The sweetest voice I ever heard in my life was telebank reading me my saldo. It was so pleasant to my ear that I would call up again and again, type in my bank-account number, pin-code and listen to the computer-voice repeating over and over again that my account-balance was over 1 million. I was 19 years old and this is my story.
I have never been afraid of work
I grew up as the first-born and my dad ran a publishing-house so my mum and dad would typically spend a lot of time reading manuscripts and reviewing them for whether or not they would invest in producing them into real books with an ISBN number and release it on the market, kind of what you do right now - reading my article and debating wether or not to give it and upvote and a re-steem.
Being the family-business it was, and of course being the kids we where looking for ways to make money to have the freedom to buy the candy we wanted, our dad taught us the value of the penny by having us sit around the dinner-table licking stamps and putting them on envelopes containing the latest offers from the company to be sent to 10,000 addresses every three months.
Once the books came delivered from the print-shops in Denmark, my dad needed someone to carry them inside the house before it started raining, as you can imagine that would damage the quality of some of the books and naturally I would do the job and make a fair little amount of extra money.
Of course, there was not work for any of us any time we wanted, but my dad was clever finding small ways we could contribute, as for example when he bought 50K bookmarks and would pay me $1.5 an hour to open the packages with a knife, carry the books to my table and stick a bookmark into every single book and make them ready for the customers.
Working for my dad was trivial, but I realized quickly that there was much more money shuffling snow in the winter and mow lawns in the summer so before I was even ten years old I had already established all thinkable services I could provide voluntarily for the society in exchange for money and the freedom that comes with it.
From Hard Work to Smart Work
The year was 1994, Norway was hosting the Olympics. I was 12 years old and started my first little production-business manufacturing calendars on a dot matrix printer that my dad gave me for free as he had moved on to a much better laser-printer. I was thrilled to have a printer, and figured I could make a lot of cool stuff with it so I printed a calendar, removed the sides, separated the pages and stitched it together, not bad - So I printed another one and did the same with it.
The next day I had about twenty calendars, and I went door to door selling them to people not too far away from where I lived, and by the end of my tour - I was sold out, all cash and very happy.
Jealousy, spite and slander - you are not supposed to make money - society says
It did not take long until My friend Håvard, who had a black and white inkjet printer, and better quality calendars approached me with a 50/50 deal where he took over production and I would go door to door and sell them. Of course time was important here, January was about to turn into February so I needed to produce a real batch. It did not take long until the Inkjet printer became too slow so I went to my dad and asked him to print them for me, in which he did not but instead gave me a price for the job that was too darn high - I instead got my mum to drive me to the big print-shop in the city which had a really nice price for me but they required a minimum of 10,000 calendars which was way too much for me as a twelve year old kid so I gave up. Besides, a lot of parents in my school did not like that I was going door to door selling these calendars because I worked for myself and not for a cause like "save the children" or "unicef".
The next year the whole family moved to a bigger house and my dad moved his business to a much larger and far more modern building where he employed everyone who was unemployed in the small town we had moved into and had already all the help he needed there was pretty much no work for me to do, so I had to invent my own money-ways.
The First Opportunity came when Internic started selling .com domain-names for $70 a piece, but to pay for it I had to have a VISA-card, and as a now 14 year old teenager I had none. So I asked my dad if I could borrow his card and I would pay him back from my account - he said no. then I went to my mother and asked if I could borrow her card, she said no as well. I could not believe how hard it was stranded in Norway trying to buy a domain-name in the USA. So I had to give that idea up, congratulations to whoever registered bigbrother.com - you should send a big case of champagne to my parents for that one. They helped YOU more then you know. Just saying. So I missed the .com bubble, I did - but I had not given up making money in this space - oh no!
Fall down to Rise again!
That summer a computer-magazine owner had started a game-store not too far from me, and I used to hang there as often as I could, and the owner was a great deal-maker, a business man. Once he got two big pallets with white-labeled games from the really old era of pc-games re-branded and put on CD-ROM, and I think he was a bit frustrated over how much of them he had taken in, so he said for fun that if I wanted to buy some cases to resell, he would only charge me 25 a piece, and since I had domestic money - I shook his hand on that and arranged for the money to be transferred. My dad of course heard about the deal, and immediately offered me a partnership so we could buy a much larger quantity which we did and during the summer I sold every single one of them to video-stores and game-shops all across the country and made my money back plus whatever was left after my dad had charged me for all the imaginary costs he claimed to have had to deal with in gasoline prices and whatnot - pure bullshit of course, and that was around the time I realized that when you make money - your family, your best friends - they all change. I can literally guarantee you right now that when you become rich - people will try and take advantage of you the best they can, they become demon-possessed like Gollum - looking for that precious gold-ring he killed his brother to obtain.
For the love of money is the root to all evil
I second that opinion - I have in my life seen how money changes people - how money changed me - and how my money changed everyone around me - and when I was 25 I did not like what I was seeing, so I gave it all away to be poor again, obviously I had a lesson to learn and I will tell you all about it in a later chapter, so let us go back in time again to when I am about 15, still living with my parents and how I learned step by step the ways to make money and how I learned to make lots more.