Here’s three quick stories about a boy:
AGE 9: Boy and his brother shine shoes to make money. They’re supposed to bring $2 back home to help feed the rest of the family.
Brother loses the $2 on the way home. Mother is about to start sobbing.
Boy thinks and has an idea. He and his brother take their last nickel and go and buy a flower at a flower shop. They sell it on the street for a dime. They go back to the flower shop and buy two more flowers. They sell those.
Soon they’re back home with $2. Mother joyous.
AGE 14: Boy’s family moves to New York City. They can’t pay rent in their slum apartment.
It’s Christmas. The boy has a messenger job. He thinks again for a moment. He then writes out a neat and rhyming little message and puts it on his hat. The message invites passersby to drop a quarter in the hat in the spirit of Christmas.
Boy comes home at the end of the day and tells his mother to shake him. She does. Quarters start falling out everywhere, from his pockets, his hair, behinds his ears. Rent paid.
AGE 16: Boy needs a job. He sees a sign on the street advertising a job, and a line of people waiting at the sign.
Boy walks up to the front of the line, picks up the sign. He kindly and professionally informs the waiting applicants that the job has been filled, and thanks them for coming.
Later, when the doors to the building open, he walks in, and is immediately hired, as the only applicant.
The point of all these stories is to show you how easy it is to make money.
“Yeah but it’s not always like that,” you might say. “Those are cherry-picked stories.”
Maybe so. The fact is, the boy in the stories above did not start a flower-reselling empire. Perhaps it was a lucky one-time thing.
Or perhaps, outside of that moment of need, which broke down his usual barriers and spurred him to innovation and action, he always had some mental block to keep him back.
It’s something I’ve often thought about, and not just in connection to making money.
Anyways, there’s a good chance you’ve heard of the boy in the three stories above. He’s still famous today, even though, as you can guess by the dollar amounts, these stories happened a long time ago.
If you know who he is, well, good for you.
And if you don’t know, but would like to know, you can find out by joining my Insights & More Book Club. Because these three stories came from the second book-club book, which I started reading two nights ago.
The Insights & More Book Club is only open to people who are signed up to my email newsletter. So in case you’d like to join, either now or in the future, sign up to my newsletter here.