>>> and he kept saying "Sergey, trust me, the blockchain and crypto will take over the world. Did you know there is a website called steemit.com that pays people for the content they produce and it's all decentralized! It's like Facebook and Reddit, but better as the power belong to people!"

I kept nodding my head, thinking this guy is probably crazy... He also told me to buy Ripple when it was sitting 20 cents.

That was four months ago and now I'm writing my own introduction post on this very platform. Life is a beautiful thing, right? You never know what happens next and that's the beauty of it.

Anyway, my name is Sergey and I don't have a picture with "Hello Steemit" sign. See, yesterday we were celebrating New Year and this morning my face is not quite picture friendly, partly from the amount of alcohol that we drank and partly from the lack of sleep... Instead, I decided to use a picture form a few days ago. Plus here is my Facebook page. Hope that's ok with you guys.

I didn't come here to earn money. I'm good. The reason I decided to join the community is to explore the possibility of sharing my ideas with the bigger audience and hopefully find likeminded people.

It gets lonely in my basement sometimes, you know...

I've been in the software engineering space for the past 12 years, started as a junior web developer and worked my way up to the Site Reliability Engineer position at HBO. Basically, part of my job was to make sure you guys could watch Game of Thrones episodes every Sunday on all of the devices across the globe :)

That's all cool and nice, but after doing it for so long I realized that I'm just the tool in someone else's hands. Possibly a good tool, but still a tool...

I felt like I was stuck even though by many "common standards" I had a pretty good life - great loving family, high paying interesting job, some money in the bank, a house and a car. And yet I wasn't happy and couldn't figure out why.

That's why about 6 months ago I started my journey into unknown. I changed jobs, went to the marketing conferences (instead of usual tech meetups), accidentally ended up on Tony Robbins UPW event (which was unbelievable), spent over 30K on a few great programs for entrepreneurs, got a personal coach. All of those things pushed me to evolve at the pace I never experienced before.

I tried to capture most of my journey on my blog at distinctplace.com if anyone cares for more details. Not sure if I'll still continue writing on my blog (probably), or transition 100% to steemit. Time will tell.

My immediate goal at the moment is to "Disconnect from the Matrix", which means transform from being a Tool into the Rain Maker so I could spread my wings and "do the Sergey 100% of the time".

I figured the best way to achieve it is to set up multiple income streams. At the moment I'm involved in the three major side projects:

• an e-commerce store selling women clothing (I know, right?!) - I started it long time ago while still in college and it has been growing steadily (but slowly) since then
• financial app in the marijuana space which we are building on the SalesForce platform, where I manage remote dev team and all tech parts of the project
• a project that we recently started with my brother that teaches people how to convert cars into assets instead of a liability. I actually launched the website salvageplace.com yesterday, right before the New Year which was pretty cool. Would love to hear your feedback on it by the way.

It's likely that I'll be mentioning those three projects in great details in my future posts, as well as bits and pieces of my personal journey. Subscribe and spread the love if you are interested to hear more and HAPPY 2018! It's going to be an awesome year, I know it!

By the way, my wife just took a picture of me with the Steemit sign!

Ok, time to wrap it up. It's the introduction after all. I'm excited to be here with you guys and share everything I know and learn as I go. Lets rock and roll together!

Sergey