Confession of a Habitual Entrepreneur: I Don't Love Money and Failing is Actually Very Painful. (Part 1)

I started a micro-economy with my younger sister, starting sometime around when I was 9 and she was 5. She is very good at organizing, always had her chores done and was generally a neat child. I am textbook ADHD, and the ability to clean still eludes me today. I would sit in my room all day trying to pull everything out and replace it in a way that was acceptable. So, I invented a list that had things like "Clean under the bed- 15 cents" or "Make the bed- 10 cents" that my sister could choose her work from. Now, of course, I wouldn't have any money to pay her so I created a 'list of services' she could choose to spend the money I owed her. My list was always random, and it changed as I became a teen. Things like "build a game" (we all were creative kids and would build board games together, but I had learned origami and could make the little balloons, which I would use to make games where you springboarded the ballons into hoops or whatever), "A maze" (I was very into making mazes and would make one in a any shape she liked), "Do your makeup", "A magazine"(again, handmade using pictures I found and with mini articles for her and friends) and the one that makes me laugh the most "Cook Chicken-ala- King" (I could only cook one thing but it was delicious, and turned out to be a popular choice lol). At the time, I was simply solving a problem: I always got in trouble for having a messy room and couldn't figure out how to change myself to be a better room cleaner. I didn't realize until many many years later how ingenious it was to create labor specializations that benefited everyone.

Sitting now, looking back, it's obvious I've been an entrepreneur my whole life. My childhood best friend Leah and I were always organizing the neighborhood gang to create mini-fairs, babysitting clubs, recycling cans for candy money and even stringing blueberries to sell to neighbors. I had an extremely laborious mixtape business in middle school with my friend Shawn. Rewinding tapes to find songs and recording them was a lot more work than $5-minus-materials was worth (plus we were basically pirating, thank god they didn't come after 12 year olds back then haha). I found the Wu-Tang in highschool and saw them as examples in how to creatively hustle your way up out of poverty.

Side note: Poverty is a relative and stigmatizing term. My family was never hungry or homeless, so I use the word delicately. I will just say that I was aware of the constant stress over money in my house, and throughout my extended family, all of whom were/are still the most generous and fun people I've ever met. My desire to make money came from wanting to be able to give them peace of mind, and let the happiness they seem to conjure like magic, despite tough times, be their day-to-day

I never used the word 'entrepreneur' to describe myself until very recently, because to me that word implied that you had become financially successful. I see now that it means a problem solver and risk taker- someone whose desire to see things manifest overrides their concerns for outward appearance or stability. My ideas and projects were varied, but often overlapped. Some example projects I attempted, worked towards or succeeded in are: clothing company using graffiti artists (read about it here ), healthy fast food restaurants, a tv show that promoted 'hot spots' from West Palm Beach to Miami, water recycling for showers, biodiesel station, using music and performance as tools for social change, designing chemistry curriculums to get students learning by tackling real world problems, setting up non-profits to benefit from supporters retail purchases, an eliquid business with a vocal focus on the health and politics surrounding smoking/nicotine, and, most recently, a video game. I'm sure there are others. People might think it's unlikely I'd forget something I did if it was important, but I have a very large capacity for seeing the importance of things, with a smaller capacity (or desire) to store old mental paperwork. I keep space for ideas and strange theories that are hard to come across, so a lot of 'regular' stuff doesn't make the cut. The point is that, as I look back, it became obvious that the word "lazy", which I often used to describe my work ethic because I didn't have a steady job, needed to be replaced. I've had financial success and failures, I've had times of being admired and plenty of being chided, but we are what we are in some senses, no matter the costs. And 'what we are' isn't always clear, even to us.

I recently saw an Instagram account which had "Aspiring Entrepreneur" as his description, and I couldn't shake two thoughts 1. You can't aspire to it any more than you aspire to a mental illness. I'm not saying you can't learn to do entrepreneurial things, just as you can learn to do artistic things, but you either are doing them or you aren't. 2. I'm pretty sure his aspirations were for money and being highly regarded, not for a life of failures and long stretches of financial lack coupled with negative feedback from the world around you about how unrealistic (or worse) you are being. The part of popular success stories where the protagonist is in dire straits definitely makes for great dramatic contrast. Unfortunately, the "years of struggling" so pointantly accentuated in movies or books (whose endings are assuredly happy) will still be lived one excruciating minute at a time. What drives us is varied, but a need for wealth or an imperviousness to pain is not as common as you might think.

*First photo is widely used, could not find original source