The First Time I Made Ten Thousand Dollars

If your mission is to quit there is no better time than right now.

The only thing worthwhile in life is what we stick with. What we don’t quit on. What we don’t give up.

We’ve done a hundred different things that we had big plans for. But then we quit. 2 days later, a week later, a year later doesn’t matter. We gave up and now we’ll never know what may have been. If you had put in the time and sweat equity in that one business you may have become rich by now. Doesn’t matter what the biz was, your determination and, more importantly, your TIME is what matters.

You must show up, you must put in the time. Like Nike says Just Do It. Especially on those days when it isn’t going so well for you. When you feel like you’ve failed. It’s often been said that you reach success right after the moment you would have quit, when you were at your lowest. Like everything they say it has much truth to it.

It was my business. I had no job. I had no other income. It was do or die. Sink or swim. I was getting low on funds, real low. Mortgage time was coming. I had enough to make probably one more payment. I was riding around town with my best girl. I had been offered a job with a rival, a competitor, but I turned it down cold. You will not get your hands on my money. I lamented to my girl how tight the money situation was. Innocently, she suggested maybe I should have taken the job with the competitor. I snapped. “This is my job. There is nothing else, there will be nothing else. Never. I will get no job. I will do this and it will work or I will become homeless. Do you understand me?“

After having her head bitten off she said “OK. I trust you. I know you will make it work. I’m really proud of you for everything you have done so far“. And we drove home in silence. I could have given up right then and there. I could have taken the other job. I could have taken a part-time job and traded my time for money. If I had done that I would still be a wage slave to this very day. One of the best decisions I ever made was to bite her head off when she showed a hint of doubt at my choices. Before that day and after that day she was 100% behind me which matters more than you could ever know unless you have had someone like that in your corner.

One week after the incident I received a phone call from someone who wanted to sell something, something that I was in the market of buying. I didn’t want to go and see him. He was clearly very poor and lived in a very bad neighborhood. He is probably trying to rob me. Maybe it’s the police trying to give me a ticket for putting out my signs on the street corners. After all the excuses I decided to go. I didn’t want to, but I did. I get to his residence and we make a very good deal for me to purchase his product.

I go home and put the product on my website, I am going to resell it for a profit. I’m hungry, I make lunch. Not 10 minutes after putting the product on my website I get a phone call from someone interested in buying the product. He is a young kid. I doubt he has any money. I tell him, kid, look at the website and look at the video I produced. I’m trying to get this time waster off the phone so I can eat my lunch. He says OK. 10 minutes later he calls me back and says “I want to buy it. I’ll give you this much $$$… (exactly $10,000 more than I am paying for it)”. So I go and meet the kid. He really is ready to buy. He has the money, he has the desire. Off we go to find an escrow company so we can draw up some contracts and put some money on the line.

30 days after that very day I had no more money problems. It was the hardest deal I ever had. I had to get not one but FIVE ghetto hoodlums to sign off on the deal. Half of them were currently wanted by police and had no proper ID. They must have notarized signatures so I must get them proper ID. When they went to the ID office they made a runner after the lady looked up their names and info. The agent working on the deal was extremely uncooperative and unwavering on her demands. Every single day for 30 days was harder and more nerve wracking than the day before. Every day I could have quit. It would have been easy to excuse. But quitting didn’t even cross my mind one single time. I’ll take this deal to the edge of the fucking Earth before I quit.

I could have quit at least 5 times:

• In the truck, I could have listened to the girl and said OK, I’ll try something else. Funds were low, it would have been easy to get a job to “see me through the rough times”.
• I could have quit when I received the first fishy phone call and thought something was up. I could have reasoned and said “it’s probably not worth it”.
• I could have quit when I received the call from the minority kid who was interested in buying, whom I thought was just a time-waster.
• I could have quit when the bombshell dropped that 5 hoodlums owned equally the product and half were wanted by police. This was an extremely hard problem to fix and required constant attention. To anyone who was not determined, this problem was indeed impossible to fix.
• I could have quit when the un-cooperative and nasty agent made me jump through hoop after hoop.

Sure. Quitting would have been an option for other people. But my mind was set. There was no fucking way my plan wasn’t going to work. It was going to happen and that’s all there was to it. Not more than 37 days after the conversation in the vehicle I never again had serious money problems. Seeing that check with my name on it and all those numbers was at that point the greatest of my life. And it was a piddly amount of money looking back, but it was a whole lot more than I had ever had before. And it was there because I stuck with it. I didn’t quit. I had it firmly in my mind that I will do this deal and that’s all there is to it.

Picture by Victor Pride: Hong Kong 2011