My Origin Story, The Journey I Embarked On
Just 6 years ago, I was a 10-year-old kid sitting at my parent’s computer trying to make money online.
You see, I wanted to buy myself a copy of Minecraft but I had no money, no allowance, and I didn’t want to do what every other kid did which was setting up my own lemonade stand and actually talking to people.
So I turned online…
The first thing I did was open up my parent’s computer and search up, “How to make money online.”
I hit upon a bunch of blog posts telling me about various things.
“Stay-at-home mom makes $6,000 a week with this one easy trick!”
“How to make $250,000 a month with no risk!”
Those were various headlines that popped up at the time and it brought me into the world of binary options, matched betting, and survey taking.
Luckily for me, I hadn’t learned about being resourceful yet and didn’t pay the few thousand dollars to learn how to do binary options. And since matched betting was only in the U.K., I gave up pretty quick on that too.
Now I was left with survey taking. The one free easy thing that I could do as a 10-year-old.
But with the attention span of a goldfish, I would go through and not qualify for 2–3 surveys and then give up. Plus, my parents eventually bought me a copy of Minecraft for my birthday anyway, so I forgot all about making money online.
Fast forward about 2–3 years and now my wants are becoming way too expensive for my parents.
Instead of a $20 copy of Minecraft, I wanted a $3,000 custom-built gaming computer. I wanted Adobe software that would cost me $10,000 per year. I wanted a new $1,000 phone. I wanted to train at a badminton club that would cost me $2,000 per month. I wanted $200 badminton rackets.
And I wanted them all at the same time. I was stubborn and didn’t want to split it up into 5 different birthday gifts.
I wanted it all in the moment and I got it.
I had this new custom-built computer that had glowing red lights radiating onto my face whenever I work. I had this giant 27-inch monitor coupled with a high-end gaming mouse and keyboard with all the light-up functionality and features.
To the left of me, I had a shiny black Samsung S8 sparkling in the sunlight that peered into my room and to my right, a VR headset and a $200 gaming headset rested on my desk. Behind me was $1000 worth of badminton equipment.
I got everything I wanted. But what did it cost?
During this time, my dad became unemployed. Our household was dependant on the sole income of my mom.
As the reality of the new financial crisis hit us, our household took a turn downwards. My dad began gambling at casinos and my mom found out.
The next few months were absolute hell.
My parents were screaming at each other almost on a daily basis. No one could get them to stop. Sometimes I would be able to get them to pause momentarily by shouting at them from the top of the stairs only to find them continuing once I stopped.
My mom wrote out 3 different divorce settlements and almost submitted each one of them. And my grandparents who initially were visiting for fun eventually were brought into the arguments and a slew of insults were thrown at each other.
My grandparents told my mom that she wasn’t fit to be a mom in which my mom told them that she wishes that my grandparents would just die soon. Upon hearing that, my dad locked my mom’s hands together forcibly and called her a rotting pig.
I buried myself in games. League of Legends was the game I played every day. I would play a few hours and then lose, and then bury myself in my covers and watch anime hoping that maybe I could live in a different world.
Later in the year when everybody became more sensible and actually decided to figure out some solutions, I overheard that the reason my dad gambled in the first place was to try and get some quick money to fund my $3,000 gaming computer.
Then I found out he lost $50,000 instead and that my computer was funded by my grandparents’ retirement money.
Everything in my body just tensed up. I was the problem all along.
Eventually, the solution by my parents was for my dad to get some work by starting his own contracting business and to use their last line of credit to by houses and rent them out.
The contracting business, unfortunately, didn’t turn out too well and all focus was on buying and renting houses.
It was profitable… But not enough. Usually, the profit came down to an extra hundred dollars a month or so because of the large mortgages that my parents had to pay.
And my parents still had to manage lots of things such as fixing toilets and working with tenants while my mom was still working a full-time job.
But I still wanted things. I still wanted to do my badminton training and buy all of these rackets. I still wanted the new tech.
However, now every time I ask my parents for something, I would have a pit in my stomach. I would suddenly feel sick and wanted to bury myself in a hole.
My self-esteem crashed.
I went to school afraid of showing others that I really wasn’t a rich kid with all the expensive new gadgets so I stopped talking to others. And in doing so, I lost all my friends.
And as a kid without friends, I didn’t want to go to school. Every day my only thought was to get out of class. I stopped focusing on the learning and my marks crashed too.
My parents confronted me telling me that I need to up my marks so I could get into a good post-secondary. That the houses they bought were not for them, but for me.
A huge feeling of guilt overwhelmed me. My parents did everything for me and I couldn’t do anything for them.
And the truth was that I couldn’t really get into a desirable university or program that they wanted me to get into anymore.
My marks had already dropped too much and with only a few months left in my final year, even acing every single assignment and test for my last classes wouldn’t be enough to bring me back up.
I realized that I had fallen too deep into my hole.
That’s when I realized that I had to do something about my own life.
I had let my parents do everything for too long. I couldn’t just rely on them for the rest of my life.
And I also realized the current path where I just watch and despair is not my path either.
I needed to change my world and I needed to change my parents’ world too.
Instead of dilly-daddling in random surveys and blogs, I finally found something that I thought could work and took action.
First, it was e-commerce and dropshipping. I saw these YouTube videos talking about how so-and-so makes $267,000 per month selling these random products online.
I decided to jump in on that and I bought a lite version of a course since I couldn’t pay for the $997 version.
I totally bombed it!
I didn’t have enough money to keep it going. It just wasn’t profitable.
I needed a way to make money without having any money. That’s when I found blogging.
Unfortunately, it still costs me money to learn and use the platform I blog on, however, the expenses were much lower than my e-commerce stores.
But after a year of writing stuff about badminton, there was no real monetary gain. My blog still earns $0.10 a day which is basically the same as taking a few surveys every day.
So I gave up.
Only to some extent, though. My blog wasn’t generating a ton of money after a year, but I didn’t want to move away from it.
I had paid for all of these domains, hosting, and wrote a hundred articles; it’s impossible for me to stop here.
After reading a bunch of success stories and signing up for a few challenges and masterclasses, I learned that I have to keep going.
And that’s where I am right now. A 16-year-old who is trying to build an online business to save his world.
Join me on this journey as I document my everyday learning experiences, the goods and the bads, and my progress going forward.
