There are few things in life better than watching your Steem Power go up. Every time you look at your wallet or hit the refresh button, it's on the rise. Although SP and Vests are magical and amazing, they don't tell us everything.

Today I'm going to build on that and talk about tracking your progress up the ranks, on your journey to becoming a more influential, and powerful version of your current self, and I'll be doing it in a way I haven't seen mentioned very often, or really, ever at all.

Now that we've crossed the 100,000 user threshold, I feel it's more important than ever to discuss some of the more complex intricacies of Steem, in hopes that I can help new members and veterans alike, when it comes to getting the most out of their time on here.

Steem Power and Vests

The two most common ways to categorize where Steemians fall on the bell curve is by comparing Steem Power or Vests, and for good reason. Steem Power and Vests influence how much our votes are worth, the curation rewards we receive, and impact the "interest" that we get every second of every day.

On top of that, Steem Power and Vests (or MVs), are easily accessible and are available for anyone to see. You can access Steem Power by visiting your wallet, or the wallet of anyone else you're interested in. To see how many Vests someone has, you can visit steemd.com and add a username onto the end like this:

https://steemd.com/@driv3n

In the top right corner, Vests are shown:

For anyone not aware, the M = 1 million vests. So 18.43M vests is actually ~ 18,430,000 Vests.

Often times we see ranges given in SP or MV's to categorize whether we're a minnow, dolphin, or a whale, and that data can be used to make a lot of interesting and useful conclusions about everything going on here.

However, there's a downside to only tracking Steem Power or Vests, which is:

They only track what you are doing. They don't factor in what everyone else is doing as well.

So although your SP may constantly be on the rise, so is everyone else's who isn't currently powering down.

Because of that I'd like to introduce another metric which I feel is extemely valuable to help track your growth and progress:

Vesting Shares Percentage

The main advantage of using Vesting Shares Percentage is that it tracks how your SP/Vests change in relation to everyone else. By watching this number move up, down, or stay the same, you can gain a more accurate picture of your progress to moving higher up on the food chain.

So how do we calculate our Vesting Shares Percentage? It's simple and straightforward:

(vesting_shares / total_vesting_shares) * 100

So basically we need to know how many Vests or MVs we currently have, and the total number of Vests on the Steem network.

Step 1: Determine your vesting shares by visiting the image/url I listed above which is https://steemd.com/@username where you substitute "username" for your actual username here on Steem. Like the example above, your MVs will be listed in the top right of the screen.

Step 2: Determine the total vesting shares by visiting https://steemd.com/ and looking for "total_vesting_shares", which can be seen as the last number on this screenshot:

Step 3: Finally, we divide the two and multiply by 100. For myself it would look like this:

(18,430,000 / 453,907,455,229) * 100 = .00406

In my case, my Vesting Shares Percentage would be .00406%

If math isn't your thing, or your eyes glazed over just reading that, you're in luck.

If you visit http://steemstory.com/ and type in your username and wait about 30 seconds, you can skip everything we just talked about! Big thanks to @roelandp for doing all the work for us.

So, how does this help us?

Obviously the higher our percentage, the more lucrative our votes and curation will become, and we will also get more "interest" on a daily basis. This is because for every Steem that's created, 9 Steem Power are allocated proportionally to all Steem Power holders. That should mean that I am currently getting .00406% of all Steem Power created daily.

With that being said, if this number is moving up on a consistent basis you can be rest assured your Vests and SP are moving up faster than the average user, and that you're probably pretty awesome at life.

On the flip side, if your percentage is staying the same over the long run, you still might be doing well! I say that because as more and more people join the Steem network, it would be natural to see your % move down due to the ever growing number of people that are splitting up all Vests. Said in another way, having 1% of the vesting pie would be impressive with 100,000 users, but not so impressive if there were only 10 of us.

I'd like to sum up this post be reiterating that in general, using Steem Power and/or Vests are a great way to compare ourselves and can be used for many different projects and ideas. However, another metric to take into consideration is our Vesting Shares Percentage which factors in not only our actions, but those of everyone else as well.

As a side note, the "Pay me 100% in Steem Power" box has been checked on this post. I'm here for the long haul, and would love to know what you think about everything in this post. Thanks for reading!

*All images are courtesy of pixabay and my iphone*