Hey, what's up guys? My name is Don Roberts, and I am a dad of 6, soon to be 7 in Feb 2018. But before I get into my story, let me share a bit about how I came to know and join Steemit.

How I Joined Steemit

Over the past maybe month or so, a co-worker of mine, @vibemerchant had been talking to me and raising my awareness about cryptocurrencies and the blockchain in general. I sort of thought it was interesting, but really didn't know much about it. After discussing it with him over the course of a couple weeks, I decided I should probably at least educate myself on what the blockchain and cryptocurrencies were because it really did seem like where the future was heading, and I didn't want to get left behind.

So I started learning. Mainly just by reading articles from whatever Google gave to me at the time. I can't remember if I stumbled across Steemit in my search, or if @vibemerchant told me about STEEM, (I think he told me about STEEM and how it was a crypto for creators like me and that I should check it out?) but when I came across Steemit, I started reading more into it because the platform seriously intrigued me.

How could it be possible that people were getting paid so much for posting blog posts?! A little later I stumbled across DTube. Again, I was blown away by how people were making 10x more money from just one video than I had made on my family YouTube vlog in a year! The next day I found DSound. As a musician/composer this was another platform right up my alley. I couldn't believe what I was seeing! It was like Steemit was made just for me!

I immediately signed up that evening around 6PM on Wednesday, Jan. 24 2018. I couldn't wait for my approval to come in on what I thought would be the next next day.

This was about to show me how impatient I really was haha

The next day rolled around and I had already broke down and Googled my fate. How long does it take to get approved on Steemit? The answers I received were heart wrenching haha. Some people had waited 6 days!

I decided that I would use this time wisely to learn everything I could about this platform as best as I could. I started reading guides and watching videos from several different authors. @jerrybanfield was (and I assume will be in the future) a HUGE help to me. If you ever read this, Jerry, thank you for all your help getting me started! I seriously have fallen in love with a community and platform before I even got accepted haha.

Anyway, 4 and a half days later, I got the email telling me I was accepted, and now here I am! I can't wait to get to know all of you and contribute to the community I have become obsessed with before I even made my first post.

My Back Story

As I said before, I am a dad of 6 children, with number 7 due in two weeks of writing this post. I am super happily married to my wife, Jessica and we live just a little south of St. Louis, Missouri USA. But how we got to this point in our lives is a little crazy and I would love to share our story with you.

Growing Up

I am an only child.
Growing up, I was an only child, with severe asthma and allergies.
I was an only child, with severe asthma and allergies, ...and a huge nerd.

I had a small handful of friends and was never popular in school. Since I had all those above qualities, I never really got to take up very many outside activities, like sports for example. I pretty much spent the majority of my childhood inside, playing video games (love RPGs). It was literally all my health could handle as a kid. I say all this because it was a major factor in defining who I am today.

Lets fast forward a little bit. When I was 12, I convinced my dad to buy me an electric guitar because my best friend at the time was learning bass. It actually wasn't a very hard argument to win because my dad was a jazz drummer and wanted me to to play drums just like him, but he said he could understand why I wanted to play the guitar instead.

I was seriously disappointed in how much more work learning guitar actually was than I had originally thought. I really struggled for about 6 months to get the motivation to do my CD-ROM guitar lessons that came with my guitar. My dad pretty much had to force me to practice.

Then for whatever reason, something changed. I had an AH-HA moment. Maybe my fingers stopped hurting, who knows? But I was hooked. I loved guitar and I couldn't put it down. To make a long guitar story short, I took guitar lessons from several different teachers in different genres over the years including: Blues, Speed Metal, Classical, and Jazz and by the age of about 17 I think I can honestly look back and say I had made it to expert level.

My biggest passion in life was music, and not just playing, but composing as well. It was my dream to be a video game composer. I spent hours and hours every day creating and playing music through my teenage years.

Obviously, the only thing that made sense to me at the time was that I had to go to college for music to fulfill my dream as a composer. More on that later, but spoiler, I quit that.

When I was 19, I created a band with some of my friends ~who were admittedly more into rock music than I was but I went along with it anyway~. You can see our band, Adeline, pictured below.

We spent about 3 years as a band, and made it to a point where we were actually touring around the country a little bit before we broke up due to some crazy drug problems they all had. Remember how I was that asthmatic, nerdy kid? I couldn't deal with the direction the rest of the band's lives were heading, so I got out.

Around this time, I met a girl named Jessica. She was actually friends with our drummer and we met through some random crazy party the band was having.

The band died, I cut my hair, and Jessica and I went on with life. She even convinced me to go back to school for what I loved and to start teaching guitar so that I had some sort of musical outlet after the band broke up.

After two semesters back at school, I finally had all my music classes completed! Woohoo! The only problem was that I didn't have any general education credits to show towards an actual Associates Degree. But who wants to get all those math, history, and science classes anyway?

After some deep thought and personal reflecting, I realized that college was not for me. I didn't want to commit myself to years and years of more schooling, especially when math and history were seriously cramping my creativity. Add to that all the debt that comes with college, and then possibly not even getting a job as a composer when I'm done, forcing me to get a job teaching music theory to high schoolers.

So I quit college again. I decided it was a much better use of my time to continue teaching guitar and earning money instead of spending it. Besides, I didn't need anymore school to teach, I was already skilled at guitar.

In September of 2007, Jessica and I got married.

To give you a super quick backstory on Jessica, here is a snippet from Jessica's blog, Raising Roberts:

In 2002, when I was 14, I was diagnosed with a terminal cancer called Alveolar Rhabdomysarcoma. It nearly took my life. After a year and a half of chemo (along with surgeries and radiation) I was diagnosed cancer free! That’s a shortened version.

She was given an 8% chance of living through her very rare, childhood cancer. This all happened before I knew her, but I've heard some awful stories of some of the things she had to go through.

A few months after we were married, we found out we were pregnant with our first child! Little did we know that because of all her extensive radiation and treatments she had, that she was not supposed to be able to have kids! We felt totally blessed with out first son!

And then about a year and a half later, we had our second son. Around this time I knew that my minimum wage job at Starbucks was not cutting it, so I began searching for a new job.

In June of 2010, I began working as an overnight manager at a local gas station. It paid us about 4-5 times what we were used to making at Starbucks and Jessica and I decided right then that we needed to make sure we didn't increase our spending, but to live the same as we had been and put the rest in savings. (side note, this was how we were able to afford our new house and put $70k down as a downpayment as first time homebuyers after saving for about 5 years.)

About a year after switching jobs, I discovered something called stock music through a friend that did stock pictures. I was totally sold on this new idea of passive income from creating music. Something I was already doing. I learned a lot through the few years of stock music I did, like what types of music work well over certain types of video. It's all about energy!

Anyway, a few kids and years later, I really started becoming disinterested in my job at the gas station. I started reading about entrepreneurship and listening to podcasts like Smart Passive Income, and Entrepreneur On Fire. I was hooked on the thought of making a business for myself.

I then created a guitar teaching blog called Strumcoach and had really high hopes that through guitar lesson articles, videos, and courses, I would finally be able to fulfill my new dream of working from home.

However, working overnights at a full time job with 5 kids at the time, gave me an extremely small amount of free time to actually put towards growing my business. I pursued Udemy as a means to create my first course. You can check out that course here. This was my first real experience teaching/talking into a camera, and I have to say, it was crazy awkward to me.

Around that time, I had finally convinced Jessica to ditch her blogspot blog she had been using for the last 3 or 4 years and start using WordPress with an actual custom dot com. I had really been learning a lot from podcasts and business blogs haha.

I helped her convert and totally rework her entire site from the ground up. This process took a couple months with my limited free time schedule. When I was done, the thought of going back to Strumcoach, which was not really producing the results I was hoping for even though it was only about half a year old, seemed unmotivating and discouraging.

We had spent a lot of evenings as a family watching family vlogs on YouTube and this was something that sort of sparked my interest. Deep down I also knew I had to start getting better at talking into the camera if I wanted to do Strumcoach. So I started a family friendly vlog of our own, called Family FUNCAST. I had so much fun creating these vlogs and learning about how to more creatively use Adobe Premiere and After Effects than I had previously known through Strumcoach.

In December of 2016, after six and a half years of working overnights, I was finally moved to a day position! Which was a good thing because we had six kids at this point, and me sleeping half the day was really hard on my wife and kids.

In July of 2017, once again I started getting burnt out on my project because I just didn't have the time to invest in growing. I had decided I was going to quit Family FUNCAST and go back to Strumcoach with all the new skills I had gained the previous year with SEO (ranking in Google and YouTube). In my eyes Strumcoach finally had a chance.

We then found out we were due with baby number 7. Jessica had a pretty successful Instagram account with around 10k followers in the "mom and baby niche" and wanted to do a baby announcement on her feed. Little did we know this picture was about to go viral.

It was shared by some pretty major Instagram, Facebook, and Twitter accounts that had gotten ahold of the picture. Shares, likes, and all the above reached in the millions on their accounts, and everyone had something to say about the picture, positive and negative.

In fact, the negative was so bad that Jessica was about to shut down all of her accounts. Thankfully, she didn't.

Over the next few days, her Instagram account went from 10K to 55K, and I was ecstatic haha. We were finally getting some real traffic to our blog/vlog. This totally re sparked my interest in my vlog.

Jessica was still trying to recover from all the negative and hurtful things random strangers on the internet were saying about our family. Personally, I didn't care what random internet people were saying, but looking back I really should have been more sensitive to how my wife was feeling about all of it.

Conclusion

Well, that brings us to where we are now, and if you're still reading, I seriously thank you for sticking with me for so long! We are two weeks away from our due date. When our baby girl is born, we will have 4 boys, and 3 girls. From oldest to youngest we have Liam (9), Kai (7), Kingston (6), Evangeline (4), Desmond (2), Clementine (1), and our newborn girl who I've had to basically swear an oath of secrecy to my wife to not reveal her name until she's born haha.

My current passions include music (playing, composing, and teaching), and more recently I've taken an interest in photography, graphic design, and video.

I can't wait to get to know and connect with more of you over the years. Thanks again for sticking with my story! I hope to talk to you soon.

If you want to check out some of my other social media pages, check out:
Instagram
YouTube
Strumcoach - Which hasn't been touched in a while.