A lot of things started going my way in 1981, at the same time, things didn't which I'll likely share later.

But this chapter in my life is the story of my first job...  And in some ways, my first entrepreneurial venture.

This venture was a school in ways for me.

This venture had me working every day, 7 days per week.

I somewhat had control of how much I could make.

I had a territory of my own that nobody else could sell into.

I had responsibility to keep track of my customers and collect money from them while paying for the product which I was selling.

It had me up early on weekends.

It had me preparing  things weekly, and sometimes days in advance.

It also had me finding additional ways to earn money from the same customers I was serving.

I learned about efficiency and the process of trying the same thing in different ways to see if I could make them easier or do them faster.

While The Orange County Register wasn't supposed to hire paper boys until they were 11 or 12 years old, somehow I managed to get my route at 10.

Better yet, I had the route for our actual neighborhood.  So rather than having to cart the papers to adjacent neighborhoods, was able to simply go around our own blocks and sell the paper to our neighbors.