I started the year by bidding on 2 consulting projects, and I was rejected by the one that would have made me filthy rich, as was expected, and accepted for the one that will simply help to put food on the table and help me conclude some missions projects I’ve been wanting to finish up this year.

I always try for things that are out of my league.

When I was 14 I applied for a young entrepreneurs loan / grant and was declined (I was later told that in Canada you “need to have money in order to get money.”) lolol what?

When I was 15 I converted a bedroom in my basement into an office. I couldn’t afford a desk so I used 2 empty cardboard boxes as a base, and a sheet of plywood as a desk surface, painted blue. I didn’t have a chair so I sat on the floor. I put free ads in the paper and I had customers come over almost everyday. Most were very impressed at my gumption, shocked by my young age and delighted by my high quality work. Very few people were offended by my obvious poverty (one man laughed at me and walked right out but that was rare) and I got a lot of great new clients through recommendations. (I took on a few small investors to raise capital and things moved along slowly and steadily. By 1997 the investors received their money back plus several times more in profit. It was a happy time for us all.)

When I was 15 I had a competitor call to complain that he was losing customers to me and might consider suing me. Later I ended up getting a job offer from that competitor.

When I was 16 I bid for a tech project and won a partial contract worth $600,000 but I couldn’t get the financing to fill the order and had to give up the contract. I tried though. I applied for a business loan at the bank, and they approved it almost on the spot because of the contract but then found out I was 16 years old, and retracted the offer. The banker was shocked, she thought I was in my 20’s based on the way I spoke, plus I was dressed in the nicest gray wool suit which was I got used. I knew they couldn’t give a loan of any size to someone under 18, I knew this going in, but it was worth trying.

When I was 17 I had several people bidding for equity in one of my start-up projects. The highest bid was $300,000 plus full time employment, but to be fair this was during the dot com boom, everyone was getting these kinds of offers. The very day I turned 18 years old, banks had extended me $10,000 in credit and by the time I was 20 I had a $250,000 line of credit. I didn’t apply for it, they simply gave it to me.

I would later receive a job offer with one of the major investment banks.

By age 21 I was invited to participate in a massive class action lawsuit against one of the major investment banks that made us all lose a lot of money. Talk about adventure!

Rewind further, when I was in grade school, my grandma would force me to go to school even on holidays. Even on a snow day. I would explain to her that the doors would be locked and nobody would be there, but she would make me prepare for school, and walk there anyway just to be sure. Each time I would walk all the way to school and the doors would be locked and I would walk back home. It was frustrating, but learning how to deal with frustration so young and it really helps me out today. These days entrepreneurs quit after a few hard days.

As a child I was gunning for projects and goals that most adults won’t go for. I remember when I was 10 years old and living in the crackhead townhouses at Brandongate Drive, a man on Rockhill Road was selling an offset printing machine and I bid $250 of my own newspaper money to buy it, thinking I could start my own printing business in my garage. He wanted $5,000. I tried to cut him an equity deal. Yes, at age 10 I tried to give him a percentage of my company. He didn’t go for it. But that’s not the best part – I didn’t know which house was his, only that he lived on Rockhill.

When I heard that other people were going there to look at the machine I took my step dads car keys, turned on his car, (as I remember it a 70’s or 80’s vw rabbit) and backed it out of the driveway. I was going to drive over there. 10 years old. The local gangsters who were doing their business (selling stolen goods) saw me and were like “wow” and I came to my senses that this was a bad idea and put the car back. I ran over to Rockhill Road and knocked on every single door on the street one by one till I found him, he lived like halfway in. In a way I wish I still had that kind of gumption today.

By 2001 I had overseen over $4,000,000 USD of quality equity buy in companies like Amazon before the dot com bubble burst on us all.

Some projects have failed miserably, others have succeeded very well, others were fairly normal.

Anyway, to the next topic: I’ve just discovered Christian rap! If you like clean rap music then check out people like Dr. Cheddar, Prime Minister, Cross Movement and FTF. But please don’t steal the music from the web, just go to a cd store and buy a copy! There’s a cd store in every mall.