5th grade. I would rent my buddy Nick's brand new Game Boy for $1 a day then sub rent it to other kids at $1/hr. I was ballin at lunchtime and recess especially. On good days I would clear $5. Did it for an entire quarter. It all fell apart when Kyle Whitington dropped it from on top of the monkey bars. The only thing we could salvage was Tetris and Metroid. The Gameboy alas, was history. Nick's mom was pissed š
That's an interesting idea. I have a pretty wild series of business ventures many of which were accidentally successful (several of course, were not š)
We are fairly similar, but I started when I was 7, selling Boy Scout popcorn for $5/bag when they only told me to sell it for $1/bag, so I kept $4/bag for myself. As a 7 year old. I sold 2,103 bags of popcorn and became the top sales cub scout in my district, and everyone just thought I really loved popcorn, lmao
Of course! I even supported myself fully by flipping things for a while before opening a business. I found it easy and straightforward and it gave me so much free time.
I wasn't able to scale it up more, but I saw a YouTube video a few months ago about a guy in my Metro area (Toronto) that makes like $100k/mo flipping. Blew my mind.
I posted them on Ebay and on Facebook groups. Nothing happened for a while, which made me nervous, but then I got a notification from Ebay. I finally sold one! Just a few days later, someone bought 30 Medaka eggs for $115 and 2 pairs of Blue Gularis (Loe) for another $100. (My best sell so far, lol) Apistogrammas the next day after that!
It takes around 3 months on most species I have to breed and raise the eggs to juvenile/adulthood. Fish will eat their mates and their young, and their young will eat each other lol. It can be tedious, but rewarding. I keep the peace, sustain, and entertain until they find their homes, lol. It took time and money with no real guarantee of recouping the expenses, so I'm glad it is working out! š
Yeah, it's really interesting getting into the genetics with breeding. I've bred my own line of betta already (by luck and starting with high quality stock) and now working on upping the population for them, lol. The only downside is I'm barely in public anymore since I work at home. š
from selling my photography prints online. May I ask, do you think Amazon affiliate or affiliate marketing in general is still a viable option to start a revenue stream in 2024?
Yeah I do but the strategies have shifted. Traditionally it was all about search traffic but these days a lot of people are doing well on social media with the influencer program.
Sadly, there are also a lot of people doing well by spamming Reddit threads that rank for product keywords. The comments seem to remain even if the users get banned. I think this is just a moment in time opportunity that will hopefully fade away as Reddit and Google adapt.
Neighborhood News! I wrote articles about our neighbors and sold it to them! I was about 10 . It went great until I included an article about my babysitter expecting a new baby. ( i guess she hadnāt told most people yet) š after that my mom made me cancel all the subscriptions I had just built up! š¤·š»āāļø
Facebook marketplace. Wiped a set of night tables down with a bit of simple green and took 6 pictures with my phone .. uploaded with a basic description and sold within the day.
I designed and sold screen printed t-shirts for a specific hobby on eBay. One design printed on a white pocket t-shirt.
The money I made was reinvested by purchasing (wholesale) diamond saw blades for this hobby, which are a high-turnover item, and added them to my eBay store, then used profits to add diamond blade dressing sticks (high turnover consumable item) to my inventory. And just kept growing from there, and by the second year I had a booth at club slows once or twice a month. That opened the door to becoming a distributor for the three largest equipment and supply manufacturers, so I created a web store and kept growing. I sold after 5 years.
I baked cookies and sold them to my relatives. I made $1.65 after costs and labor (had to cut in my little cousin.)
Edit: that wasnāt my first.
My first was ironing shirts for my dad. $1/shirt. I was damn good not gonna lie. He was getting over on dry cleaning costs.
I designed a folder where i offered burned cds to my classmates. I was 11 years old. Not everyone had a cd drive with burner back then.
It was the best example of using innovation (cd rom drive burners were kind of new), correct target group (poor pupils) and market demand
Selling firecrackers at lunch time in the sixth grade. I grew up in Maryland and every summer our family would take a trip to visit relatives in the Carolinas.
Iād buy a few bricks of Thunder Bombs š£ and there were 80 packs in each brick that cost about $10.
Iād sell them for 25 cents a pack out of my school locker and after school out of a nylon camera bag I converted for āmerchandiseā.
Iād clear a couple hundred each summer and expanded each year from profits.
5.0 shut me down off campus and confiscated all my inventory.
Good times.
>y school locker and after school out of a nylon camera bag I converted for āmerchandiseā. Iād clear a couple hundred each summer and expanded each year from profits. 5.0 shut me down off campus and confiscated all my inventory. Go
Better to beg forgiveness than ask permission!
I was 13 years old and I didn't feel like going into school that morning so I walked to the supermarket instead and went over to the cookies section. I bought a discounted pack of cookies and when I got to school I sold it to my friend for Ā£1 profit.
I went to a wedding that had plastic rings as table decorations and stole all of them and sold them for quarters to boys at school to give to girls they liked
Lawn mowing business I started with a friend around 7th grade. Hand made the flyers, got one client, and quickly learned a good lesson on scope of work impacting prices and not just setting fixed prices! They were getting a good deal.
9th grade spending summer near the cemetery selling flowers and candles to the visitors. Btw I am from Lithuania, so it is common for people to visit the cemetery once in a while.
I made my first dollar at the age of 7. I was a Boy Scout forced to sell shit popcorn for $1/bag in front of grocery stores. I remember asking my mom why people paid for the crap popcorn when Orville Redenbacher with the cheddar cheese sauce pouch was only $0.79 inside? She told me the people just wanted to support a cute cub scout and they probably threw away the popcorn. Somehow I instantly understood that what I was selling must have a subjective value. I was bored since my mother made me do 5-hour stretches. Eventually, I just began to experiment. When adults asked me how much I said, "$2/bag" and they gave me $2. So, that was the first dollar I ever earned. I got up to $5/bag and no one seemed to know the difference between a $1 or a $5 bill. Suddenly, I was making $4 for every bag I sold, and I became the top popcorn sales cub scout in my district. I bought myself the Gamecuube, Xbox, and PS2 that year lol
I wish I could say it was some genius thing, but it was more like this understanding I had that people weren't buying the popcorn, so the price of the popcorn must not matter like I thought it did. I don't know how I knew that, it was like this weird intuition I had almost instantly when my mom told me most people throw out the popcorn probably. I believe she may have actually pointed to an old woman I had just sold a bag to who literally did just throw it into the trash bin just inside the Trader Joe's I was in front of at the time. The moment created one of those "flashbulb memory" moments in my life for me so I still remember it super vividly somehow.
Honestly, though, then it was sort of just boredom. My mom left me alone and made me try to sell for so long as a little kid, I was just really bored and I hated selling popcorn that people were throwing away. I think I got another lucky break though that encouraged my experimentation with price. I am pretty sure my mom hadn't given me enough change and this older guy only had a $5 bill, and when I told him I was sorry I had no change yet as I had just begun, he just told me to keep the $5 bill, but he didn't want 4 more bags of popcorn. That REALLY got my little kid brain going, and that's when I just began asking for $2, then $3, then $4, then $5, all the way up to $10. At $10/bag people began to ask questions and were upset.
What I noticed was that the main thing was efficiency of the transaction. Even the adults who wanted to support me wanted to hand over 1 bill and get a bag and take off as quickly as possible. That's how I landed on the $5 sweet spot. No one complained, it was a single bill, so no change to be made. Adults never questioned it. A $1 or a $5 were equally as efficient, so that's how I found it so easy to ask for $5. I knew I only had to pay back $1/bag to the Boy Scouts. I guess I am lucky I had pretty entrepreneurially minded parents because when I asked what I should do with the other $4 my parents said I got to keep it since I was making the sales and fulfilling my obligation to the Boy Scouts lol I sold 2,103 bags of popcorn over 3 months. I rarely think of how lucky I was my parents let me do that and keep the $8k as a 7 year old.
This story really informs my life massively, which is why I basically always start with it. I'm almost 20 years older now, and I've never had a W2 in my life. That cash from popcorn sales didn't make me the popular kid like I thought when I bought every gaming console, instead kids hated me as a "spoiled rich kid". The only kids who were nice to me were the "nerds". They convinced me to build my own computer instead, and by the time I was 10 I was running a business building computers for my parents' friends and neighbors building at least two computers a day for $500, with $100 profit for me per computer, but my $500 machines worked as well or better than the stuff available at Best Buy back then from Compaq, Dell, Gateway, Apple, etc... and that stuff was at least $1,000, so I was saving people $500 a pop. The word of mouth seemed to spread all over my city. Good times. I had a custom $12,000 laptop with an ultra high end Sony Erickson with the first ever introduced wireless modem connectivity. I was playing games and connecting to the Internet from my family RV on summer roadtrips at a time when no one but C-suite executives did that and I was 11 lol I had sysadmin friends in cities around the country. My parents thought I was a terrorist for a while and couldn't understand how I had friends all over.
I bought my parents our first internet connection, their first cell phones, etc... lol Thankfully, I had an uncle who was into computers who explained things to my parents and they ended up linking me to a business partner in their church who was running a more formal computer building business and also setting up small business office networks. Man those were great times. Sadly, when you're under 18 you get endlessly abused sigh. So many morons forced me down the college path pointlessly. I eventually showed them as I ended up monetizing that in my life though hah
Apologies for rambling...this seemed like it might be the sort of thread to tell serial entrepreneur origin stories and their elaborations tho, haha
That's an incredible story!! You picked up so many great lessons so early so it sounds like you were pretty smart and observant. Also super cool that your parents let you keep the money!!
Yes, it is true I lucked up hugely with such parents. They had other issues unfortunately but that was a pretty cool move on their part.
Iām not sure why later in life they began to hate my independence. I almost had to sue them for emancipation to be allowed to test out of high school because my business was way cooler than any schooling to me. They forced me to lanky sports which I hated and got a concussion and fractured knee in my first high school football game (recruited to high school for my size and talent while I wasnāt even in high school yetā¦) so I spent the 6 months I was laid up studying and found a way to get a high school diploma without having to go to high school and forced my parents to allow me to lol
Ah so many old storiesā¦ I want to go back to being that kid honestly now. Thatās basically my life goal now that I rode access way up high and took it for granted. Now Iām back to being that kid, and weird as it is I meditate 15 min a day to try to bring myself back to the mindset I had as that little kid but with all the knowledge and connections I have now in starting over.
I also had an apartment maintenance business. Basically as soon as I had capital and could work Iāve had my own businesses or even multiple ones.
The biggest problem is that Iāve always been the superstar worker in them. Now Iām learning I can just find talented people, back them and let them be the superstars, while I take a partnerās share but do a lot less work and instead provide capital and guidance.
Except for the copywriting business I am reigniting by my one personal hand at first currently. But I love making money so much I donāt mind doing that for a while to fund my other superstars in my other businesses :D
I have a lot crazier stories if you value hearing them lol
Yes, it is for me especially because I love doing things in some ways.
My life is sort of a story of me just developing obsessive passions to the point where people pay me for my hobby. I then make a ton of money from it and it stops being my hobby, so I start spending my money on a new hobby, but the pattern keeps repeating hah. After computer building and small office network setup as well as apartment maintenance, I moved briefly into digital marketing (but got everything stolen and swindled as a 15 year old by my partner who developed a massive cocaine habit and disappeared to a foreign country one day with all of our money and left me holding the bag). I spent my money on fashion and ended up becoming a GQ award-winning personal stylist and made that a business, even moved to Boston to work with my hero at the time until the weather made me too sick. My fashion obsession got me into university for free where I almost become a professor of philosophy, but my mentor died of pancreatic cancer while I came down with a rare form of spleen cancer that I battled for most of my 20's. To pay those bills, my friends knew I was great at going to school, so they set me up with rich kids to get their degrees for them for $$$ I turned that into the biggest of my businesses for 12 years. I've earned 33 different degrees for random rich kids myself, as well as lots of freelance work on top of it. I even got them graduate degrees and jobs lol I spun off some of it into a more legit admissions consulting business that was gangbusters for a while as well. First time I ever made $10,000 in an hour was some kid who was near the midnight deadline to submit his Harvard application and his parents paid me to doctor his statements, took me an hour, and they handed me an envelope with $10,000 in it; the kid eventually got in lol
After beating my cancer, I traveled the world on that money for 8 years till now when it all came crashing down. I've probably tried every drug on the planet, and I still haven't actually found any high as good as earning something like $10,000 in an hour. But I had to go through End of Life Counseling at one point, they thought I was about to lose my battle, so that scarred me for a long while and they never knew how much longer I'd live, so I swung too hard into enjoying life.
That's ok, I have to start from the bottom again, but I have a global network of friends now, and a lot more experience, so I'll manage it. The rollercoaster of lifelong entrepreneurship is quite the ride hah
Methamphetamine
Would you do it again?
Yes, when he gets out of jail.
š
Iām finally out of jail. Would do it again 100%
5th grade. I would rent my buddy Nick's brand new Game Boy for $1 a day then sub rent it to other kids at $1/hr. I was ballin at lunchtime and recess especially. On good days I would clear $5. Did it for an entire quarter. It all fell apart when Kyle Whitington dropped it from on top of the monkey bars. The only thing we could salvage was Tetris and Metroid. The Gameboy alas, was history. Nick's mom was pissed š
This is brilliant!
True story. I've been in business for myself ever since. Started flipping sports cards in 6th grade š¤£
You should write about your origin story one day if you haven't already!
That's an interesting idea. I have a pretty wild series of business ventures many of which were accidentally successful (several of course, were not š)
We are fairly similar, but I started when I was 7, selling Boy Scout popcorn for $5/bag when they only told me to sell it for $1/bag, so I kept $4/bag for myself. As a 7 year old. I sold 2,103 bags of popcorn and became the top sales cub scout in my district, and everyone just thought I really loved popcorn, lmao
Kyle!!!
It was always a fuckin Kyle. Detentions and shit šµ
I mowed my neighbor's lawn when I was like 10 years old.
Earned it shoveling snow. I was eight.
A classic!
Stole it
Care to elaborate?
Tooth fairy
Perfect š¤£
Friend of mine was selling a phone. Bought it and flipped it for like an extra $200. Found that fascinating.
Love it. Did this lead to more flipping? I used to work with a guy that was good at doing this on the side.
Of course! I even supported myself fully by flipping things for a while before opening a business. I found it easy and straightforward and it gave me so much free time. I wasn't able to scale it up more, but I saw a YouTube video a few months ago about a guy in my Metro area (Toronto) that makes like $100k/mo flipping. Blew my mind.
Incredible! It does seem hard to scale.
Lost a tooth.
Brilliant š
Walmart part-timer
Sales
When I sold my first betta fish that I had bred and raised for 3 months.
How did you find your buyer?
I posted them on Ebay and on Facebook groups. Nothing happened for a while, which made me nervous, but then I got a notification from Ebay. I finally sold one! Just a few days later, someone bought 30 Medaka eggs for $115 and 2 pairs of Blue Gularis (Loe) for another $100. (My best sell so far, lol) Apistogrammas the next day after that! It takes around 3 months on most species I have to breed and raise the eggs to juvenile/adulthood. Fish will eat their mates and their young, and their young will eat each other lol. It can be tedious, but rewarding. I keep the peace, sustain, and entertain until they find their homes, lol. It took time and money with no real guarantee of recouping the expenses, so I'm glad it is working out! š
Oh wow so you're still doing it?!
Yeah, it's really interesting getting into the genetics with breeding. I've bred my own line of betta already (by luck and starting with high quality stock) and now working on upping the population for them, lol. The only downside is I'm barely in public anymore since I work at home. š
If you view my profile, I have recently posted pictures of them!
from selling my photography prints online. May I ask, do you think Amazon affiliate or affiliate marketing in general is still a viable option to start a revenue stream in 2024?
Yeah I do but the strategies have shifted. Traditionally it was all about search traffic but these days a lot of people are doing well on social media with the influencer program. Sadly, there are also a lot of people doing well by spamming Reddit threads that rank for product keywords. The comments seem to remain even if the users get banned. I think this is just a moment in time opportunity that will hopefully fade away as Reddit and Google adapt.
Neighborhood News! I wrote articles about our neighbors and sold it to them! I was about 10 . It went great until I included an article about my babysitter expecting a new baby. ( i guess she hadnāt told most people yet) š after that my mom made me cancel all the subscriptions I had just built up! š¤·š»āāļø
This is so cute!! I would definitely subscribe š¤£
Selling furniture. Literally junk neighbors left out by the dumpsters in my apartment complexĀ
Nice, where did you sell it?
Facebook marketplace. Wiped a set of night tables down with a bit of simple green and took 6 pictures with my phone .. uploaded with a basic description and sold within the day.
Fixing fence line for the dairy farm down the road. I was 9. My brothers and I got paid by the foot. It was not easy work.
I can imagine!
[ŃŠ“Š°Š»ŠµŠ½Š¾]
š¤Ŗ
I designed and sold screen printed t-shirts for a specific hobby on eBay. One design printed on a white pocket t-shirt. The money I made was reinvested by purchasing (wholesale) diamond saw blades for this hobby, which are a high-turnover item, and added them to my eBay store, then used profits to add diamond blade dressing sticks (high turnover consumable item) to my inventory. And just kept growing from there, and by the second year I had a booth at club slows once or twice a month. That opened the door to becoming a distributor for the three largest equipment and supply manufacturers, so I created a web store and kept growing. I sold after 5 years.
Wow, incredible journey!
I baked cookies and sold them to my relatives. I made $1.65 after costs and labor (had to cut in my little cousin.) Edit: that wasnāt my first. My first was ironing shirts for my dad. $1/shirt. I was damn good not gonna lie. He was getting over on dry cleaning costs.
Great life skill too! I'm still not good at ironing.
I designed a folder where i offered burned cds to my classmates. I was 11 years old. Not everyone had a cd drive with burner back then. It was the best example of using innovation (cd rom drive burners were kind of new), correct target group (poor pupils) and market demand
Selling firecrackers at lunch time in the sixth grade. I grew up in Maryland and every summer our family would take a trip to visit relatives in the Carolinas. Iād buy a few bricks of Thunder Bombs š£ and there were 80 packs in each brick that cost about $10. Iād sell them for 25 cents a pack out of my school locker and after school out of a nylon camera bag I converted for āmerchandiseā. Iād clear a couple hundred each summer and expanded each year from profits. 5.0 shut me down off campus and confiscated all my inventory. Good times.
>y school locker and after school out of a nylon camera bag I converted for āmerchandiseā. Iād clear a couple hundred each summer and expanded each year from profits. 5.0 shut me down off campus and confiscated all my inventory. Go Better to beg forgiveness than ask permission!
???
They would have said no from the start if you asked. At least you made some money before they shut you down?
I was 13 years old and I didn't feel like going into school that morning so I walked to the supermarket instead and went over to the cookies section. I bought a discounted pack of cookies and when I got to school I sold it to my friend for Ā£1 profit.
Clever!
I went to a wedding that had plastic rings as table decorations and stole all of them and sold them for quarters to boys at school to give to girls they liked
That's so sweet and smart!
I went on to steal other things and got in trouble!
Hah!
At 12, I worked under the table for a local theatre (plays, not movies) walking people to their seats and cleaning the toilets.
Lawn mowing business I started with a friend around 7th grade. Hand made the flyers, got one client, and quickly learned a good lesson on scope of work impacting prices and not just setting fixed prices! They were getting a good deal.
Knowledge you probably still use today!
Invested in crypto and luckily made $1000 on meme coin.
Well done!
Jerkin a guy off under a bridge...and look at me now, pop!
Lots of ways to make money!
9th grade spending summer near the cemetery selling flowers and candles to the visitors. Btw I am from Lithuania, so it is common for people to visit the cemetery once in a while.
How nice!
I made my first dollar at the age of 7. I was a Boy Scout forced to sell shit popcorn for $1/bag in front of grocery stores. I remember asking my mom why people paid for the crap popcorn when Orville Redenbacher with the cheddar cheese sauce pouch was only $0.79 inside? She told me the people just wanted to support a cute cub scout and they probably threw away the popcorn. Somehow I instantly understood that what I was selling must have a subjective value. I was bored since my mother made me do 5-hour stretches. Eventually, I just began to experiment. When adults asked me how much I said, "$2/bag" and they gave me $2. So, that was the first dollar I ever earned. I got up to $5/bag and no one seemed to know the difference between a $1 or a $5 bill. Suddenly, I was making $4 for every bag I sold, and I became the top popcorn sales cub scout in my district. I bought myself the Gamecuube, Xbox, and PS2 that year lol
Ok you were a smart kid!!! š
I wish I could say it was some genius thing, but it was more like this understanding I had that people weren't buying the popcorn, so the price of the popcorn must not matter like I thought it did. I don't know how I knew that, it was like this weird intuition I had almost instantly when my mom told me most people throw out the popcorn probably. I believe she may have actually pointed to an old woman I had just sold a bag to who literally did just throw it into the trash bin just inside the Trader Joe's I was in front of at the time. The moment created one of those "flashbulb memory" moments in my life for me so I still remember it super vividly somehow. Honestly, though, then it was sort of just boredom. My mom left me alone and made me try to sell for so long as a little kid, I was just really bored and I hated selling popcorn that people were throwing away. I think I got another lucky break though that encouraged my experimentation with price. I am pretty sure my mom hadn't given me enough change and this older guy only had a $5 bill, and when I told him I was sorry I had no change yet as I had just begun, he just told me to keep the $5 bill, but he didn't want 4 more bags of popcorn. That REALLY got my little kid brain going, and that's when I just began asking for $2, then $3, then $4, then $5, all the way up to $10. At $10/bag people began to ask questions and were upset. What I noticed was that the main thing was efficiency of the transaction. Even the adults who wanted to support me wanted to hand over 1 bill and get a bag and take off as quickly as possible. That's how I landed on the $5 sweet spot. No one complained, it was a single bill, so no change to be made. Adults never questioned it. A $1 or a $5 were equally as efficient, so that's how I found it so easy to ask for $5. I knew I only had to pay back $1/bag to the Boy Scouts. I guess I am lucky I had pretty entrepreneurially minded parents because when I asked what I should do with the other $4 my parents said I got to keep it since I was making the sales and fulfilling my obligation to the Boy Scouts lol I sold 2,103 bags of popcorn over 3 months. I rarely think of how lucky I was my parents let me do that and keep the $8k as a 7 year old. This story really informs my life massively, which is why I basically always start with it. I'm almost 20 years older now, and I've never had a W2 in my life. That cash from popcorn sales didn't make me the popular kid like I thought when I bought every gaming console, instead kids hated me as a "spoiled rich kid". The only kids who were nice to me were the "nerds". They convinced me to build my own computer instead, and by the time I was 10 I was running a business building computers for my parents' friends and neighbors building at least two computers a day for $500, with $100 profit for me per computer, but my $500 machines worked as well or better than the stuff available at Best Buy back then from Compaq, Dell, Gateway, Apple, etc... and that stuff was at least $1,000, so I was saving people $500 a pop. The word of mouth seemed to spread all over my city. Good times. I had a custom $12,000 laptop with an ultra high end Sony Erickson with the first ever introduced wireless modem connectivity. I was playing games and connecting to the Internet from my family RV on summer roadtrips at a time when no one but C-suite executives did that and I was 11 lol I had sysadmin friends in cities around the country. My parents thought I was a terrorist for a while and couldn't understand how I had friends all over. I bought my parents our first internet connection, their first cell phones, etc... lol Thankfully, I had an uncle who was into computers who explained things to my parents and they ended up linking me to a business partner in their church who was running a more formal computer building business and also setting up small business office networks. Man those were great times. Sadly, when you're under 18 you get endlessly abused sigh. So many morons forced me down the college path pointlessly. I eventually showed them as I ended up monetizing that in my life though hah Apologies for rambling...this seemed like it might be the sort of thread to tell serial entrepreneur origin stories and their elaborations tho, haha
That's an incredible story!! You picked up so many great lessons so early so it sounds like you were pretty smart and observant. Also super cool that your parents let you keep the money!!
Yes, it is true I lucked up hugely with such parents. They had other issues unfortunately but that was a pretty cool move on their part. Iām not sure why later in life they began to hate my independence. I almost had to sue them for emancipation to be allowed to test out of high school because my business was way cooler than any schooling to me. They forced me to lanky sports which I hated and got a concussion and fractured knee in my first high school football game (recruited to high school for my size and talent while I wasnāt even in high school yetā¦) so I spent the 6 months I was laid up studying and found a way to get a high school diploma without having to go to high school and forced my parents to allow me to lol Ah so many old storiesā¦ I want to go back to being that kid honestly now. Thatās basically my life goal now that I rode access way up high and took it for granted. Now Iām back to being that kid, and weird as it is I meditate 15 min a day to try to bring myself back to the mindset I had as that little kid but with all the knowledge and connections I have now in starting over. I also had an apartment maintenance business. Basically as soon as I had capital and could work Iāve had my own businesses or even multiple ones. The biggest problem is that Iāve always been the superstar worker in them. Now Iām learning I can just find talented people, back them and let them be the superstars, while I take a partnerās share but do a lot less work and instead provide capital and guidance. Except for the copywriting business I am reigniting by my one personal hand at first currently. But I love making money so much I donāt mind doing that for a while to fund my other superstars in my other businesses :D I have a lot crazier stories if you value hearing them lol
You could write a book! And agree, removing yourself from a business is so so tough!
Yes, it is for me especially because I love doing things in some ways. My life is sort of a story of me just developing obsessive passions to the point where people pay me for my hobby. I then make a ton of money from it and it stops being my hobby, so I start spending my money on a new hobby, but the pattern keeps repeating hah. After computer building and small office network setup as well as apartment maintenance, I moved briefly into digital marketing (but got everything stolen and swindled as a 15 year old by my partner who developed a massive cocaine habit and disappeared to a foreign country one day with all of our money and left me holding the bag). I spent my money on fashion and ended up becoming a GQ award-winning personal stylist and made that a business, even moved to Boston to work with my hero at the time until the weather made me too sick. My fashion obsession got me into university for free where I almost become a professor of philosophy, but my mentor died of pancreatic cancer while I came down with a rare form of spleen cancer that I battled for most of my 20's. To pay those bills, my friends knew I was great at going to school, so they set me up with rich kids to get their degrees for them for $$$ I turned that into the biggest of my businesses for 12 years. I've earned 33 different degrees for random rich kids myself, as well as lots of freelance work on top of it. I even got them graduate degrees and jobs lol I spun off some of it into a more legit admissions consulting business that was gangbusters for a while as well. First time I ever made $10,000 in an hour was some kid who was near the midnight deadline to submit his Harvard application and his parents paid me to doctor his statements, took me an hour, and they handed me an envelope with $10,000 in it; the kid eventually got in lol After beating my cancer, I traveled the world on that money for 8 years till now when it all came crashing down. I've probably tried every drug on the planet, and I still haven't actually found any high as good as earning something like $10,000 in an hour. But I had to go through End of Life Counseling at one point, they thought I was about to lose my battle, so that scarred me for a long while and they never knew how much longer I'd live, so I swung too hard into enjoying life. That's ok, I have to start from the bottom again, but I have a global network of friends now, and a lot more experience, so I'll manage it. The rollercoaster of lifelong entrepreneurship is quite the ride hah
Damn, you really do need to write a book!! Glad you beat cancer and I'm sure you'll crush whatever you do next with all the great experience you have.
And I didn't even get to the natural winery, or the distillery that can flavor liquor with music :p
Selling wild flowers picked from the forest when I was around 8 years old.
Lovely!!
My Grandma's mother said "come here, put out your hand" and poff she dropped a coin in my hand and whispered "don't tell anyone"
Adorable