this alcohol one which got tons of comments but few zaps. So, these days, I just zap people when I feel I have enough to share.

A byproduct of this epiphany is that I lowered my default zap amount from 108 to 49 sats. 49 instead of 50 because I need that one sat to post a comment in response to the Stacker. (Talk about being cheap haha.) But it might be a good thing on the whole. 49 doesn’t come attached with as much weight as 108, so I find that I can zap all comments to my post in one shot.

If my zap is 108, I tend to hesitate about commenting. I think subconsciously I feel that I have to type something insightful to warrant a 108 sat zap. With 49 sats, however, it’s all systems go, what you see is what you get.

So these are my takeaways from the MSM. Was it business as usual for you or did you learn something interesting about yourself?