I started to learn at a young age.
Remember, I was being groomed to do this. I was not allowed to have jobs. I
would caddy, I would go to the golf course and caddy for people. But I realized
that there was this one hill on our golf course, the hole that had this huge
hill. And people could never get their bags up it. So I would sit there with a
lawn chair and just carry up all the people who didn't have caddies. I would
carry their golf bags up to the top, and they'd pay me a dollar. Meanwhile, my
friends were working for five hours to haul some guy's bag around and get paid
bucks. I'm like, "That's stupid because you have to work for five hours.
That doesn't make any sense." You just figure out a way to make more money
faster ( raising children).
Every week, I would go to the
corner store and buy all these pops. Then I would go up and deliver them to
these old women playing bridge. And they'd give me their orders for the
following week. And then I'd just deliver pop and I'd just charge twice. And I
had this captured market. You didn't need contracts. You just needed to have a
supply and demand and this audience who bought into you. These women weren't
going to go to anybody else because they liked me, and I kind of figured it
out. I went and got golf balls from golf courses. But everybody else was
looking in the bush and looking in the ditches for golf balls. I'm like, screw
that. They're all in the pond and nobody's going into the pond. So I would go
into the ponds and crawl around and pick them up with my toes. You just pick them
up with both feet. You get the golf balls, and you just throw them in your
bathing suit trunks and when you're done you've got a couple hundred of them.
But the problem is that people didn't want all the golf balls. So I just
packaged them.
I packaged them up three ways. I
had the Pinnacles and DDHs and the really cool ones back then. Those sold for
two dollars each. And then I had all the good ones that didn't look crappy.
They were 50 cents each. And then I'd sell 5 at a time of all the crappy ones. And
they could use those for practice balls. I sold sunglasses, when I was in
school, to all the kids in high school. This is what really kind of gets
everybody hating you, because you're trying to extract money from all your
friends all the time. But it paid the bills. So I sold lots and lots of
sunglasses. Then when the school shut me down -- the school actually called me
into the office and told me I couldn't do it -- so I went to the gas stations
and I sold lots of them to the gas stations and had the gas stations sell them
to their customers. That was cool because then I had retail outlets. You know
we teach our kids and we buy them games, but why don't we get them games, if
they're entrepreneurial kids, that kind of nurture the traits that you need to be
entrepreneurs? Why don't you teach them not to waste money ? ( raising children).
This is Adam Norman, a 30-year-old father and a journalist. I consider being a father as my full-time duty, which comes before my actual job of journalism. As a father, there will always be new challenges for me to face everyday while raising my kids. This is where the idea of this website came from. I wanted to give out my experience, along with the experience of others, to all parents out there who need an advice with raising their kids.
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