I Sold Diaries Door to Door at 12 – It taught me more than any deal since
I Sold Diaries Door to Door at Twelve. It Taught Me More Than Any Deal Since.
I sold my first product when I was twelve years old, pocket diaries, door to door, so I could buy myself a suit. Four decades and a few billion dollars of real estate later, that twelve-year-old still teaches me more than most of the deals that came after him.
People assume the big lessons in a career come from the big transactions, the nine-figure acquisition, the deal that made the news, the moment everything changed. In my experience it’s the opposite. The lessons that actually shaped me arrived early, when the stakes were small and the tuition was cheap. By the time the deals got large, I wasn’t learning the fundamentals anymore. I was just applying the ones I’d already burned in years earlier.
That’s the part most people get backwards. They wait for the big opportunity to teach them how to operate. But the big opportunity doesn’t teach, it tests. It shows you whether you learned the basics back when getting them wrong cost you almost nothing.
I want to walk through the jobs that taught me those basics, diaries at twelve, vacuum cleaners at sixteen, a sales role at nineteen, my first development at twenty-one. None of them were glamorous. Every one of them mattered more than the deals that followed.
If you’re early in your career and the work feels small, this series is really for you.