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College dropout makes $100,000 a year, with a two-day workweek
- mitchellh 18y agoI really dislike these posts, which are all the same "Person who skips college retires at 24" or "College really needed? This man makes 400,000 a year!" Of course college doesn't guarantee that you'll come out making $100k a year or more, but also NOT going to college is the same. As happy as I am for this person, I hope no one gets the wrong idea from these posts and just drops out. Having an idea is one thing, putting it together and having it be a success is another. If anything, I would say the YouTube and Facebook guys had it right, they made the product during college, released it during college, succeeded during college, and subsequently left college. Thats the way to do it IF ANY. And for some people, school just isn't there thing. Anyways I'm rambling, I think my point has been made.
- brandnewlow 18y agoThe title of this link misreads the story a bit to re-cast it for Hackers. Yes, the guy's a dropout, yes the guy works two days a week, but I think his approach to how he positioned himself as THE pre-school birthday party magician is what's most interesting. That and all the wonderful, wonderful writing. The adventure in Atlantic City is a highlight.
- chris11 18y agoYeah I really agree. it seems like most of these posts are saying anyone can make 100k+ working a couple days a week just by finding the right job. Sure, it's possible. But people do it by finding a niche, and marketing themselves very well. And there isn't usually room in these niches for many people to make that kind of money. These posts usually remind me of those late night tv infomercials telling that I can make millions, I just need to spend a few hundred to learn how to do it. I think that people can make that kind of money with little work, but they don't do it by following a defined career path.
- NyxWulf 18y agoIt's interesting because there seems to be this ethos among the hacker/tech startup community that if you want to be successful you either need to be young, a college drop out, or an ivy league grad. The Kauffman foundation did a study on entrepreneurship though and found that this idea is totally off base. (http://dobbscodetalk.com/index.php?option=com_myblog&show=Entrepreneurs-and-Tech-Startups-Whos-Doing-What-When-.html&Itemid=29 http://dobbscodetalk.com/index.php?option=com_myblog&sho...) This article is fascinating - and well worth a read. If you are looking for a quick summary: More education directly correlates with better performance in your startup, and most founders are much older and have greater work experience than people would think.
- tptacek 18y agoWow are you ever missing the point of this story.
- tjmc 18y agoYou're assuming he read it
- brandnewlow 18y agoThis is a somewhat old article. It's also very, very long. It's also one of the greatest newspaper feature stories I've ever read. It was passed around the writers' circles I was part of when the Post ran it years ago. Here's the gist (from memory): 1. Guy has a gift for connecting with little kids. 2. Guy has good sense of humor. 3. Guy decides to do magic shows at pre-school birthday parties for a living. 4. Guy targets the richest community of clients for his service. 5. Guy figures out what people are charging for pre-school birthday party magic shows and charges DOUBLE their price. 6. Guy markets his shows by hanging out around shopping malls where parents and kids wandered by, having fake conversations on his cell phone about non-existent work. 7. Guy works 10 birthday parties a weekend, charging $200 for a 30-minute magic show. 8. Parents feel guilty about dropping $200 on a 30-minute preschool magic show, but the kids ADORE the guy's funny act and tricks that blow up in his face. He's got a gift. There's a great subplot about the magicians deep, dark secret, in fact it's what prompted the Washington Post reporter to shadow the guy for a few months. Parents were wondering why the magician kept showing up unshaven, with dark circles under his eyes, and why his gear was so beat up if he was making so much money. I'll leave the surprises to those curious enough to read the whole thing.
- jpcx01 18y agoThanks for the summary. This useless fluff piece lost me after the first page.
- brandnewlow 18y agoHow can you render judgment if you didn't read past page one?
- randallsquared 18y agoNot reading past page one is a judgment. It's one I make all the time about various articles and stories.
- brandnewlow 18y ago
- PaulMorgan 18y agoI'm curious where this guy is now after three years. Is he still doing this gig or have his flaws caught up with him?
- PaulMorgan 18y agoAnswered my own question. He's still in business: http://www.thegreatzucchini.com/index.html http://www.thegreatzucchini.com/index.html
- brandnewlow 18y agoWhat's interesting about his page is that it doesn't even show his face on the front, just dozens of happy, delighted pre-schoolers. The man knows what he's really selling to parents.
- chops 18y agoHe does show his face on the "More Info" page, though. http://www.thegreatzucchini.com/about.htm http://www.thegreatzucchini.com/about.htm
- akikuchi 18y agoI actually enjoy many of the posts about the creative (or at least somewhat non-traditional) things people do as solo entrepreneurs. After reading the entire article though, I do find it funny how this tagline was used to position the article for the HN community. The article is actually much more of a character study than a discussion of a business, and it takes a significant change in content after the first thousand words.
- dasil003 18y agoBrilliant article, brilliant HN positioning, brilliant page partitioning. Best thing I've read on HN this year.
- jibiki 18y agoThe way the article totally changes course on the last page is brilliant. This might be the only news article I've seen that used the hypertext format that well.
- brandnewlow 18y agoThere was a live chat with the author on the Washington Post the week this was published. Someone asked him if the paging was set up this way on purpose and he denied it.
- palish 18y agoI always click 'print this article', then click my Readability bookmarklet ( http://lab.arc90.com/experiments/readability/ http://lab.arc90.com/experiments/readability/ ). Works 9/10 times and gives a nice speed boost to reading articles. The page partitioning sounds well-done though. I guess writers put a lot of thought into that. (Edit: ... and then I read brandnewlow's comment above mine which refutes that theory. 'Print this article' links rock.)
- dasil003 18y agowho says editors have no outlet for creative genius...
- jacoblyles 18y ago"You could just have a party where you all played pin the tail on the donkey or musical chairs or something. But that is just not done in this part of D.C. If you did that, you would be talked about." That's a microcosm of what I didn't like about DC. The culture is very status oriented and judgmental.
- chops 18y agoThat comment totally struck me while reading the article. I thought, "Wow, what an awful and fake little world that must be." God forbid you be "talked about!"
- shard 18y agoI think that humans in general are very status oriented and judgmental. Hacker culture is the same, we just focus on a different set of status indicators and pass judgment on a different set of criteria. Other cultures' values and judgments look unpleasant and silly to us, just as ours look unpleasant and silly to them.
- jacoblyles 18y agoYou have a point. Maybe I just didn't like the city because it didn't share my values.
- squidbot 18y ago3 years ago suburbanites were swimming in money and had nothing better to do with it. I doubt this guy is still pulling in a full weekend of @$300 shows.
- Retric 18y agoSome DC suburbs are still under 3% unemployment. Government consulting in one form or another is vary stable work when you can get it. EX: I work for a multi-billion dollar company that grew over 10% last year while being vary profitable. Many people I work with have a combined family income over 250k/year, young children, and little free time.
- Alex3917 18y agoFlagged. Come on, really?
- gabrielroth 18y agoYeah, really.
- Alex3917 18y agoWhatever, it's still a bad headline regardless of the quality of the article itself.
- critic 18y agoThe fact that you were downmodded tells me that the bozos are now the majority of HN. Time for a new digg clone?
- tjmc 18y agoOk - it's a story about a clown. But does that mean it only satisfies the intellectual curiosity of bozos? I'll take this article over another tawdry analysis of the financial crisis any day.
- SwellJoe 18y agoThis is actually one of the better articles I've seen on HN lately. And, I've been a bozo here for quite some time.
- deleted 18y ago[deleted]
- spoiledtechie 18y agoBrilliant article. Prob one of the best things I have read all year long. WOW! Should make a movie about it.
- jlees 18y agoI'm already visualising Tom Hanks in the feature role. What a vivid story. We just need a happy ending, no? :)
- apstuff 18y agoWhen I read this article all I could think about was Raffi singing 'Banana Phone.' Now I can't get it out of my head. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_-LbvFPLpeo&feature=player_embedded http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_-LbvFPLpeo&feature=playe...
- there 18y agois "college dropout" really anything special these days?
- quizbiz 18y agosociety tells me that if I want to make anything out of my life, college is the place to go. One poster in my High School flaunts that I will make one million dollars more in my lifetime if I go to college.
- justlearning 18y agoThe title was misleading in the sense that the article in itself is much more than about creativity. I thought it had more to do with emotions, psychology and effects. After reading the whole article, I am in awe of how he knows kids so well! I feel sorry that creative professor mother + phd math father did only so much for their son, putting their own pursuits first instead. But I guess that is how today's world is and will be.
- tptacek 18y agoYou can read it like that, or you can read it as a story about a guy who could be leading a completely charmed life, except for the fact that the personality traits that give him instantaneous connections with 4 year olds also make it hard for him to lead a normal life --- the same way genetic mutations can make us more attractive and more susceptible to specific diseases, or the same way that David Foster Wallace's brain could ricochet through a thousand ideas in a couple pages, but also get so tangled up and hopeless that he was compelled to kill himself. As in, a story about how things that seem simple --- let's write an ebook, how to make $100,000 a year with a 2 hour work week! --- are actually really complex, because we're humans and not 300 word business model posts on Hacker News. Is what I think you could think of it, is all.
- shard 18y agoI don't quite see it as their parents putting their own pursuits first. Rather, he is so different from them in the way he thinks that they just don't relate to each other. Imagine a field that you have no interest in, or maybe even feel repulsion for, maybe it's NASCAR racing, or piano tuning, or salsa dancing, or the two argument starters: politics and religion. Now imagine your child has the kind of personality that will make him a master in that field. How do you relate to his thoughts and interests?
- erlanger 18y agoI remember when this came out in the Post mag a couple years ago here. I still don't get why they had to take a nice light-hearted story and dig up all of that dirt about the guy's gambling problem...it seemed sensationalist and completely irrelevant.
- shard 18y agoIt makes the person three-dimensional, as opposed to a light hearted human-interest story. A story about a clown that 4-year-olds love, I will forget in an hour. A story about a clown who gave up adulthood because of his past, that I will remember for many years.
- tptacek 18y agoI like how careful he is with the tone he's writing. For instance, the story about the people across the hall; he doesn't let it blow up in your face, and he doesn't just let the air out of it either; he reels it in like a fisherman, letting a key detail out early, but still landing it with a climax. Thanks for posting this. I had no idea about this guy, now I'm trying to track down everything he's written.
- deleted 18y ago[deleted]
- ciupicri 18y agoHe and Seinfeld :-)
- tptacek 18y agoAnd of course, this is the same writer who just got the "leaving babies to die in the car" story published, which just made the rounds: http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2009/02/27/AR2009022701549.html http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2009/02... There's definitely a rhythm and a way of developing characters in common with all the stuff I've read from him so far. Or how about this: THE BEST-INFORMED PERSON I EVER KNEW was a friend of my grandfather's back in the Bronx, where I grew up. Every morning of every day of his life, this elderly man -- his name, as I recall, was Boris -- would dress impeccably in a suit and waistcoat and shuffle to the public library, where more than a dozen of the day's local and out-of-town newspapers were threaded through bamboo poles and hung from racks. One by one, Boris would read them all, front to back; at dusk, he would walk home alone. This daily pilgrimage was conducted with ecclesiastic solemnity, a quiet, dignified homage to the majesty of knowledge. Even as a little boy, in that intuitive if primitive way that children comprehend important things, I understood the fundamental truth that Boris was, in some clear but compelling way, a douche bag. This guy is a genius.
- blueben 18y agoWe rarely see a case of attention deficit disorder as obvious as this.
- gnaritas 18y agoExcellent article and excellent writing. Anyone complaining about this being too long has some ADD issues of their own; they should especially make the effort to read this as a warning what happens when such tendencies are allowed to take over their life.
- deleted 18y ago[deleted]
- peter123 18y agohere's the Great Zucchini in action: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XVjB4f_nBvQ&fmt=18 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XVjB4f_nBvQ&fmt=18
- look_lookatme 18y agoThat is amazing.
- mkuhn 18y agoOne of the best written stories I have ever read. Intriguing, funny and sad!
- ananthrk 18y agoPretty moving story wonderfully written!!
- omnivore 18y agoGreat article. He did his homework, targeted his audience and finally sees a payoff. But it took him 10 years of working in a nursery school and babysitting and party hosting at DZ for him to manage to get there. But good on him for recognizing that he had a gift and that he could make a living doing it.
- plinkplonk 18y agohttp://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2009/02/27/AR2009022701549_pf.html http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2009/02... another article by the same writer. A very sad one this time, but great writing.