Hi everyone!

My name is Andrew Furmanczyk! Nice to meet you all. I'm new to Steemit, so here's my my story. 😊

Currently, I’m 30 years old with a Wife (@lgfurmanczyk) and a 4-month-old Son, living in British Columbia Canada.





My interests and skills are kinda all over the place, and I’ve gone through many phases of my life…so I’ll start at the beginning and work forward.

Piano

At 5 years old I began piano lessons. When I was 13 I decided I wanted to be a concert pianist, and increased my practice up to about 4-6 hours a day. A few years later I was being paid to perform around my city about 5 hours per week. Everything was going well, and I was preparing for university when suddenly one day everything changed and I got a bad viral heart condition that ended my piano performing career. I was very sick for a few years, almost died a couple times and lost everything that gave me my identity. I fell into depression, but then turned it around one night in 2006 when I realized I was lucky enough to have the experience and knowledge I had, and I could share it for free on YouTube to anyone who had a passion to learn piano even if they were poor or in a location without teachers.


My YouTube channel turned into a whole thing, that ended up with me teaching piano across the internet to millions of people.

My First video in the How to play piano series.

I've been ranked #1 on the search for how to play piano since around 2009.


I already have a longer bio written about the details that story on my website.

Like all of you steemians, I’ve got other interests, and my story isn't one dimensional:

Photography (I took about 150,000 photos over 3 years.)

In the middle of 2010, I began photography as a hobby, but then I got super interested in it, the challenge of capturing things on the camera just fascinated me. I dove in and learned everything I could from technical articles that described how the camera worked under the hood.





I went nuts for a few years and posted my photos on a facebook page. Over those years I ended up getting pretty serious, doing paid professional work, winning a few small awards, teaching a little, having my work sold on canvas, and on a billboard.


It was such a great time, I went out on a lot of adventures.



However, I ended up getting really drained and lost all my energy for photography, it started to become something that made me feel numb inside. I didn’t want photography to be that for me, so I decided to back off on professional work and do it as a fun hobby on the side so I could enjoy it.

Business

As a kid growing up I had gotten the impression that business people were these evil greedy assholes, and since I cared about adding positive things to society, I had kept myself far far away from anything in the world of business and money. However, while doing professional photography, I began reading how I could make money from my photos; (so I could buy more camera gear obviously!) this caused me to start learning about business.


As I started to learn a little about business, a lightbulb went off, and I realized business wasn’t so evil. I now saw business as a powerful tool for bringing people together to work on a common cause that could either impact the world in a negative, neutral, or positive way. This new vision of what I could use business for really excited me, and got me very interested in learning more about business. I had more ideas of how I could improve my YouTube channel to empower more people to follow their passion for music.


Business was such a huge topic to cover, I ended up reading tens of thousands of pages of business topics, biographies of famous people, watching hundreds of hours of videos on business, taking online courses and basically absorbing everything of value I could. But knowledge without action is useless, and the ultimate reason I even wanted to learn business, is to be able to apply the power of business to developing positive world changing outcomes.



A few years into my business dive, I learned about Elon Musk and thought, this guy is a great example of what I want to do in my own way one day. Obviously, I am NOT Elon Musk, and I can’t and shouldn’t be just like him, we all have our own paths, but I developed a huge bro crush on Elon because of HOW he was using business to bring about positive change.


So, what amazing things am I doing now? Honestly, there’s not much to show so far. It’s almost not worth mentioning but basically, I’ve launched a small ecommerce store, and I’m working with a developer on an app that hasn’t launched yet. The ecommerce store is for the dual purpose of gaining more business experience, and making some money on the side. The app is related to music education, and I’m excited about getting it out there to help people achieve their own dreams of playing music for themselves on day. There is no crazy success at this point. Sometimes I feel this intense pressure inside myself to go faster, to achieve more, and sometimes it even gets so bad that I can’t sleep. But I know success doesn’t happen overnight and if I stick to building things that will be of value to people, it’s statistically, only a matter of time and effort before something I do has a significant impact.


This is a little off topic, but it took me until my mid-twenties to know exactly what I want to do with my life. I want to build businesses that have a positive impact on humanity. That first business working out, won’t be the cushion I retire on and end my life with. One successful business, will mean I’ll start over again and make another business, and another, and another until I die. I think this life of building things is well suited for me since I’m the type of person who enjoys the process of overcoming a challenge, and become bored when the challenge is gone.


Like many people, I have a lot of ideas for businesses I’d like to create in the future, but ideas are nothing without execution, so I until I act on these ideas, they’re not really worth talking about further.

Family

In 2016, after 4 years of being together, I got to marry the love of my life, Lovely (@lgfurmanczyk).



Yes, her real name is Lovely. (When I first met her, I didn’t believe her name was actually Lovely and asked for ID to prove she wasn’t playing a joke on me.) Then later this February we had a baby boy that we named Leon. 😊 All these new responsibilities have been tough to adapt to, but being a dad is one of the greatest gifts in life I can imagine having. I remember when we brought him home from the hospital, I didn’t feel like this baby could actually be mine. Somehow it seemed like a dream.

Leon’s only 4 months old now, but he’s already growing so fast. When he laughs and looks me in the eye, it connects with me so deeply, it feels like he has a direct link into my heart. I find myself thinking of how he’s doing whenever I’m not with him. One thing that really puts me at peace is knowing how caring Lovely is for Leon. I can trust that he’ll be ok when she’s taking care of him. I couldn’t ask for a better mother for our little baby. I am thankful for having a family.

What brought me to Steemit

I first started learning about bitcoin in 2013, but I didn’t really “get it” until this past year when I was alerted by the huge spike in cryptos like a lot of other people. So this year I asked myself, why was the price taking off? And, I ended up doing YouTube research binges about bitcoin and the underlying technology of the blockchain. There was much more information today than I found a few years back and I now “I get” how big of a deal cryptocurrencies are. Really, the invention of blockchain was the invention of synthetic automated trust. Trust is a BIG deal. Block chain is a BIG deal.
While doing my research on crypto’s I was on a website that listed different crypto currencies and saw Steem listed as a crypto currency for a new social media platform. This was different than anything else I’d seen so I decided to take a look. Instantly I was blown away by how cool Steemit’s idea was and what Steemit could mean. I applied for an account and about a week later my steemit account was approved on June 2nd 2017. Steemit feels a lot like early YouTube did, and I really miss the days before YouTube became highly commercialized. I joined YouTube 1 year after launch in 2006 and YouTube was a small tightly knit community who knew and talked with eachother. I see Steemit as a site that will grow as big as YouTube one day. However with that growth, Steemit will eventually also become commercialized; probably faster than YouTube did since businesses don’t need a complete mind shift on how important the internet is this time around. I’m looking forward to getting to know you guys now before the site gets mainstream.


So there you have it. I know, I could’ve done a shorter post, but I think by posting something this length, those of you who have actually read this far actually know me to some degree, and I think getting to know someone that is new to Steemit is what this type of post is all about. 😊

The End!

Thanks again for reading! I’m excited to become an active member of this community.


Much love ❤
Andrew