If I said all my life would that be an understatement?

Growing up

I did so many different things growing up everyone thought I was going be a super successful business person.

You always get hooked with your first lemonade stand. It’s a shame most kids these days no longer try this. Then again a lot of places nowadays fine people for not having the correct permits. When I was younger I would not wait for summer to start. I would get to drag the picknick table down to the end of the drive way and put up a sign “5 cent lemonade” over the years it turned into 10 cents and then 25 cents woo buddy inflation!

Mowed lawns and shoved snow for a while for elderly neighbors

My grandfather was really into wood carving as his hobby in retirement. He loved to teach grandchildren how to cave and shape blocks of wood into things. Shape the wood with a router tool, use a knife to form different edges or marks, sand for hours on end, and then gloss the wood with some glued on tails and fake eyes. If you need a bird house, different animal shapes like mice, cats, dogs and such well I was the kid to craft you one!

I use to craft these lizard things from beads. I had this giant container of beads and string. I still have some of them still. I use to love going to a hobby crafting store and I would spend hours picking out the different color type of beads I wanted to make things out of. Naturally, I had different pricing. depending on the type of binding and bead you wanted one of them to be crafted from. One time even we visited some relatives at their cabin and they ask if they could buy $40 worth. I spent the entire weekend making lizards and aliens. The other kid’s thoughts I was crazy. I thought they were crazy they wanted to go swimming and not make $40!

Help a family friend assemble that advertisement you would hang on peoples door handles. They had to be peeled out of their bindings, and then the correct stickers placed on them regarding contact information and pricing.

I use to run garage sales. People always walk up and ask “hey where are your parents at” or “how much for this and don’t your parents need to be here to price it?” I even had one person ones try and scam me by keep asking me to break different amounts of change. I looked at them and said, “do I need call the police I know this scam that is $5 for my time.” The person drops $3 on the ground and ran for their car lol.

Adult life

Right out of high school I wanted to be a day trader. Traded in Forex. Was never so unhappy in my life. Didn't make a cent either!

Tried being a profesional gamer for a while in StarCraft II and some other games. I was very bad and every season I swore I was getting worse. Just to many people wanted to do that for a living so I gave up.

Tried to make a video game once. I really loved playing video games so why not give that a go. Well turns out all the people that told me they could do all these different things had a clue about anything and those that claimed they did were just copying the code they found on websites. Needless to say, I got off lucky only wasted 2 weeks of my life on that project.

Traded in virtual goods for a while. I played some real money economy video games and I found items that were hard to find or things that people were willing to pay for my time in helping them out with. I was a bit of an item broker for a while. Nothing big like the big boys but people know if they needed something under $100 in the game I could find it for them.

I really enjoy farming, mining, and crafting in a video game so I often was loaded with the games money. Most of the friends were not and just didn't have the time. So I was always happy to give them some in exchange for games or some cash on the side. They were just happy they didn't have to grind for the in game money.

In one video game, people would pay me to detect, interfere, sabotage people trying to commit corporate espionage in a group of gamers in a video game. I started off in one game just wanting to play it for fun. People soon noticed I was hard to scam and I even caught a few people trying to do some low level scamming and stealing of information from the group I was with. Well, one thing leads to another and thankfully someone knows some one that had money and a very large group of players. They had just recently had a massive in game item theft of assets. People were leaking and selling information in the game for in game money. The guy was rather rich in life and could afford to waste said money on his hobby, so paid me for a while to help reduce and take advantage of things. I caught many of spies and they had an alarming rate of successes due to mis-guided spies in the game. I offered my services to a few in that game after word got out about my “ability.” For what ever reason I never got banned in that game for selling services for real money some of the devs know about me didn't have an issue with it even though it broke the games term of service.

Was a consultant for a short time. I would contact a company with a pitch and try and sell them on my idea and why they were missing out on some opportunity to gain more market share or take in a bigger profit. I gave up on that one night after getting an email written from a lawyer threating to sue over IP of their product. A while after they released the idea I was looking to sell them and I just gave up since people never wanted to pay they just wanted to get you to talk as long as they could for free in “helping them out.”

Then just a lot of minor and small failers: youtube, twitch, survey filling, free lance websites, running gaming servers, and far too many other rather boring and short term stuff.

Then you have all that stuff that falls under NDA or is current that I won't talk about.

So maybe

I've done a lot of interesting things trying to be self-employed from the very young age of 4 I think up until now. I use to love the freedom and more importantly telling people “no.” If I didn't want to something I just didn't and no one could force me otherwise. Many of this thing would focus on different passions I had and some of them were deftly not your normal put a label on it this is what you do for a living type of thing. A lot of the times it took a few of these things all at the same time just trying to make it work. More times than not it ever did.

I’ve started to lose the spirit. Been thinking about just focusing on a weekly paycheck, not having to spend so much energy in a week. Let someone deal with medical insurance, retirement plan funding, and stress over the upper management side of things.