[Bruce Achterberg]

Originally Posted by jpfieber

What's ironic is that as Steve has become more popular, and he's found more ways to make money, the quantity and quality of his posts has declined. When I first found this site I spent a lot of time reading his back posts, and every new post that came out sent me off on a new and interesting thought process. In the last couple months his posts have been few and far between, and the topics have been a little 'out there' for me (of course that's going to be a subjective thing).

So, when Steve was living off just Adsense and donations, he was doing fine. Now he's spending time milking the system, and I'm not finding him helpful anymore...

In order to understand some of Steve's posts, I've learnt how to get a pretty good idea of where Steve is currently at in his life, as well as what led him to this point. I may not have a 100% accurate picture, but it at least takes into the account the bigger picture of where Steve has been, where he is now (from what he tells us about that), and where he says he wants to go. I don’t just look at one of his posts (which is merely a snapshot of Steve) and make judgements based on that since that is a pretty bad way to gather information to draw conclusions. It’s like looking at 5 minutes of a 2 hour-long movie and saying that the movie sucks.

When I look at the "quality" of the posts he's making now and compare them to his older posts, I don't see a difference in quality, I see a difference in focus. Another thing I see is that Steve seems to be starting to embrace his value, and I believe you're going to see examples of this by Steve producing info products to sell, building his business, and trying to reach more people and build a greater audience. Steve has openly admitted that he initially wanted to build traffic to his website (hence the large amount of posts he made), and now that he’s done that, he’s putting that traffic to good use and expanding his efforts further. Personally, Steve’s motives while doing this are irrelevant to me. If Steve is offering a quality service (whether you have to pay for it or not), if I find it useful, I will invest in it (either with my time, my attention, or my money).

It’s quite likely that while you are seeing fewer posts on his blog, Steve is busy working on other projects behind the scenes, and we’ll probably begin to see evidence of this as Steve continues to expand further. I’m not sure if you noticed, but the same thing happened with the forums. When Steve is busy working on other projects, he posts less blog posts, and just like when I am busy, I post fewer posts on the forums here, maybe even shorter posts. Now it’s quite easy to draw conclusions about how many posts I make on the forum and the length of such posts and say things like “Bruce is posting less, he doesn’t care about the forums anymore”, or “Bruce is posting less, he must have just been doing it for the attention”, but it’s quite likely that I’m just busy working on other things. I may even be busy working on something for the forums that I will post at a later date. And I’d be willing to bet that the same thing is probably true of Steve.

Expecting Steve (or anyone else for that matter) to constantly meet my expectations is going to leave my continuously disappointed when he appears to have “changed”, so I generally don’t bother making expectations like that. Just like everyone else in life, Steve is going to do what Steve can do. I can compare Steve and what he does to my own preferences and be disappointed if he doesn’t match up, but that’s going to cause me unnecessary, self-induced suffering. It’s near impossible to control other people to a realistic, reasonable degree, so I just let “what is” be “what is” and worry about my own pursuits.

Overall, I think everyone just needs to chill out a bit. It’s fine to have an opinion and draw conclusions, but you don’t necessarily need to act on them -- especially when they are potentially inaccurate. Let Steve do what he wants to do. Let him be wrong and make mistakes. Let him be right and experience success. Let him scam people and make money for his own self interest. Let him devote his life to service to the greater good out of selflessness. It’s quite easy to put Steve on a pedestal, but really, he’s just a mortal like the rest of us, dealing with similar challenges and making the same decisions that most of us have to make. I think some people forget that when they see Steve deviate from the perfect mental model that they hold of him and fail to realise that under everything, Steve's just a fellow human being trying to life life the only way he knows how.