The First Time I Realized Initiative Beats Talent

When I was in high school, I started an eBay business. I was buying and selling stuff all the time — buying discounted electronics, selling old video games and CDs, even charging my friends a small fee to sell their stuff for them.

I even started running some creative schemes — overcharging for shipping, and having buddies use fake accounts to bid up my items. eBay had just launched a few years prior, and it was somewhat of a lawless land in the early days of the internet.

In my best month, I made about $1,000 in profit. As a kid doing this part-time off his bedroom computer, it wasn't a bad hustle.

I remember telling my friends about my eBay business in high school, and they would listen and laugh at the stuff I was doing. They thought it was great, but I was always shocked that they didn't try to do it themselves. Why not? All you had to do was create an account, snap some photos of some stuff, and boom — you have a little business earning cash.

But to them, it was an effort. It wasn't easy. It required time, discipline, and attention. And it was the first lesson I got in realizing that people create blockers for themselves, they say no to opportunities, and that not everyone is wired to create their own success.

Looking back, that tiny eBay operation taught me something I didn't have the maturity to articulate at the time: most people don't struggle because the opportunity isn't there. They struggle because taking the opportunity feels inconvenient. Even when the path is obvious, even when the barrier to entry is low, people talk themselves out of starting.

I didn't see it as ambition or entrepreneurship when I was seventeen. I just wanted to try things and see what would happen. When I feel stuck, I build something. When I feel uninspired, I experiment. When I feel boxed in, I find a gap and run toward it.

Some people wait for the green light that never comes, and some people just start moving and figure it out along the way. You do not build confidence by thinking about what you could do. You build it by trying something that feels slightly ridiculous and trusting yourself enough to see where it leads. That has been the through-line of my entire life.