I think some of the variance just has to be accepted.

All we can do is play our cards as best we can. In steem this means all we can do is write content as best as possible and then we need to accept that sometimes the content won't get noticed.

Likewise we must be careful not to overreact to our successes, because just like our misses are often likely negative outliers the last big hit might represent a positive lucky hit.

We cannot control when big whales login and read our articles and we cannot control what they like or don't. So I think there has to be variance in how we will be rewarded.