Patience and Understanding on your Gridcoin Journey

I am going to talk about golf for a moment. If you are like me, golf bores the crap out of you, so please bear with me because you will see what I'm getting at by the end of the post.

My dad is a golf fiend. Plays once or twice a week and is glued to the TV on Thursdays and Sundays watching whatever tourney is on. Once upon a time, when I was a young man, he bought me lessons from a golf pro so that I could go out and whack the ball around with him.

For those of you that have not had experience with golf, there are a lot of movements you have to get right in conjunction with each other to get a good swing in. You have to have the right stance, to hold the club the right way with your hands, to pick the right club for the swing you want to make, to judge the "lay"? , "lie"?, of the ground between where you're smacking from and the hole, ad infinitum.

There is no way that you as a golf newb go out and start smacking holes in one. It takes understanding of the techniques and the patience to put all those things together in practice before you start sinking the ball.

And here we have Gridcoin. To start mining Gridcoin takes a lot of moving parts that have to be right in relation to each other, and the understanding of all those concepts. RAC, project RAC, magnitude, proof of stake, proof of research, these are just a few of the concepts you have to understand before you will be able to mine consistently. I have been reading up for over a week, I am still reading, and I still don't have a good enough understanding to explain it all correctly to another Gridcoin newbie.

Here is where patience comes in. It takes time to learn these concepts...not just from reading about them but from seeing them in play. You may see a magnitude of "1" in your wallet while the block explorer or Katlee's calculator say you have a magnitude of "2". You have to have the patience to read up on why this would be, or to ask someone on the forum, and to see how that plays out. It takes patience to build up grc in your wallet and let them mature. It takes patience to build your RAC, especially if you pick a big project. And it takes patience to finally mine your first gridcoin.

For what it's worth. I played golf with my dad once. I finished the lessons he bought for me, knew that I stunk at the game, and was bored silly with all the different things I needed to know. But after really stinking up the first two holes, I managed to only go over by one the next two. And then a bit of satori kicked in, and I got a birdie ( or one shot under the normal score for that hole). All the things I practiced just came together, and the ball went where it was supposed to go.

There was something else great about that birdie. Although my dad understood how badly I disliked the game, he was so happy I got a birdie he didn't ask me to play after that! We had our "happy golf moment"...and he probably didn't want to see me flopping all over the course any more ;>

Good mining, and stay patient!