College dropout makes $100,000 a year, with a two-day workweek | Hacker News Reader

College dropout makes $100,000 a year, with a two-day workweek

washingtonpost.com

194 pointspeter12375 comments

This is a somewhat old article.

It's also very, very long.

It's also one of the greatest newspaper feature stories I've ever read. It was passed around the writers' circles I was part of when the Post ran it years ago.

Here's the gist (from memory):

1. Guy has a gift for connecting with little kids.

2. Guy has good sense of humor.

3. Guy decides to do magic shows at pre-school birthday parties for a living.

4. Guy targets the richest community of clients for his service.

5. Guy figures out what people are charging for pre-school birthday party magic shows and charges DOUBLE their price.

6. Guy markets his shows by hanging out around shopping malls where parents and kids wandered by, having fake conversations on his cell phone about non-existent work.

7. Guy works 10 birthday parties a weekend, charging $200 for a 30-minute magic show.

8. Parents feel guilty about dropping $200 on a 30-minute preschool magic show, but the kids ADORE the guy's funny act and tricks that blow up in his face. He's got a gift.

There's a great subplot about the magicians deep, dark secret, in fact it's what prompted the Washington Post reporter to shadow the guy for a few months. Parents were wondering why the magician kept showing up unshaven, with dark circles under his eyes, and why his gear was so beat up if he was making so much money.

I'll leave the surprises to those curious enough to read the whole thing.

Thanks for the summary. This useless fluff piece lost me after the first page.

How can you render judgment if you didn't read past page one?

Not reading past page one is a judgment. It's one I make all the time about various articles and stories.

Certainly. But then you don't pass judgment on the work as a whole based on the little bit you read.

Perhaps not. But suppose I wrote 5,000 pages of pure stream of consciousness drivel. Would you feel obligated to read every page before deciding the whole thing was crap?

I'll let you know once I finish the other 4,783 pages that DaVinci wrote. It's kept me hooked so far, though. http://www.sacred-texts.com/aor/dv/index.htm

So just write "tl;dr" and let us get on with it.

Maybe a different kind of summary would be helpful for certain people.

The article is roughly divided into two parts:

Part #1: How this regular guy, a college dropout, an apparently average Joe, can walk into a room full of parents and children and own them, making the children laugh uncontrollably, the mothers secretly want to sleep with him, the fathers impressed by him. Then they gladly PAY him and he earns six figures working only on weekends. At a business he started by pretending to talk to customers on his cell phone.

Part #2: How every business is made up of real people, with real personality and real-life problems. And how some people (all people?) who have fantastic qualities can also be deeply flawed in other ways.

Part #3: Yes I know I said there were only two parts. The third part is afterwards when you realize this essay that started off as a not-too-serious business article about marketing was in fact an amazing work of art and that it won a PULITZER PRIZE for a reason.

Now go read the whole article.

'This useless fluff piece'

I think your getting the wrong idea. A picture of a cat with a caption on it is a usesless fluff piece, a blog post of a video with someone talking about code is a fluff piece.

This isn't an article about start ups or code; but this article I'd argue will give you more as a human, as a entrepreneur, as a family member, as a citizen then any article you'd get from d2h or 37signals.

This article helps you use your brain in ways that people with engineering degrees have a hard time grasping sometimes. Sure you understand the deep intricacies of x programming language or you've got a really cool app, but it doesn't mean you understand people.

Almost every theory of intelligences says that there is more then one way to be a genius, be it in math, art, people, sports anything. And almost all theories will agree that people who are extremely smart in one area and never apply the brain outside of their specialty can be practically retarded in the other parts.

I've been thinking a whole bunch about this lately, as I go to an Engineering School and the sentiment is that Art Majors and Athletes and English majors are idiots cause they most likely won't be making money when they graduate.

I've been trying to make an argument that even they will agree to and understand, but to ask people to change their mind is like asking a rock to be more like sand.

The article is just toooooooo long. If want to develop my brain in some other way, I can always read some real literature, instead of newspaper articles. Or I could even visit some art galleries with paintings, sculptures and so on.

And even if the article is useful after all, if it's written badly, in a non-interesting way, people won't read it. That's why Joel is so popular. Because his articles are a joy to read.

Anyway, if I really wanted to know more about how people think, I would study Psychology (or Sociology) and spend more time with them in real life. Some people just aren't meant for this kind of stuff. The last universal man was Leonardo da Vinci.

P.S.: I loved your last sentence.

I really liked it. I read the whole thing in one shot, which isn't like me. I actually started re-reading because I was afraid I may have missed details at the beginning when I wasn't yet aware that it deserved my attention.

This is real literature, its writing in the purest sense.

Yes it is long but probably worth it. The last page itself is good enough to justify the article.

Studying psychology only gives you an understanding of the workings but not a feel for humans. Psychology mostly searches for patterns in humans, and often times misses the big picture.

Its tricky to understand but after reading that article and getting to the end to hear about what happened to create the person you read about in the beginning you feel like, or at least I did, you know him. You see that it takes a lifetime of experience to create any one person and lucky is the person whom gets to truly know someone.

What's with the downmod party? I've read 100s of feature articles and this one was pretty dull, especially at the beginning. It does get better towards the end, but there's just nothing great about this guy, or his life, or his life-in-words. He seems really pathetic to me. Makes decent money playing a clown, and then throws it away in Atlantic City on gambling (and probably hookers and blow).

Eh. Except for the "clown" part, how is he different from a million other losers?

The author of the article also won the Pulitzer for writing this brilliant piece about skill, art, and modern life:

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/04...

I've read it before, but this is too is worth a second look.

Thank you - that was interesting and beautiful.

... their son had strung rubber bands across his dresser drawers and was replicating classical tunes by ear, moving drawers in and out to vary the pitch.

Damn, I guess that answers the question: Would he still play music if he had been born to an illiterate family in a desolate rural part of a third world country? Yep, he still would.

Except many people in those parts are so malnourished that their minds don't develop properly.

Or they die before reaching 5 years old.

my first impression too was WTF? the entire first page tells you almost nothing. Seeing that there were 5+ pages, no thanks....

In this case, the first of 5 pages is nowhere near 20% of the story.

Thank you for the last couple of paragraphs of your summary that provided the motivation to actually read the article. To others here quick to dismiss it out-of-hand as just a fluff piece, it's anything but.

No problemo. I remember reading it at work when it came out, thinking...what the heck IS this thing?

It came to me originally from the mailing list of Warren Ellis, a cranky, foul-mouthed British comic book writer who hates and despises everything he sees, hears, and reads. That morning he sent an e-mail out to the 12,000 people on his mailing list saying: "Here's something that isn't terrible. In fact, it might be the best thing you read all year."

That's the sort of endorsement that encourages you to keep at it.

http://www.warrenellis.com

I actually enjoy many of the posts about the creative (or at least somewhat non-traditional) things people do as solo entrepreneurs. After reading the entire article though, I do find it funny how this tagline was used to position the article for the HN community. The article is actually much more of a character study than a discussion of a business, and it takes a significant change in content after the first thousand words.

Brilliant article, brilliant HN positioning, brilliant page partitioning. Best thing I've read on HN this year.

The way the article totally changes course on the last page is brilliant. This might be the only news article I've seen that used the hypertext format that well.

There was a live chat with the author on the Washington Post the week this was published. Someone asked him if the paging was set up this way on purpose and he denied it.

I always click 'print this article', then click my Readability bookmarklet ( http://lab.arc90.com/experiments/readability/ ). Works 9/10 times and gives a nice speed boost to reading articles. The page partitioning sounds well-done though. I guess writers put a lot of thought into that. (Edit: ... and then I read brandnewlow's comment above mine which refutes that theory. 'Print this article' links rock.)

who says editors have no outlet for creative genius...

That bookmarklet is great! Thanks for the link. Do you know of a firefox extension that does that to persist across page views?

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/discussion/2006...

"Luck and perseverance also enter into it. There was one day when I considered not joining Eric at two parties; I was tired, I'd already been to a LOT of parties, I had good material, I wanted to sit down start writing. But I forced myself to go. The first turned out to be the party in the Coxes' house at the top of the story; the second was the party...at the end."

And of course, this is the same writer who just got the "leaving babies to die in the car" story published, which just made the rounds:

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2009/02...

There's definitely a rhythm and a way of developing characters in common with all the stuff I've read from him so far.

Or how about this:

THE BEST-INFORMED PERSON I EVER KNEW was a friend of my grandfather's back in the Bronx, where I grew up. Every morning of every day of his life, this elderly man -- his name, as I recall, was Boris -- would dress impeccably in a suit and waistcoat and shuffle to the public library, where more than a dozen of the day's local and out-of-town newspapers were threaded through bamboo poles and hung from racks. One by one, Boris would read them all, front to back; at dusk, he would walk home alone. This daily pilgrimage was conducted with ecclesiastic solemnity, a quiet, dignified homage to the majesty of knowledge. Even as a little boy, in that intuitive if primitive way that children comprehend important things, I understood the fundamental truth that Boris was, in some clear but compelling way, a douche bag.

This guy is a genius.

"You could just have a party where you all played pin the tail on the donkey or musical chairs or something. But that is just not done in this part of D.C. If you did that, you would be talked about."

That's a microcosm of what I didn't like about DC. The culture is very status oriented and judgmental.

That comment totally struck me while reading the article. I thought, "Wow, what an awful and fake little world that must be."

God forbid you be "talked about!"

I think that humans in general are very status oriented and judgmental. Hacker culture is the same, we just focus on a different set of status indicators and pass judgment on a different set of criteria. Other cultures' values and judgments look unpleasant and silly to us, just as ours look unpleasant and silly to them.

You have a point. Maybe I just didn't like the city because it didn't share my values.

I like how careful he is with the tone he's writing. For instance, the story about the people across the hall; he doesn't let it blow up in your face, and he doesn't just let the air out of it either; he reels it in like a fisherman, letting a key detail out early, but still landing it with a climax.

Thanks for posting this. I had no idea about this guy, now I'm trying to track down everything he's written.

Brilliant article. Prob one of the best things I have read all year long.

WOW! Should make a movie about it.

I'm already visualising Tom Hanks in the feature role. What a vivid story. We just need a happy ending, no? :)

The title was misleading in the sense that the article in itself is much more than about creativity. I thought it had more to do with emotions, psychology and effects. After reading the whole article, I am in awe of how he knows kids so well! I feel sorry that creative professor mother + phd math father did only so much for their son, putting their own pursuits first instead. But I guess that is how today's world is and will be.

You can read it like that, or you can read it as a story about a guy who could be leading a completely charmed life, except for the fact that the personality traits that give him instantaneous connections with 4 year olds also make it hard for him to lead a normal life --- the same way genetic mutations can make us more attractive and more susceptible to specific diseases, or the same way that David Foster Wallace's brain could ricochet through a thousand ideas in a couple pages, but also get so tangled up and hopeless that he was compelled to kill himself. As in, a story about how things that seem simple --- let's write an ebook, how to make $100,000 a year with a 2 hour work week! --- are actually really complex, because we're humans and not 300 word business model posts on Hacker News.

Is what I think you could think of it, is all.

I don't quite see it as their parents putting their own pursuits first. Rather, he is so different from them in the way he thinks that they just don't relate to each other. Imagine a field that you have no interest in, or maybe even feel repulsion for, maybe it's NASCAR racing, or piano tuning, or salsa dancing, or the two argument starters: politics and religion. Now imagine your child has the kind of personality that will make him a master in that field. How do you relate to his thoughts and interests?

here's the Great Zucchini in action: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XVjB4f_nBvQ&fmt=18

That is amazing.

I'm curious where this guy is now after three years. Is he still doing this gig or have his flaws caught up with him?

Answered my own question. He's still in business:

http://www.thegreatzucchini.com/index.html

What's interesting about his page is that it doesn't even show his face on the front, just dozens of happy, delighted pre-schoolers.

The man knows what he's really selling to parents.

He does show his face on the "More Info" page, though.

http://www.thegreatzucchini.com/about.htm

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2009/02...

another article by the same writer. A very sad one this time, but great writing.

One of the best written stories I have ever read. Intriguing, funny and sad!

We rarely see a case of attention deficit disorder as obvious as this.

Great article. He did his homework, targeted his audience and finally sees a payoff. But it took him 10 years of working in a nursery school and babysitting and party hosting at DZ for him to manage to get there. But good on him for recognizing that he had a gift and that he could make a living doing it.

is "college dropout" really anything special these days?

society tells me that if I want to make anything out of my life, college is the place to go. One poster in my High School flaunts that I will make one million dollars more in my lifetime if I go to college.

Pretty moving story wonderfully written!!

He and Seinfeld :-)

Excellent article and excellent writing. Anyone complaining about this being too long has some ADD issues of their own; they should especially make the effort to read this as a warning what happens when such tendencies are allowed to take over their life.

I remember when this came out in the Post mag a couple years ago here. I still don't get why they had to take a nice light-hearted story and dig up all of that dirt about the guy's gambling problem...it seemed sensationalist and completely irrelevant.

It makes the person three-dimensional, as opposed to a light hearted human-interest story. A story about a clown that 4-year-olds love, I will forget in an hour. A story about a clown who gave up adulthood because of his past, that I will remember for many years.

Flagged. Come on, really?

Yeah, really.

Whatever, it's still a bad headline regardless of the quality of the article itself.

The fact that you were downmodded tells me that the bozos are now the majority of HN. Time for a new digg clone?

Ok - it's a story about a clown. But does that mean it only satisfies the intellectual curiosity of bozos?

I'll take this article over another tawdry analysis of the financial crisis any day.

This is actually one of the better articles I've seen on HN lately. And, I've been a bozo here for quite some time.

3 years ago suburbanites were swimming in money and had nothing better to do with it. I doubt this guy is still pulling in a full weekend of @$300 shows.

Some DC suburbs are still under 3% unemployment. Government consulting in one form or another is vary stable work when you can get it.

EX: I work for a multi-billion dollar company that grew over 10% last year while being vary profitable. Many people I work with have a combined family income over 250k/year, young children, and little free time.

When I read this article all I could think about was Raffi singing 'Banana Phone.' Now I can't get it out of my head.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_-LbvFPLpeo&feature=playe...

I really dislike these posts, which are all the same "Person who skips college retires at 24" or "College really needed? This man makes 400,000 a year!"

Of course college doesn't guarantee that you'll come out making $100k a year or more, but also NOT going to college is the same.

As happy as I am for this person, I hope no one gets the wrong idea from these posts and just drops out. Having an idea is one thing, putting it together and having it be a success is another. If anything, I would say the YouTube and Facebook guys had it right, they made the product during college, released it during college, succeeded during college, and subsequently left college. Thats the way to do it IF ANY.

And for some people, school just isn't there thing. Anyways I'm rambling, I think my point has been made.

The title of this link misreads the story a bit to re-cast it for Hackers. Yes, the guy's a dropout, yes the guy works two days a week, but I think his approach to how he positioned himself as THE pre-school birthday party magician is what's most interesting.

That and all the wonderful, wonderful writing. The adventure in Atlantic City is a highlight.

Yeah I really agree. it seems like most of these posts are saying anyone can make 100k+ working a couple days a week just by finding the right job. Sure, it's possible. But people do it by finding a niche, and marketing themselves very well. And there isn't usually room in these niches for many people to make that kind of money. These posts usually remind me of those late night tv infomercials telling that I can make millions, I just need to spend a few hundred to learn how to do it.

I think that people can make that kind of money with little work, but they don't do it by following a defined career path.

It's interesting because there seems to be this ethos among the hacker/tech startup community that if you want to be successful you either need to be young, a college drop out, or an ivy league grad.

The Kauffman foundation did a study on entrepreneurship though and found that this idea is totally off base. (http://dobbscodetalk.com/index.php?option=com_myblog&sho...)

This article is fascinating - and well worth a read. If you are looking for a quick summary: More education directly correlates with better performance in your startup, and most founders are much older and have greater work experience than people would think.

Wow are you ever missing the point of this story.

You're assuming he read it

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