Archive for September, 2007
My first sale
Well that didn’t take long. The book sold this morning. Here’s the message from Amazon.com:
Your Amazon Marketplace sale is official! We’ve deposited your earnings from the sale of this item into your Amazon Payments account.
Please ship this product using Standard shipping.
Item: One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest [Paperback] by Kesey, Ken
Condition: Used - Very Good
Condition Note: Pages in excellent condition, with no dog ears. Very minor wear on cover corners.
Listing ID: 0912J164182
SKU:
Quantity: 1
Purchased on: 09/13/2007
Buyer’s price: $1.99
Amazon commission: ($2.64)
Shipping credit: $3.99
Your earnings: $3.34
The buyer lives in San Dimas, CA. Media mail to his address will cost $2.13, leaving me with $1.21. I’ve tripled my stake!
My first purchase
On the way back from lunch today I passed a garage sale with a box of paperbacks selling for 50¢ each. I spotted a nice copy of Ken Kesey’s classic One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, and talked the proprietor into giving it to me for my 40¢ stake.
 40¢ goes a long way at a garage sale |
I have listed the book on Amazon for $1.99, undercutting the next lowest price of $2.72 by a goodly margin. If the book sells, after Amazon takes its (quite large) cut, I will receive $3.34, including my shipping allowance. Cross-country media mail from the U.S. Postal Service costs $2.24, so when all is said and done I should clear $1.10, almost tripling my investment.
If you haven’t read this book yet, you should, and if you’re quick, you can click my link and get your hands on a cheap copy. If a reader of this site buys my book, I will sign it on request. Who knows, it may end up being a piece of Internet history. (Update: Too late, it sold.)
I highly recommend the film version as well, by the way. It’s Jack Nicholson’s best role ever, in my opinion.
The Game Commences
 Eugene and his magic change jar. |
I brought my shiny new dime home and set it on my desk. How to double a single dime? You can’t really buy much of anything for a dime anymore. Double Your Way to a Million suggests a solution for dealing with really tiny amounts of seed money like this: Go up to someone and say, “Hey, I’m trying an experiment. If I give you a dime, will you give me two dimes?” If they ask why, just insist that it’s an experiment, and you’re not allowed to say why.
Now this may seem a bit lame, but I couldn’t think of any other way to double a single dime. So, when my roommate Eugene got home, I asked him, feeling extremely silly. He gave me an odd look, but of course he pulled out his change jar and gave me a dime. “Great,” I said, “Now, if I give you these two dimes, will you give me four dimes?”
 Four dimes, and my dog Daisy. She’s such a princess. |
Eugene’s look became more suspicious, but he gave me two more dimes from the jar. “Ok, so now…” I began.
“I’m putting my change jar away, now.” Eugene said.
So I’ve learned that Eugene’s patience runs out after about 30¢. More importantly, I’ve completed the first two steps of the game! Only 22 more doubles to go…
Post Scriptum: While I was trying to take a closeup photograph my new four-dime stake, my dog kept nudging my hand and messing up the shot. She seemed content when I leaned back, however, so I shot the photo with her in it. I guess she just wanted to be in the picture. We all know who’s the real boss around here, now don’t we?
The Secret to Building Real Wealth
My brother is what some might call a ne’er do well. He’s never had much luck holding down a job. He’s extremely intelligent, creative, and charismatic, which of course means he’s utterly unsuited for the typical stifling corporate workplace. To make matters worse, he’s a high-school dropout.
Building Real Wealth
After a series of unsuccessful jobs, he was discouraged, and had a chat with our mother, who told him what I’ve been telling him for years: he needed to start a business and be his own boss. It’s the only true path to building real wealth - there really are no exceptions when you look closely enough. If you get rich in stocks, it’s because you own the businesses you invest in. Dot-Com millionaires don’t get rich off of their salaries, but off of their stock options, which again represent ownership of a business. Even CEO salaries are peanuts compared to what they make off of stock ownership. The list goes on and on.
My brother understood the idea intuitively. The trouble was he had no earthly idea how to go about starting a business of his own.
Build Your Own Wealth by Helping Others
Faced with this quandary, my brother asked my mother what to do. Her response was the most important six words any aspiring entrepreneur can hear. This simple statement holds the secret to unlimited wealth: Find a need and fill it. Repeat this statement to yourself. Think on it. Meditate on it. It’s the secret behind every successful business ever made. If you can manage to follow this extremely simple idea, then your success will be all but assured.
Of course the idea may be simple, but that doesn’t mean it’s easy. How do you find an unfilled need? Well let’s look at what my brother did: He started visiting successful businesses in the small Southern where he lives. He simply walked up to the front desks asked to speak with the owners of the businesses. More often than not, he was let right in. He then chatted with the owners about their businesses and asked if there was a service which would help them out, which they wished were available locally. (As I mentioned, he’s quite charismatic.)
Build Real Wealth With A Few Mops and Some Elbow Grease
As it turned out, this small Southern town was in a bit of an expansive boom, and lots of medium to large office buildings were cropping up downtown, yet many of the standard services for office buildings you see in bigger cities just weren’t available in town. One was after-hours industrial cleaning.
So my brother bought some gear, and started an industrial cleaning business. The very same business owners he chatted with originally became his first customers, and his business quickly expanded by word of mouth. He now has several employees and more business than he can handle. More importantly, there’s no jerk in a stuffed suit telling him what to do. He’s well on his way to achieving financial success, and he’s done it all his own way.
You can Build Your Own Wealth, Too
Trust me, if my brother the high school dropout can make such great strides toward building financial wealth , anyone can. Just follow mom’s advice.
Inspiration and Resources for Building Financial Wealth
Whether you’re playing the game and looking for some inspiration or some help, or are brewing your own wacky idea, here is a list of resources and success stories to help you along the way.
Wacky Ideas
Every one of these ideas seemed crazy at first. Laughable, even. Who’s laughing, now?
- One Red Paperclip — A guy who traded a red paperclip for a house.
- The Million-Dollar Homepage — A kid who made a million dollars by selling space on his home page one pixel at a time.
- Plenty of Fish — A free dating site run by two people, the founder and his girlfriend, out of the founder’s apartment. They’re making over $1 million a year in Google Adsense revenue.
- How to Double Your Way to a Million — Stuart Goldsmith’s classic that inspired this site. Mr. Goldsmith has made millions over the years using the exact ideas he writes about.
Free Resources
With so many free tools available now, it’s easier than ever to make something out of nothing.
- The Gimp — A powerful free graphics editing tool. Why pay hundreds for Photoshop when the Gimp has almost all of the same functionality, and is free? All of the graphics you see on this site were created with it.
- Emacs — The best text editor in the world. This entire site was written in it. (No vi fanaticism, please.)
- Wordpress — A powerful, flexible, and easy-to-use blog publishing platform. This site is published using it.
- ReCaptcha — Having to enter distorted words to verify that you’re human is mildly annoying, but a necessary evil to stop the scourge of comment spam. ReCaptcha is a free service that actually makes use of the effort you make to decipher the words, because it uses real scans from old books that are being digitized. Thus, I ch0se ReCaptcha to provide the human verification for this site. Stop spam, and help preserve old books at the same time. What could be better?
Learn About Money
- The Motley Fool — A comprehensive financial education may be found on this site, all written with great humor and irreverence.
- Warren Buffett’s Annual Letters to Berkshire Hathaway Shareholders — Read every one of these letters from beginning to end, and you will learn more about business, the economy, the markets, and finance than in any MBA program in the world.