I always believe in growing myself first before I focus on helping others. My reason is simple, if you are powerless (pun intended, haha..) yourself, how can you expect to provide meaningful support for the others?

Fortunately, on the Steem platform, helping yourself and helping others are not mutually exclusive. By upvoting others, you also get curation rewards. By sponsoring someone a SBI share, you too get a share. By delegating to a community bot, you usually get upvotes too.

Coming back to your point on curation trail. I am not too sure how much that will help. Your votes are typically quite insignificant when you are still a minnow. I will rather you browse around your favorite topics and follow some authors that you like. Interact with them and build deeper relationships. Steem is a social platform after all. Therefore it is important to make friends. If you really like an author, you can then subscribe for auto-voting via services like SteemAuto.

To sum it up, be more patient in building your presence on Steem. You will find the journey more rewarding if you take it easy and do it one step at a time :)