Introducing Myself : Excited to be part of Steemit Family!

Hello Steemians,

I'm excited to be part of this family and looking forward to share my thoughts, experiences with y'all in my upcoming posts.

First of all - let me introduce you to Sai , journey of a guy who grew up in surroundings where people are conservative, close minded to living with 80 people from 30 different countries in San Francisco to traveling in South East Asia and Europe, believes in learning from the experiences of others.

He is passionate about cooking, house music, curious to learn and explore something new everyday.

As of now, he is obsessed with investing and retiring early. :)

1990 : Sai was born in a poor family to a beautiful couple in the South Indian city most known for Biryani.
His parents worked hard, focused on saving money to provide him education.

1995 - 2011 : Lived in the same city, with my parents for 21 years occasionally visiting his grandparents in a small village. He grew up among people who believed in superstitions, being conservative, arranged marriages, caste system and assumptions about western cultures were based on movies.

He received his Bachelors degree in Information Technology. It was the time to explore other career options!

First Exposure to International People, Culture and Life Style
India to USA

2011 : His parents had to put most of their savings to send him to USA and to sponsor his education there.
It's always back of his mind to repay them back.

2011-2013 : He was excited to be around people coming from different cultures and backgrounds, actively participated and organized many events on campus with them, used to work hard( both on his academics, extra curricular activities ) and party even harder, made some really good friends. He was awarded with "Global leadership of the year" for his exceptional abilities in organizing/managing events through his networking skills.

2013 : Yet another phase of life came to an end with lots of memories and great learnings.
He graduated with Masters degree in Computer Science from Old Dominion University, VA

Virginia to California
Workaholic Year

He accepted a job offer from an awesome product & design company in San Francisco which made him move to The Golden State.

Oct 2013- Sept 2014 : He loved his job, became workaholic( working late nights , 13-15 hrs everyday including weekends) and worked hard to learn as much as he can. He was living with a group of people who are from different regions in India. Though he lived in San Francisco for one year he haven't seen any of the attractions in the city.
He was missing his social butterfly life style, which made him look for a new place to move into.

Extreme Extrovert Phase Begins - Living with 80 people
Year of Awesomeness, New Experiences and Adventures

Sept 2014 - Dec 2015 : He chose to move into this community of 80 people from 30 different countries ( he was excited/curious to experience and share the cultures, being with so many people )

This is the time when he started drinking alcohol and started partying at the age of 24 , so late to the party but you know they say you are never too late for good things in life ( haha! )

ABOUT COMMUNITY

To get into this community every person had to go through couple of interviews where first round is to see if you're able to share your skills to the community with respect to your background, second is with the housemates to see the way you behave, social skills, your personality etc. once this is done, housemates who interviewed the person gets to rate on scale of 5 ( 5 being the best , 1 being the worst ) based on ratings all the people gets to decide if you are in or out.
Once you're in , you have to choose a directorship for the house ( like director of camping, director of parties, director of cooking, director of hiking, director of kitchen, director of cleaning etc..). The community house had a huge living room and kitchen, movie room, game room and library on the ground floor. Most of the people used to go to their rooms just to sleep since all of them used to hang out in living room or in the kitchen or in the movie room etc. We have a community budget of 6000-8000$ per month ( 10x number of people living ).
We used to have events everyday after office hours ( after 6pm )
Monday - Arts and Crafts/Movie Night
Tuesday - Taco Tuesdays/Game Night
Wednesday - Wing Wednesdays( Dr. Teeth in SF - 25 cent wings every Wednesday )
Thursday - Beers and Ideas/Tech Talks
Friday/Saturday - Drinking & Yelling ( haha! ) & parties
Sunday - Family Dinner ( where four people will cook for all 80 people ) followed by town hall to discuss issues in the community

Family Dinners are the best since this is the only event we had all 80 people attending!

Director of Interior Design

When Sai moved in, he chose director of interior design to design movie room for the community, he worked hard to put together a plan right from choosing couches, seating plan, projector, sound system, lighting etc. In 3 months he had fully functional movie room for the community.
It's time to move on to another directorship :)

Taking up Directorship of Family Dinners

At the time , there isn't proper structure for family dinner. They used to have 200$-250$ budget every week for family dinner to cook for all the people we were having costco pizza every sunday instead of people cooking.
Somebody had to change this and also sai was looking for new directorship. Everyone unanimously voted Sai for the director of family dinner. He took the responsibility of choosing four people to cook/helping them cook new cuisine and four people to clean the dishes every week, if those four people aren't showing up to cook it's the director's responsibility to cook for all 80 people. Since Sai was passionate about cooking he used to cook for all 80 people at times with help of one or two volunteers. This was an amazing five months cooking different cuisines( french, italian, eastern european, african, middle east, mexican, Argentinian etc.) every week, breaking cultural barriers among all the people and making community grow stronger.

Taking up Directorship of Outdoor Adventures

After five months being responsible for family dinner it was time for me to take up director of outdoor adventures reason being i know by now i'm moving to Singapore end of the year ( which is 4 months from then ) i wasn't totally sure if i'm going to come back so i wanted to take this opportunity to explore California and do adventures ( camping, hiking, Bungy jumping, scuba diving, sky diving, snorkeling etc.) along with people who are interested to join me for these.
It was an amazing experience.

People are what makes this community special is that we have all kinds of people - People who are superficial, people who are selfish, people who are introverts wants to be extroverts, people who are conservative, people from different backgrounds( tech, teaching, librarians, entrepreneurs, biologists, post docs etc etc.), different cultures. He learnt so many things from those people that he couldn't have done living outside.
At the time of his exit from the house he met so many beautiful, interesting and different people, so many positive experiences, made long lasting memories and became extreme extrovert and completely open minded willing to accept change at any moment of his life.

-------------------------Stay vulnerable. Let New Experiences in----------------------

Moving to South East Asia
Year of Travels

2016 : This is the first time that he is going to a different country apart from India and USA.
Singapore was absolutely stunning. He lived and worked from Singapore, now that he had met people who used to talk about traveling he wanted to experience traveling and different cultures in south east asia.

He has been to 7 Countries in South east asia ( Thailand, Cambodia, Vietnam, Taiwan, Malaysia, Indonesia, Singapore ), 5 countries in Europe ( England, France, Belgium, The Netherlands and Spain ) and one in Oceania ( New Zealand ) in one year.

He will be sharing about his travel experiences in detail in another post soon.

South East Asia to USA
Year of Investing
2017

After one year journey in South East Asia, he is back to SF living with awesome people that he met at this community house in 2015.
He is always looking to meet new people , learn from them and share his experiences. He feels STEEMIT is one such community where he can share, make connections and get feedback and suggestions from you guys.

What is he doing now?

He works for the same company as a research engineer, cooks a lot, learning to mix on his Dj controller and explores/reviews several restaurants in the city.
He started investing from past 5 months , exploring opportunities, looking to get suggestions on investing and more importantly planning for his early retirement and travel.

What was his greatest achievement till date?

He put all his savings to gift a house to his parents in India.

Where did he invest?

Stocks, ETF's, Cryptos, REITS
He will be writing about these in detail in another post. Stay tuned.

How do he know about Steemit?

Since he is into investing , he was reading several articles on where to invest, future of investing ( in cryptos, precious metals ) . He read this awesome post by Hive account@sebastianjago investment-cryptos-what-is-next. This is when he started to look into steemit and found interesting.