When I was twelve, my mother and I hit a rough spot where we couldn’t even afford to buy food. We used to go to churches to get meals, because otherwise, we would’ve gone hungry.
But I had an idea.
I took a plastic bucket and put a sign on it that said, “Please help. We need money.” Too embarrassed to let anyone see me with it, I put it next to the road and looked out the window, hoping people who went by would drop money in it.
Needless to say, it didn’t work. Even worse, my mother saw it, and it punched a hole in her heart.
“You don’t have to do this,” she said, tears streaming down her face. “We’ll make it somehow.”
But I couldn’t do nothing. The feeling of powerlessness was killing me.
A few days later, I noticed a Girl Scout going door-to-door, selling cookies. By the time she got to the end of the street, all her cookies were gone, and she had a wad of money in her hand.
That’s when I learned one of the most important lessons of my life…
You can’t just wait for people to put money in a bucket. You have to give them something in exchange. You also have to go to them, not expect them to come to you.
But what could I give them? We didn’t even have enough food for ourselves, much less supplies to bake cookies.
I looked around and found a poem I’d written for my mother. It was all I could afford to give her for Mother’s Day.
“That’s it,” I thought. “I’ll sell poems.”
Over the next few days, I wrote a dozen or so poems. Each of them less than a page.
And then I made little frames for them out of popsicle sticks.
When I was done, I went to every house on the street. My neighbors opened their doors and found a skinny little kid in a wheelchair sitting outside, selling poems for three dollars apiece.
What do you think happened?
You guessed it, I sold every single one of those poems. Not a single person said no.
I made $36 from my writing that day. Later, we went to the store, and little Jon Morrow, a 12-year-old kid in a wheelchair, bought his family’s groceries for the first time. Still brings tears to my eyes, just thinking about it.
A week later, my mother found work, and I stopped going door-to-door, pestering the neighbors, but I was never quite the same after that. I got rid of a demon that’s plagued writers for centuries.
— “Jon Morrow” support@smartblogger.com