My 1st Steemit Anniversary — Looking Back at an Amazing Year Of My ...

I wasn't planning on writing this but then during my recent travel I realized the importance of recording a few milestone moments in my life. Steemit has been one of the best things that's happened to me. The past year on this social media platform has been nothing short of a dream come true.

You reap rewards if you are prepared to put in the effort!

I joined the old Steem Slack (now deprecated) around mid-June 2016 but I didn't sign up until 8th of July. It took me 3 weeks to be convinced this platform and everything about it is real. I was a big skeptic once upon a time!

The journey with Steemit ever since has been nothing short of incredible. I started from a mere 10 SP and today I have reached about 28250+ from using this platform over the past year. It took a lot of hard work to get this far and I'm excited about what the future holds!

I'm a community person. I love socializing with people and building thriving communities. I want us to grow together and my work on Steemit has mostly been about helping new and existing users thrive and grow on this incredible platform.

Human Connections

Steemit at the face of it looks like a blogging site but I think many here will related to the fact that you can make some real human connections here.

I've become friends with a quite a few people that I've had an opportunity to collaborate with on Steemit. SteemFest also put faces and personalities to usernames and I bonded closely with a bunch of people I spent time with during SF2.

There are far too many names to mention but I'm grateful for all the love and support you guys have showed me over the past few months. Especially when I was down and out!

There's not a day that passes when I don't talk to some of these people and it feels like the virtual life has seamlessly merged with the real one!

Personal Achievements

I want to a highlight a few nice things that I've accomplished on Steemit over the past year. Because I think with some hard + smart work anyone can do something like this in their life. This post will serve as a reminder that I cannot stop here and I have to keep working harder!

I worked up the ranks from a normal user to become the Admin for user management at Steemit.Chat thanks to Hive account@riverhead who continues to trust me with this position right from the early days of Steemit.Chat. A small team of volunteers has ensured things run smoothly behind the scenes. I'll post to this effect soon.
I worked together with a small team of enthusiastic Steemians to setup and run initiatives such as RobinHood Whale and SteemCleaners and users such as Hive account@anyx Hive account@patrice and Hive account@fubar.bdhr.
About 10-11 months ago, I was invited to join Project Curie couple of weeks after they started operations and it was one of the most exciting projects I've collaborated on around here. It is always a great experience working with Hive account@donkeypong Hive account@liberosist Hive account@kevinwong Hive account@lpfaust and others from the team.
I've also curated for Hive account@smooth in early July 2016. Our team of 10 was the first curation guild of any sorts which basically led to ideas taking shape as RHW, Curie and other curation guilds.
Many might not realize but these initiatives have helped shape this platform positively over the past year and when I came back from my recovery I took on some newer challenges such as growing Steemit in India.
I pitched to Hive account@roelandp to assist him in execution of SteemFest in August-September 2016 and this opportunity allowed me to bring together a fantastic bunch of people. Thanks to Roeland's vision and efforts and some help from 'Firepower Crew' we created Steemit history with the first Steemit conference. We're all coming together again in Lisbon this year for SteemFest 2.
Today, I'm the 12th most followed user on Steemit and I hope to get into the top 10 very soon! I've gained 8200+ incredible followers over the past 3 months.
As one of the top authors from India I hope to continue growing my stake to a figure that helps in making a greater difference to users on this platform.
I've managed over 8350+ comments and approximately 6000+ of those were in the past two and half months.
I've been a trending author with consistent quality of posts on a regular basis.
Got into the big leagues once by managing over 1300 votes/post. A fantastic achievement for me!
Steemit and I celebrate birthdays on the same day!

My accident gave me a second chance at life and I've poured my heart and soul into my work around Steemit ever since I've come back and incredible things have happened as a result.

I've taken a lead on the India side of things with the India Steemit Accelerator program to spread the word on Steemit and Steem blockchain amongst Indian users and media. I've conducted two conferences that has gotten considerable eyeballs on and off Steemit with some excellent media coverages.
I was also featured by one of the top Indian digital publication, "The Quint."
I've been fortunate enough to be able to donate INR 1,00,000 or $1560 from my earnings on Steemit in the last 3 months to charitable causes that is improving lives of people in our community.
I've got my 58 year old mother Hive account@geetharao to sign up on Steemit in addition to few influencers including the youngest surfer girl from India and they are all participating regularly here.
My most recent India Steemit Accelerator event was hosted by Robert Bosch India HQ which was the latest feather in my cap. My step brother worked as a Senior Engineer at this facility before moving to US few years ago. So, it was great opportunity to present at their facility!

There are few more exciting things brewing behind the scenes and I hope can talk about it in the future...

After the Bangalore event I felt like I needed to rest my mind a little and therefore I took a couple of small vacations recently to meet some close friends and spent some time at Bangalore, Hyderabad and then at Jaipur most recently.

Jaipur was extremely memorable because my dear friend Hari Singh (of Hari + Sukhmani fame) who saved my life when I met with an accident as we were traveling together in February, was performing at the top club in Jaipur with his band partner. It was a sheer coincidence that we happened to be in the city at the same time.

^{L-R: Hari Singh, Me, Hive account@aishwarya and Sukhmani Malik}

My dear friend Hive account@aishwarya joined me that evening. We were on the guest list and the night turned out to be simply incredible! I couldn't have asked for a better way to celebrate life and overcoming many challenges over these past months!

After two difficult years and then last 6 challenging months of recovery after my accident it felt good to celebrate my 1 year on Steemit by actually getting out of my house and doing things I love, with the people I really wanted to spend my time with.