The website housing the article that you are now reading is a unique social content platform which creates communities of writers across the United States and tasks them to share what matters to them.

The administration encourages local editors to volunteer to host their own community. The ambitious soul who took on the task at my university also happens to be a friend of mine.

She approached me about being part of the group she was assembling of 12+ writers and I asked the obvious question: What's in it for me?

What came next was a statistic about the 16 million+ monthly viewers and the gift of having such a seizable opportunity for audiences to see my work.

Unsold, I pressed her for more, and; as it turns out, there is an additional incentive. The most shared article of the week would be gifted with $20. I decided to give it a try.

Fifteen articles later, I've yet to see one dollar. And although I did once peak at 67 shares, I'm not necessarily warding off troves of fan mail.

But that doesn't mean that the Odyssey hasn't done me a favor.

My best friend told me a few years ago that he scheduled out time in his day for remembering. I thought this was remarkable. I still do.

These days he shares with me his plans to create a blog with intricate organizing properties (indexing, tags, etc.) This is important to him because he doesn't want to lose what he has learned.

If I have a revelation, I might be duped into assuming that I'll never forget it. The intoxication of a new discovery can make us careless.

Writers for the Odyssey Online are required to produce an article per week. If they miss a week, they are given a strike. After three strikes, they lose their fan base of 16 million people and counting as well as their potential $20 per week winnings.

Heaven forbid.

It isn't always easy cranking out a 500-word small essay for public consumption, but I am always learning and always growing and I cannot think of a better place to document my discoveries than right here.

And even though I am tempted each week to regurgitate some memes from across the web into my text document and drastically increase my chances at pocketing an Andrew Jackson, I would do myself a disservice.

I would lose the opportunity to chart my course. My evolution would be lost in the coils of my papery, gray memory. Facing an impasse, I would forget that I already possessed the tools to overcome it.

The appreciation for discipline I garnered from the film "The Way Way Back" would eventually slip away, the a-ha moment I had when my friend listened carefully to a tale about a demon would materialize with occultic flourish, and I would almost certainly be unable to recollect the numerous lessons afforded to me by my Asian roommate.