Living the dream- How I've always found ways to work for myself- Steemit Introduction

When I was 15 years old I got my first job, working at a local grocery store. I quit that job after 3 months and haven't worked for someone else since. I'm 29 now.  I haven't spent any of this time homeless or broke, although that would've probably made for some great stories. I realized early on that having a set schedule and working for someone else just wasn't going to work for me. I've been fortunate enough to be find multiple avenues that allow me the freedom to work when I want, and entirely for myself.  

What's my point?

I've never thought of myself as very good at teaching, but when I found Steemit I decided if I was going to post I would try to give some sort of value to the community. I think at the very least my story can show that there are many ways out there to make a living, you just need to have patience, stick with them and do things the right way.  In future blogs I'd like to expand on any or all of the topics I touch on here, depending on what the community is interested in.

Starting Out

Early on in my teenage years, I started playing a card game called Magic: the Gathering.  For those who haven't heard of it, MtG is a trading card game that currently has about 20 million people playing it. I would spend my weekends traveling to play tournaments, and to buy and sell cards for a small profit.  Now, I don't want to trick anyone into thinking it's easy to make huge money through this game, I managed to win enough so that I could justify not having a $6/hour job, but it's next to impossible to make a career of it. However,  this game led me to meeting many very intelligent people, and  to my first real "job"- being a professional poker player.

The transition from playing Magic to playing poker is very natural. They both require very similar skillsets. I spent my college years playing small stakes poker online, and then made the transition to playing live cash games in casinos full time. I played $2/$5 NL Texas Holdem almost exclusively for about 4 years, consistently staying around $40/hr and playing a style in which big losses almost never occurred.  Eventually I got sick of the poker grind though, and wanted to look for something new.

About 2.5 years ago a friend came to me with a business idea. He had been doing a lot of research into an Amazon program called Fulfillment by Amazon (FBA). Basically, as a seller you send all of your inventory to Amazon, they store it, and when someone makes a purchase they handle the individual shipping. They take a large fee, but they do the majority of the work. The seller doesn't have to deal with customer service and the customers have the security of buying through Amazon and knowing all of their policies will be upheld. I jumped right in, took a year off from poker and threw myself completely into the business. We turned a profit in the first year, and this year we're on pace to do over $1 million in sales. We've had quite the progression in which products we sell, as there are so many different paths you can take in this business. I'd like to get into those in more detail in future blogs.

I've also been a Fantasy Football/Baseball player for years, and more recently have gotten into Daily Fantasy Sports. I play pretty small stakes but have been able to turn a profit every year so far. As you can probably tell, I'm all over any type of gambling where I can find an edge!

I'm hoping this outline will sort of guide me into where my future blogs should go, so please let me know in the comments if anything I brought up was interesting, or even if I'm just a boring idiot- some response has to be better than none right?