Twenty Failed Schemes

Between twelve and sixteen I ran about twenty different schemes and every single one of them lost. CPA offers. Google Sniper. Exact-match domains I was certain would print money. Pop-unders, which I am not proud of.

None of them worked. Not one got close enough to working that I could tell myself it almost had. I would find a method in a forum at eleven at night, believe it completely, spend two weeks on it, and watch the number sit at zero. Then I would find the next one and believe that one just as hard.

The one I still think about is the email software. It cost $1,000 and I did not have $1,000, so I made my case to my parents. A teenager with a track record of nineteen straight failures, asking two working adults to put a thousand dollars on a prepaid card for software he found on the internet. They did it. It earned exactly nothing.

I have thought about that money for years. They did not have it sitting around and they knew the odds, because they had watched every previous version of this play out at their own kitchen table. They put it on the card anyway, and the reason is simple. They had put their dreams into me. I had been wrong nineteen times in a row and they made the twentieth bet, which is not what the math told them to do.

Twenty failures is a number I say out loud on purpose. It was the tuition. Every one of those schemes handed me a piece of something that paid for itself later, traffic and offers and funnels and the difference between a real market and a wish. The money is long gone. The education never left. My parents bought me a very expensive education and they never once asked me for a receipt.