| | Thanks, Robert. Definitely good to know about. Ultimately, that the culture does not encourage this is symptomatic of much. In our generation, newspaper home delivery and street corner vendors were children. That is all but gone now. Here in Ann Arbor, the newspaper closed last year, but at that time, kids only delivered: all billing was handled by the paper.
When we lived in Albuquerque, I wrote an article for The New Mexico Business Journal about Thomas Griego, who invented a green process for plating micro-circuits. (He said that he could gold plate a red blood cell.) He invented the process when he was a contract employee in Japan, negotiated for the patent rights, and brought the company home. The thing is, he grew up in business. His parents owned fast food and convenience stores over the years. When he was in high school, he opened his own equipment rental company, providing light industrial machinery for home improvement.
Thomas Griego said that his families -- first his parents; now he and his wife -- met the challenges of life in the high desert. Success comes in many forms. It is hard not to start off well if you are a kid in West Bloomfield. "According to a 2007 estimate, the median income for a household in the township was $98,832, and the median income for a family was $113,191. Males had a median income of $74,557 versus $45,339 for females. The per capita income for the township was $44,885. The township is often regarded as one of the most affluent in the country." -- Wikipedia.
My accountant once told me that he and his brother mowed lawns in their neighborhood in their early teens. By the time they were in college, it was a routine. They had a customer base. In those first years, their buddies were doing not much on Saturday mornings -- cartoons first and then the beach later. When they were in college, he and his brother would work the business during the summers -- which meant that they were done and off to the beach while their buddies were getting ready for their shifts at MacDonald's.
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