4 ms·
People say do what you love, I say do what pains you. I find it painful to see an opportunity and not take it. I have always sold stuff. When I was 14, there w
by mahmud 16y ago
People say do what you love, I say do what pains you.
I find it painful to see an opportunity and not take it. I have always sold stuff. When I was 14, there was a civil war where I lived and the prices of everything shot up several hundred percent. The government intervened and subsidized food and gasoline. At the time, I was an A-student: I had the second highest grade in the state and was featured on both radio and television. A good kid by every measure .. BUT! I found a contact at a cigarette factory who would sell me cigarettes at 80% discount. He just meant to sell me a pack, because I was a "rich kid". I flipped him over to work for me.
At 14, I ran a cigarette cartel out of my grandmother's house supplying tens of shops and street vendors.
I didn't need the money. My father and all my older brothers and sisters were in America. I didn't do it for the money. I just did it because it was an opportunity.
With some of the money I made I bought a bicycle and decorated it at a carpet shop .. for some reason. I got that idea that, perhaps, draping the bicycle frame in velvet cloth would look more appealing than the bare metal. I took it to the carpet and curtains guy and told him what I wanted done. He was confused, but money is money, so he pimped out my bike in purple velvet; a pair of wheels befitting a dealer.
Every kid in town wanted my bike.
My second venture was bicycle upholstery. A cottage industry unheard of up to that point. I didn't make as much as I did in cigarettes, but to this day, you can go to my old hometown and see kids ride bikes draped in cloth.
You're just born with the bug, I guess.
- jacquesm 16y agoSuper story, I knew you had a 'checkered' history, but didn't realize just how checkered. A cigarette cartel out of your grandmothers house is really quite neat, I'm trying to imagine my (very straightlaced) grandmothers response if I had tried something like that.
- ahoyhere 16y agoAh! A fellow traveler! Some of us are just born hustlers. When I was 12, I funded my own computer in no small part by selling most of my stuffed animals and all of my My Little Ponies. When I was 13, I used to make good money reselling brand new IKEA lamps and things on eBay. I had it down to a system -- selecting the ones that had the biggest multiple of going price over real price, never keeping stock on hand, having a real system to writing the listings, and spacing them out, etc. Things just got more boring from there on out. And while the secondary IKEA market is funny, it's not as funny as yours. Bicycle upholstery! Cracked me up. That's amazing.
- kajecounterhack 16y agoI'm not nearly as much of a hustler as either of you, but I traded three pokemon cards I got for free from a friend into 400+ cards back in 4th grade. (Pokemon cards were as good as currency for us.) I would trade a pokemon to someone who didn't care about energy cards (and would give me 10:1), then traded 5:1 for better cards, traded those cards for some star cards, traded star cards with better stats for holos with worse stats, traded holos with worse stats for multiple non-holo star cards, and kept this up until somehow I had a lot of cards. Never ended up buying a pack of pokemon cards either. My parents thought I was crazy. Yeah I ended up accidentally sticking most of my holos into the wash on one occasion though. :(