It has been about 5 months now that I'd been on the Hive platform now.
And I must say the journey has definitely been worth it.
Initially, when I was introduced to Hive by 
The general tendency for most people that do not know so much about the blockchain is to get disinterested in anything that sounds like cryptocurrency.
There was that initial inertia of not really being interested in the idea.
But I was literally dragged by
It wasn't until very much later that I realised that there was so much to Hive than meets the eye at first sight.
And now, a handful of months down the line, I wish I engaged on the platform faster.
There is still a lot I don't know, although I need to learn and consolidate about how things work on Hive. But I think I somewhat get the idea that one has to grow.
When I saw the Newbie Initiative organised by 
And so after giving it a little thought, I think here are my goals on Hive for the 3 month period on the Hive Learners platform.
I'll draw my thought process from the SMART acronym for setting goals.
S = Specific
M = Measurable
A = Attainable
R = Realistic
T = Timely
I'll be employing these in the various points of growth I'll be discussing here.
1. HIVE POWER (HP)
I used to joke to a friend about how Hive Power is like gas for moving around on Hive, although Resource Credits seem to be a more appropriate representation of it.
Going for Hive Power seems more like eating good food as a child in order to grow not just fast, but well.
But in the real sense of it, the more HP you have, the more you can actually get to do more stuff on Hive I believe.
I therefore place more emphasis on earning HP than liquid Hive.
As a Newbie that needs to grow, GROWING is much more important at this point. And when you put more emphasis on filling your your tanks first, you can go much farther.
Therefore a specific plan for that is to place my post earnings staked on 100% HP.
With regular posts (which is achievable for me at least 3ce a week), I should have significant growth to reach at least 1000HP by the end of 3 months.
2. ENGAGEMENT
As much as possible, I always actively look for interests on Hive. Hive is so large that a majority of topics in everyday life and society have already been explored in various communities, so I first look for topics that resonate with my strengths and engage such first, before engaging other topics.
I believe quality engagement is embedded in organic participation. For example, in commenting, you should not just comment for commenting sake. You can truly have a comment that comes from a true thought process that sees through the post you're engaging.
It's the reason why I look for my strenghts on hive first and actively engage there.
From there on, I could now engage other posts.
I believe engagement means a lot of things, from commenting to reblogging to followership to posts to upvotes and the likes.
But I think the soul of Engagement is in being DELIBERATELY involved in what goes on within Hive.
Trust me, it's harder to engage what you might not be interested in, but it's super easy to talk about stuff you already kmow about. And I think it's going to be pretty hard not to at least find 1 interest on Hive!
To achieve this, I'll work more on engaging on my strenghts actively. Most of my strenghts revolve around music, tech and medicine. I do the 3 under professional terms in my daily life so it's a lot easy to engage in topics around that.
3. COMMENTS
This appears to be one of the most important, if not the most important tool in engagement for a newbie. It allows readers see through your mind. And people always appreciate good value.
In fact, from interactions with my mentor
It's easy to know who really "vibes" with a topic simply from the kind of comments made.
And from there not only can you get followers, but you can get people to check you out, check out your posts and "become a fan"😅
Specifically, I prefer to comment as 'organically' as possible. It removes the pressure of having to find posts that I might not even be interested in, and just commenting anything just to reach a preplanned quota of amount of comments I set for myself per time.
But to make this achievable, I still have to put quotas to it... Remember the SMART acronym - M for MEASURABLE.
So for a start, I intend doing 10 comments per day. But then I also intend putting deliberate efforts to commenting. And that's the more reason why finding my strenghts will be important.
I also noticed that engaging in my strenghts via commenting helps me to find topics that might need to be explored more on Hive. It also arms me with some knowledge which might ne useful in commenting on other posts. So in short, I'm doing my own mini-curation for finding topics already😎
So a rule of thumb for me:
"Comment constructively on your strenghts while building ideas for curating content for more comments and eventually high quality posts"
I've illustrated this idea here:
I hope you get the idea!
This applies generally to engagement, not just commenting.
4. FOLLOWERSHIP
This purely relies on engagement. People will follow you when you have quality stuff. It's natural and I think the best way to get followers is to stick to quality engagement. Getting followers is purely up to people. You might get followers and you might not.
But I think the best thing to do is to stick to being a quality person.
You have to follow people too.
But to put some perspective on it, I would love to have at least 200 followers in 3 months. That seems small but safe to say achievable.
CHALLENGES
Goals are not without challenges. Therefore, I expect to find challenges with achieving these goals.
These challenges are from my experience so far and might apply to some other newbies too.
1. Time: This is top on the list. I'm still learning how to dedicate time to engaging on Hive. Weekends are the 'freest' times for me a day even work seems to still choke it up.
But I dedicate about 2 hours in the evening for Hive each day and also engage at free times during the day.
2. Powersupply: This has been a major challenge for me in the recent past. The epileptic power supply in the part of the world where I live can be frustrating. I survive power outages with 3 powerbanks and sometimes still run out of power.
I guess I can only work with the time I have power available for now while looking for other power solutions.
3. Fatigue: Fatigue is real. I'm a medical doctor by profession and the fatigue of work in itself can be a factor in preventing these gials from being adequately achieved. I will just have to adapt to better stress management methods.
Participating in music on Hive alone gives me some stress relief sometimes.
Asides these factors and with the plans highlighted above, I think I might be able to just do well on Hive and I really have high hopes to grow on Hive!
Thanks once again to 
And a big thanks to 
And special thanks to my mentor and friend