100 followers finally happened and I want to thank all of you!

There is just something about hitting a follower milestone that makes you get a great feeling inside. I want to thank all my followers for believing in me and knowing I can bring value to this platform. In particular, I want to thank a couple special people for inspiring me in different ways.

@malicered for letting me know there are others out there willing to work for free to support the community
@shayne for calling me out on shitposting, and helping me understand better the value of this brotherhood
@benjer0987 for giving Steemit a try, and being one of my best friends
@good-karma for being the first witness I bothered voting for and providing me a way to Steem on the go
@finux for being the first person showing intrest to collaborate with me in the crypto space, and being an awesome dude

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I'd like to include a reintroduction to go along with this post since my first one was pretty short and lame.

So where do I start...

I grew up in Tukwila, Washington which is a small ghetto town just south of Seattle. I lived in the same house there for pretty much my whole childhood. As a child, I was pretty timid. My Mom and Dad divorced at a pretty young age and my Father was never quite "around". That left me to be raised by my single mother who is exceedingly religious and pushed me into Christianity and private school. Around grade 3 my teacher said I was a spawn of Satan, and I was expelled from school (in grade 3!!!). From this point on my self-esteem was complete shit until I graduated high school. Being expelled my mother did not have enough money to pay tuition because obviously, I could not get any scholarships. So instead of putting me into a public school, she decided to home school me through the same institution. This furthered me into my own world and cut me off from humanity. Through my childhood, I went through many phases, attempted suicide twice, and fell in and out of love.

The greatest thing my mom ever did for me has been putting me into piano lessons when I was 8 which I mastered, and truly believe that if I didn't have music that I wouldn't be here today. Music was a huge part of my life as a kid and now is my whole life.

As a kid, I grew up with two different music styles which were hip-
hop and punk. I remember my sister buying Ludacris' Chicken and Beer when it came out and playing it non-stop. I also remember buying the first album by The Used which was their self-titled album and that is still my favorite album of all time to this day.

Around the time I was graduating high school I found am an artist by the name of Mod Sun who taught me about the Law of Attraction. That was the turning point of my life and when I realized that I could do whatever I wanted to do if I set my mind to it and worked hard. I recommend anybody to listen to his older music if you like positive old school type hip-hop. The song by him called Mentality 2 Reality is the song that made me believe the world isn't so bad.

I even got a shitty tattoo as a kid to honor that mindset. I have a picture here of me chilling with Mod at Warped Tour in 2012.

While in my teenage years I attempted to find my musical self because by then I had decided I wanted a career in music. I tried multiple different bands and formed many friendships before realizing I work best as my own boss. That's when I decided I would start my own record label.

Going into the future as an adult, I went to college for music business and audio technology, that lasted two years before I finished my degree. The only thing at that point that I needed was to figure out what I wanted to name my business. This is whole other story though and will be told another time...

As far as my work life goes, I worked at UPS a majority of my life until my doctor told me I wouldn't be able to walk later if I kept working there. After this, I delved into a sales job providing businesses with SEO and online marketing. I learned a lot from that company about how to get your online business noticed. Within the first two weeks of employment there I made my first sale of 4000 dollars and went on to sell about $300,000 in packages while I worked there for 6 months. After that, I worked for Verizon Wireless for a year as a customer service rep. I ended up selling too many phones so they tried to hire me as a full-time salesman. Though, I was tired of working for Verizon because of the corruption in that company.

This is the only point in my life where I had no employment, my mother recently had double knee replacement surgery and I took two months off my job to help her out with her healing process. This led me to bills not being able to be paid. I panicked and was trying to find ways I could supplement my income; that's when I started trading cryptocurrency. I made decent trades, but nothing substantial. Then I found Steemit...

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I joined Steemit when it was at it's lowest.

I joined Steemit, not for the monetary value, but for the community I found here. When I signed up for this network around 2 months ago, the price was sitting around 7 cents per STEEM. I dropped $100 of my own currency which was a stretch at the time. I got lucky or maybe just good Karma. All I know is my 100 dollars is now worth about $1500, and that is even after selling some of my profits. I hate to be powering down at this time, but bills are still extremely tight still. I'm about 20k USD in debt from music equipment that I'm still behind on payments from the two months I was out of work. The most important thing about all this is that I found a community that I can love and support. Getting rewarded for my content is just icing on top of the cake. I even have done away completely with Facebook and my life is way less toxic now.

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My plan for Steemit going forward.

I plan to make Steemit my main social networking site, until of course it no longer exists of course if that ever happens. The amount of freedom and hospitality here is astonishing considering how much 'cancer' the world is infected with nowadays. I know that we still have trolls here, but the pros way outweigh the cons!

On top of this I plan to be developing my record label exclusively through Steemit, I think this is a perfect place to reach out to individuals that may not have the income to fund large amounts of press for themselves. I will be explaining more about this in another post about my record label once I get all my legal paperwork taken care of. Long story short I really want to be the person bringing up artists, and letting their individual talents shine. I am sick and tired of seeing labels controlling their artists and/or taking most of their profits.

I also have another idea planned for when I have a couple more hundred followers that I am going to rip off of @malicered; in which I will be running contests for completely free audio mixing and mastering to one of my followers each week or so. I haven't decided the full details yet, but let me know what y'all think about this idea. This could be for any type of audio ranging from a song, a podcast, or anything your heart desires that is in audio file form.

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Finally, I would like to add that I hope you enjoyed the read, and if you have any thoughts or suggestions for me, let me know in the reply box! I am a pretty open person and have no issue with most criticism.

Follow me on Steemit and other places

Steemit: @rdollarsign

Twitter: http://twitter.com/rdollasign

YouTube: https://goo.gl/1U8Gkm