What I Learned From Odd Jobs – How Kids Start Off On The Entrepreneurial Trail
April 12, 2008 by Yvonne Russell
My first ever realization that you could actually get remuneration for doing something was when I was about 8 years old.
My father was building a house. The carpenters who sub contracted toiled long and hard in sub tropical temperatures and worked up quite a sweat. When we came home from school, the carpenters would ask us to go to the nearby shop to buy them some icecreams – cold icy paddlepops on a stick.
We were kids, and happy to do it. The whole house building thing was an adventure to us. We looked forward to getting home and to watching these guys work, and to seeing progress on the house.
I remember being blown away when the first time we raced to the shop for them, they told us to get an icecream for ourselves too. What! A free icecream… just for going to the shop. Amazing!
Of course, now we had an extra reason to look forward to getting home and to doing our daily icecream errand.
Did you have odd jobs as a child that you look back on now with a business or entrepreneurial eye?
This is an entry in the Odds Jobs Group Writing Project at Middle Zone Musings and High Calling.
Marcus’s Lessons From Odd Jobs meme at High Calling is ongoing. I won’t tag anyone specifically, but if you’d like to join in, head on over to his site for all the details.
Well, there was that time we collected 50 large grocery bags full of pecan when my Dad said his buddies at work would give us actual real money for ‘em! I made $5 and was King of the World for while!
Thanks for the contribution to WILF this month!
Cheers!
LOL. King of the World with $5…. What did you buy with it?
And I thought I was doing well with an icecream.
I’ve never had an “icy paddlepop” but it has such a great ring to it.
I didn’t have many entrepreneurial thoughts as a kid, but I remember trying to sell painted rocks one time. I didn’t want to do the “normal thing” of setting up a lemonade stand, and I’m not sure why I thought there would be market demand for painted rocks. Turns out, there wasn’t.
Hi Marcus
Was that during the pet rock craze?