So my goal my entire life had always been to get to a point where I didn’t have to work in life. Or at least the work that I did I didn’t actually notice it as being work. I finally got to that point, I always was one to disregard woman, and focus on acquiring currency. Ever since I was 14, I would go around and walk dogs in my neighborhood. I was always a lazy kid though, so instead of walking them I put on roller blades and had them take me around the block.
That went well for a while, pretty much did that for a year till I got a job at dunkin donuts. Worked there for a while when I was 15 and then when I turned 16 my mom moved up to Connecticut. I came along for the ride, within the first few weeks I realized I was miserable here, so I moved back to Florida… (Yeah I know moved out at 16 haha).
Florida was a alright place to grow up, I actually pretty much loath the state now. I feel that happens to most people who grow up in a place and end up going outside of it and travel I guess or something. Although there are some places that I feel always feel like home. Maybe it’s the friends or family that a place feel like home. Who knows what the actual reasons for it are, I just know that when I moved out Florida felt like home so I went back.
When I was in Florida I had a bit of money and my dad said he would support me for a bit and so did my mom. So here comes a 16 year old who has always been too nerdy (Hell at one point I was ranked top 10 in Magic the Gathering in my state, and had even played in nationals) to talk to girls who suddenly falls into poker.
Now I obsesse on things… A lot. Before I learned poker it was Magic the Gathering (MTG) and business. I guess at all points I have two obsessions going, ones always business, so when I was obsessing in business I started to read every book I could get my hands on that talked about business. Come time to play poker, I start reading all the books at the time on it… I had a friend who showed me a home game that played omaha/8 10-20 limit.
Thankfully I played that game back in the day, it was a expensive lessons but helped me get my bankroll going and turned out to be one of my favorite poker games.
This lead me to start playing poker with the little money I had saved up from walking dogs, husseling people in MTG, and Dunkin Donuts. Well I still randomly stopped by to visit my old friends at the comic shops who still played magic and at one point I had one of the owners sell me some gumball machines. He even let me put one in his comic shop, I had no more money at the time to actually buy gumballs so I used the extremely old ones he had in it…
Needless to say in a week it had made $20, I bought it for $100. That was a 20% ROI in a week! Life was en route to be good!
Then came the most famous line that was ever told by my economics teacher when he use to teach a “life” lesson about acquiring currency. ”How smart ya gotta be?”
Used that $20 to buy some more gumballs, fresh ones… and then used some of my poker winnings that week ($200) to buy two more machines…. Went to two other comic shops and asked if I could put them in their shops. This was at the time that Pokemon was hitting shelves so little kids always running around comic shops. I started negotiating prices of revenue that the owners would get for letting me “rent” their floor space.
This led me to keep playing poker and managing my machines, all while still going to school. It wasn’t too much work though, as I never hated going to a comic shop and checking out the new comics, playing some games of either poker or mtg (it’s were all the cool kids hung out 
). So my days after school were always fun and gumball machines, especially mine held 1,000 gumballs so there was really no need to have to refil them often.
Now one might think that this would lead to other logical choices, but it took a while for me to realize that I could also buy Soda and Snack machines and put them in places… So then I bought some of those and put them in the comic shops that I had gumbal machines. The owners loved it, had to do no work (this was before coke started just offering to put up machines in those places and give them a cut) and got handed checks from me once a week.
More to come later.
