My Inspiration

My grandfather Robert Schilke was a collector.

My grandfather was a collector of everything he found to be valuable to him but his favorite thing to collect was money. My grandfather made a life out of finding and trading coins and bills to find even more interesting and valuable pieces to add to his collections.

By the time my grandfather had passed he had to build and fill an entire room in his house to store all of these coins and bills he had collected in his lifetime and all are worth more than the stated worth on them. One of the pieces he chose to show me was one of the rarest pieces of U.S. currency I had ever laid my eyes on. It was his 1796 U.S. quarter that is certified and in excellent condition.

This quarter is special to me because I am a history buff and especially for the revolutionary period of our great country. As a child growing up, we would always be running around his basement while he was working on his collection and studying his coins and often, I would be the one he would call over to show a discovery to.

I always took an interest to his collection because he always had a story behind the coin and story of how he obtained the coin through time and researching the right buyers. So much detail went into finding these pieces of our nation’s history as many of the coins and bills he collected were like the quarter issued in 1796.

The reason this coin is a special piece of U.S. currency is because only 650 of these coins survive today in a known verified count and when first issued only roughly 7 thousand were made and issued into our currency. This meaning that this quarter of genuine silver was of the rarest commodity in the birth of our nations capitalistic system.

The next set of quarters were not released until 1804 and contained a reverse draped bust as seen in the 1796 coin which then raised its value again and continued to do so as the designs kept changing on our currency. My grandfather expressed the importance of this coin and made it very clear that many collectors search for this coin for a lifetime to complete their sets and it is a very rare to find a genuine coin from this time period.

I find myself still collecting change and always taking a look at it to see the date and to see if there is any significance to the coin and this is definitely something that has kept a warm memory of my grandfather alive. I am grateful for the time he spent teaching me and peaking my interests that were aligned with his, I learned a lot and it was fun having something to bond over with my grandfather and he has inspired me to keep his tradition of collecting alive.

A collection that I have taken over for myself in due part of my grandfather is baseball cards. Before he passed and all through my childhood we bonded over baseball because I was his only grandson that played, and he loved the sport. He did not miss a single game growing up and I would always see him sitting in center field with his binoculars watching from a far but always there to show his support.

I loved him though because it was always tough love never trying to make me have a big head about how good I did or how many strikes I threw it was always a helpful tip on a mistake I made. He was a real person with an honorable aura about him that when you were in the room with him, he commanded respect just with his presence, even though he was the nicest guy you would ever meet.

So, this collection of baseball cards has meant a lot to me over the years.

He set me up with two huge boxes of baseball cards dating back to the 1940s all the way up to the present time which was around 2010 at the time I believe. He had been saving them from when he was a child and growing up through the years in his life and I was so honored and appreciated he picked me to turn them down to me for the next generation.

I still have not gotten through even half of the cards but for some reason kept buying more and more cards. My passion fell off the past few years after getting into college and him passing away and just really having no time to really do anything with the cards or the motivation to start anything and finish it.

Well recently I decided on my winter and spring break this year to pick the cards back up and get back into my card collection. I also had the idea to sell a couple of them and trade them for even better cards. I wonder how many hidden treasures I still have yet to uncover; some boxes are still unopened.

I started trying to sell some and I sold one or two for a couple hundred each but for some of the cards I had I could not find the right buyers. I sold a Randy Johnson card for four hundred dollars and a Nolan Ryan card for two hundred which was maxing the worth I could get for those particular cards. They were low value but for some reason more popular than the rarer cards I had in my possession that were worth thousands. But that was honestly okay with me at the time because I was not sure how ready I was to start selling some of my really special cards.

I sometimes do not even like letting people know what cards I have.

As I started to really dig into my collection, I had to do my own research on my collection as my grandfather did with his coins. So, by taking his lessons, I began my searching for the ultimate baseball cards with the same blueprint he used to find his coins. What I did not realize is that I was sitting on one of the most valuable cards in baseball card history which is a 1965 Mickey Mantle card that is supposedly worth up to 60,000 dollars if graded and sold to the right buyer. This is my prized possession thus far and still have not gotten it graded nor thought about selling it yet.

I guess that’s the benefit from really sitting down and looking at what you have in front of you because I saw that card a million times but it never really held any importance to me other than it was Mickey Mantle a baseball great.

The reason I do not want to sell this card is surely not because I have an extra 60,000 dollars laying around but because it is not what my grandfather would have done. He was smarter than a onetime pay day, he would have told me to keep it up and look for a better offer.

What was awesome about the cards my grandfather gave me was that they we a special edition type of baseball cards that were very rare and I had no idea because he never told me. They were tiffany edition cards, and they raise the value of the paper cards I had by like 60 percent opposed to the regular version the cards.

The tiffany cards have a special tint to them and a few of them were printed without the names on the front of the card which was done by mistake. In these cases of messed up prints and names would subsequently add significant value on top of the cards original value. Also, this made the cards extremely rare so, I decided to keep these cards for myself as I did with my Mickey Mantle card.

I guess my grandfather just wanted me to really dive in and find an interest in it myself because he never let me know that there might be some worth to these cards, he just wanted me to have something of my own to go through.

Or maybe he was just tired of me going through his coins and stuff he was doing every day. Who knows?

He was like that with stuff, he really wanted you to think about things and I miss that from him no one else in my family was as life smart as he was, I think. I really just learned a lot being around him as a kid.

The most important thing I learned when it came to selling and trading valuable goods though was that the first buyer is never the right buyer, and to never sell what you have short because worth changes constantly. My grandfather also told me to pay attention to when it is a good time to start trading and selling cards because it comes in waves every few years.

And I thought to myself its time, but I still could not bring myself to sell of my collection my grandfather gave me. But then I had an Idea.

Well in today’s youth sports cards are back in a big way and when I was looking at my cards, I saw an opportunity that I knew I could not pass up and I did not even have to sell any of my actual cards that I liked.

What is interesting about the new sports card wave is that it is mostly all-virtual cards, not paper anymore. Its more like virtual art I would say but they sell for a shit ton! So not being artistic at all other than kind of with writing I went and talked to my very talented girlfriend who loves to draw and paint. I brought her the idea that we invest in the iPad and the drawing pen and we start making our own baseball cards on digital platforms.

About two months ago we finally got our iPad and our drawing pen, and we got started trying to make our own virtual art. What the art is called are NFT’s and they sell for thousands of dollars on the internet. My idea was to watch or find pictures of athletes of all kinds and digitally draw them on our sketch pad to turn into a creative capture of that picture or play or whatever it may be.

So, we made a few of these and none of them caught on or got sold and the ones that did were not for very much.

My girlfriend had a good point though we were creating content for an avenue flooded with the same stuff, so she had the idea to branch out a bit and try some different lanes of content. We tried artist like singers and rappers and landscapes and all kinds of things and then we really started to see a change in the interest and feedback we were receiving.

But still not making any money but we were still having fun doing it.

But one day just when we thought it was going to be a lost cause one of our very first creations of Deion Sanders running a football split with running a basepath in a baseball game sold for three thousand dollars and we did not think it was real at first.

We kept refreshing the page to see if it was a glitch or something, but the buyer messaged us asked to send the money to us and to send him the drawing and it went through easy as that to my paypal account.

We sat there and just looked at each other in disbelief.

We immediately went back to work making at least two or three really quality cards a day on the iPad and things really started to take off. The biggest thing I learned from finding out what people want from these cards are the most famous scenes from a player or singer and they want it drawn up an edited to something incredible and unique to the play or picture. Once we figured this out the cards started to sell faster and faster.

The whole time while doing this I could not help but feel it was my grandfather who was guiding my success through this endeavor. I put a lot of time and effort into helping make designs, ideas and getting equipment, I am sure he is watching me give everything into making these NFT’s from the cards he got me because ultimately the idea stems from the cards. Not to mention a lot of the NFT’s we make are baseball ones because that is the least common sport among NFT sellers. We fit perfectly into our own little lane and are making very good money from it.

In just a couple of months we have made a little over ten thousand dollars by making and selling our creations. I really never thought it would actually work out for us, but we are well on our way to making this a longevity business because we have made so much in such little time with only two people. These pictures are changing our lives we were able to go to Miami for spring break this year because of these pictures which is someplace we have both always wanted to visit and we were able to because of them.

I may be making it sound a bit easier than it was because there was a ton of fighting and arguing about the ideas we had and where to start and when it was not successful was another problem. To say the least we were very grateful to come out on the other side so soon after starting it up, but we had our fair share of roadblocks.

One major issue was my girlfriend adapting to making art inline rather than painting it and drawing it on paper. She would get so upset and mad they were not coming out right at first and that was a huge problem for our idea because if they did not look professional obviously no one would be interested. In order to fix this, we took time with tutorials and practiced almost day and night for a couple weeks straight until we thought we had something we could sell.

The very first creation we made for sale was a Mike Trout baseball NFT card of him hitting his 300th homerun, a benchmark for great baseball hitters in their career. We sold this NFT for seven hundred dollars just recently which goes to show you this really is a waiting game, and you never know when the right person is going to pop up and buy your art.

Another huge roadblock we faced was honestly just keeping the faith it took everything in us to not give up after a couple of months of getting really no where then having multiple sells together and around the same time it was amazing. We had to keep in mind that it was the internet and its obviously way too big for everything to catch on right away and that we needed patience. It was hard because again its also the internet and you want what you post to go viral and be rich right away and it just does not happen like that to everyone.

Going back to how I was inspired by my grandfather I think it was him who taught me the patience as he would spend years trying to either buy one specific coin or sell one specific coin and sometimes it did not work out at all even after all the waiting. So, in the back of my head, I knew I had to pay my dues with this stuff, but I felt like I could not wait that long with these NFT’s because who knows how long this wave will last. Nevertheless, this lesson kept me disciplined enough to stick with my project and see it through and I owe that to my grandfather as well.

His coin collection now worth millions were left to my brothers and I from him. When I learned of this, I really knew that he knew how much I loved those coins. He did not sell them off and give us the money. No. My grandfather left us a collection to keep building and to keep learning more and more about them.

Sometimes I think to myself if I would have anything that I have today without my grandfathers’ subliminal lessons and advice on my own collections. He inspired me, started me, and helped cultivate and keep my baseball card collection while he was still around. I really wish I had the opportunity to let him know how much they meant to me but unfortunately the time of his passing I was not mature enough to see this fully.

His inspiration birthed one of my best ideas I have had in my life to make my own money and Invested in my own idea and my own way to make money without someone controlling it. I owe my success on my NFT projects to him because without the card and my sentimental connection to them that made me unable to sell them willingly it made me think of an alternative to burning my collection away.

From the coins to cards to digital art my grandfather I know has been overseeing me and my progress and guiding me to make the right choices. I would not know where I would be today without these inspirational lessons and experiences I had with my grandfather. I cherish them every day and I never forget who and what made me into what I am today, and he is a major reason for this.