Chapter: Absurd Yet True
In 2005, Canadian blogger Kyle MacDonald had bills to pay and a patient girlfriend who was paying the rent while he was searching for work. He also had a red paperclip and a big dream. Kyle wanted to be able to provide for himself and his girlfriend. He dreamed of owning his own house. One day he got this crazy idea. Kyle decided to put an advertisement on the popular classified advertising website Craigslist, with the intention of trading that red paperclip of his for something better. It didn’t take long before he got contacted by a girl from Vancouver who offered him a fish pen in exchange for his paperclip. He then traded the fish pen for a doorknob and the doorknob for a camping stove. Kyle seemed to be on a steady course to bigger and better things. He started a website where he shared his trading stories with the world. At the end of this project, he had traded his way from this single red paperclip to a house (!) in a series of online trades, all in over the course of a year.
Kyle was inspired by the childhood game Bigger and Better and his website received a considerable amount of attention for tracking the transactions. In 2007, Kyle released the book One Red Paperclip: How a Small Piece of Stationery Turned into a Great Big Adventure.
Possible Moral
Believe it or not, to get that house for the price of a paperclip, Kyle MacDonald only had to make 14 trades. There is a valuable lesson to be learned here: Folks who are patient and adept at recognizing value can actually get more through bartering than by selling the same item for cash. Simply put, both bartering and patience are skills worth mastering. In less than a year, Kyle took a one-cent paperclip and turned it into a house worth tens of thousands of dollars. Good luck getting returns like that from the stock market.
Story from We All Need Heroes: Stories of the Brave and Foolish.
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