Salutations, fellow Steemit Users!
The crypto craze brought me here and I am interested to see how this community evolves over time. As my post title suggests, my experiences are vast and varied - largely due to binge learning sessions and always searching for new ways to grow.
If you aren't growing, you're dying.
Since I was a wee lass of 12 years old, I have always worked; so I've had a lot of time to cultivate an arsenal of random skills. When my family couldn't afford to help me do what I wanted to do, I was self-sufficient and always found a way.
At 12 I succumbed to a massive addiction to playing paintball, which proved to be an expensive hobby. I took up a job at a local hog farm to support my love of the sport for the next few years.
I was on a team with about six other guys; we travelled to different tournaments around our state and played competitively. Here's a picture of me and my team from back in the day. We won third place:
When I started high school, paintball was replaced by video games. WOW, Halo, Gears of War, COD... you name, I played it.
The summer between 10th and 11th grade, all I did was eat cereal and play guitar hero until I beat every single song on every single difficulty level and procured every single platinum record on every single song.
Then when Rock Band came out, my brothers and I would put on fake British accents and pretend like we were rockstars in a rock band to harass our parents.
I was the only one that could play the all instruments on expert, which I was pretty proud of... until one day I witnessed one of my friend's who had taken piano lessons since she was 5 play the piano.
I was instantly hooked and sought out her piano teacher. Since my parents couldn't afford piano lessons, I cleaned my piano teacher's house weekly in exchange for lessons.
Once I was old enough to drive, I juggled an all AP and dual enrollment course schedule, a 20 hr/wk office job, piano, video games, and showed hogs at the fair every year.
After graduation, I started college. I quit video games and joined the college rowing team as a coxswain.
My daily grind looked like this: 5AM crew practice, 8AM to 12PM classes, 1PM to 6PM office job, and post 6PM into the early morning - you guys already know.
It was a crazy time, but I graduated with a four-year Bachelors of Science degree in three years.
It would've been two years, but I was forced to fail a class because I scheduled (a year in advance!) a trip to Rome during the week of finals. One teacher refused to let me take the final at another time and that particular final was worth 50% of our grade.
So naturally, I got on a plane and went to Rome. Which caused me to have to take the class again. It was the best decision I ever made because I was bit by the travel bug. BADLY.
Right before college graduation, one of my friends wanted to make a land investment and wanted my help. I suggested we buy a commercial piece of property and build a paintball field to operate on the weekends for passive income.
During the planning process, a mass email crossed my eye from one of my professors: "$15K Reward for Business Plan Competition!"
You better believe I was all over that.
Seven out of 25 groups of entrepreneurs were selected to present at the Competition based on the quality of their business plan. I, the youngest competitor and only undergraduate student (who presented solo), won the top prize of $15,000 to fund the start-up.
At that point, there was no looking back. So, my business partner and I built the facility from scratch , virtually by ourselves until the grand opening a year later.
During the build and first two years of operation, I worked full time Monday through Friday as the financial manager of a law firm and worked on the weekends (6AM to 7PM Saturdays and 9AM to 8PM Sundays).
I worked every. single. day. for three years. It was the hardest thing I've done so far. But the business was/is a massive success. We surpassed my three-year financial projection in one.
At the paintball field, colonies of frogs were emerging everywhere. You couldn't swing a dead cat without hitting a frog during rainy summers.
And I love frogs and would take a picture of every single one I caught (or that jumped on me). Here are a couple of my favorites:
Having photographed frogs for three years straight with my cell phone, I received a nice camera with a micro lens as a gift. Now one of my hobbies is nature photography. Here are some of my favorites:
After paintball became passive, the law firm I worked at got screwed to the tune of $25k by a dude who promised to re-build our website and SEO our content to the first page of Google.
So, I binge learned about SEO, became an expert, got our content to the top, and then wrote a book about how I did it. You can buy it from Amazon here:
SEO 2017 (No Bullsh*t) Strategy: The Ultimate Step-by-Step Search Engine Optimization Book -
https://www.amazon.com/dp/B01MTWZVC7
My role at the firm further expanded into jury consulting - which consists of helping the lawyers pick jurors that could be fair and view our case favorably.
I've been doing it for two years now and I'm (so far) undefeated at 26 out of 26 victories.
In the past few years, I've had the opportunity to travel. Budapest Hungary, Vienna Austria, Munich Germany, Bangalore India, Costa Rica, Cayman Islands, Tuscany Italy, and Iceland (my absolute favorite.) Here are a few of my favorite pics of Iceland, my heart!
Now I am creating new case management software to sell to lawyers and digging deep into this crypto craze. I hope this intro was an entertaining read.
I look forward to our continued digital interface in this imaginative, resourceful web portal courtesy of Steemit.
Cordially,
CC