Business Sense My Ass
Today on the Opinionado learning channel, let us tackle some more nonsense. Today’s article is fueled by yet another bullshit how-to article. This time it’s called “How To Make A Million Before You Turn 20“.
I advise you to read the article and when you feel your critical thinking kicking in, please do comeback and finish reading my interpretation. … Welcome back. So what was the one thing that all these rich kids had in common? If you answered “they are all whiz kids”, “they all had amazing business sense” or “those kids had some serious drive” then you my friend just failed at critical thinking. The common factor between all these kids was luck.
This Fraser Doherty character made it big by making jam. The brilliance of his scheme is overwhelming. I mean what do you do when everybody wants some of your jam? Open a factory and start making more? I would have never thought of that! Give me a break. This kid (age 14) makes jam from his grandmother’s recipe to take to church, word spreads that his family makes great jam and next thing you know he’s being written about in a news article boasting about his entrepreneurial skills. I could understand if the kid had superb jam-making skills and came up with a new way to make jam. But instead he gets recognition for something totally out of his control. Not like he went around promoting his jam, other people did that for him. Nowhere in the article does it say anything about his outstanding culinary skills. I would understand if the kid was a boy chef, but no apparently that isn’t important enough to mention either. The focus of the story about him is on the fact that A LOT of people liked jam. Remove him from the picture and replace him with his grandmother. The jam remains the same. He just got lucky with these jam-loving church goers. Not to mention he drops out of school at the age of 16 to purse his jam. I guess he figured he’d learned everything he needed to make great jam.
Next kid, Cameron Johnson, made a name for himself by selling Ty Beanie Babies on eBay for crazy amounts of money. Once again, a pretty obvious case of mis-attributed success. He got rich not because he sold Ty Beanie Babies, but because crazy idiots bought Ty Beanie Babies for way too much. The denominator being luck. If he had sold the 30 Ty Beanie Babies he got from his sister and made 30 cents would he have been in this article? It wasn’t his marketing genius, or his eBay auction-creation abilities, or his prowess. Just crazy people seeking overpriced toys. Then later with the money from his Beanie Babies he started an email forwarding service (how one goes from selling Beanie Babies to an email service is beyond me). Made a bunch of money there from advertisement. Once again, people doing the work for him. From all this ad success he started another company with some other fruits and effectively ruined the internet as we know it. Apparently his scrolling advertisement idea took off. Now he’s living off his made fortunes writing books about his success and giving speeched (he’s 23). No mention of him going to school or accomplishing anything else. Just selling beanie babies and filling people’s screens with spam. Man what an entrepreneur!
The next bunch (Catherine Cook and brother Dave) convinced their brother to give them $250,000 to start the MyYearbook.com site. I’m not even going to bother pointing out how much luck is involved with having a money sack of $250,000 lying around.
Basically the article is done and I’m still left wondering how I’m supposed to make a million bucks. Of course the article makes no mention of how incredibly lucky these kids are and how important luck (though undefined) is.
Just to be clear. I am not trying to take away from their success. I’m just trying to shed some light on the unmentioned reality.
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