Make Money Online

We were mid-raid. Somebody in the Ventrilo channel said four words that had nothing to do with the boss we were fighting. Make money online. I had never heard them put together before.

I left the raid. I went and looked it up, and in a real sense I never came back to that game. What was on the other side was not a business idea. It was an entire category of person I did not know existed, people making money out of a bedroom with a connection and an angle, and I read about them until my eyes hurt.

What I did next says everything about me at eleven. I did not go find a niche or buy a course. I got paper and I drew the house. Floor plans, room by room, hand-drawn, a mansion I had never seen designed by a kid who had never been inside one. Then I drew the airplane hangar next to it, because obviously I was going to need somewhere to keep fifty exotic cars.

I was not embarrassed about that then and I am not going to be embarrassed about it now. Billionaire was the number. I wrote it down. Nobody in my life had that kind of money and I had zero evidence I ever would, and the arithmetic on it never bothered me for one second. That is the useful part. Before I had a single skill, before I made one dollar, I had a picture specific enough to draw. Everything since has been me trying to get the real thing to match the drawing, and it started with a stranger on a headset saying four words in the middle of a fight.