How to Make a Million Dollars

Risk Equals Reward — Big Risk Equals Big Reward

How do you turn your kitchen table idea into a million dollars? How do you become a successful entrepreneur? There are many books that detail all the abilities and strengths that need to be brought to the task, but it's not so much a question of competence as one of entrepreneurial character. You could bring with you every word of wisdom and degrees from venerable Ivy League colleges on how to succeed to the threshold as an entrepreneur, but without the necessary willingness to take a calculated risk, you could not take the first step toward that exciting and mysterious frontier of risk and reward.

There is no reward without risk, and the bigger the risk, the bigger the reward.

To some people — a couple of whom will no doubt be family members — the willingness to embark upon a path of risk will be perceived on one day as courage, on the next as foolish abandon, and on another as insanity. At the very beginning, I was walking in the darkness of faith and not the light of reason. There was no way I could communicate my expectations to friends and family — I just had a gut feeling that I would be successful and I had to follow my gut. Many told me I would fail. Let's face it; vision is a gift of the dreamer, and not everyone was born to dream. People had been laughing at dreamers for aeons before I came along. I'm sure a lot of people laughed at Bill Gates when he dropped out of college to pursue some little business he had going on in his garage.

I Was No Bill Gates

The little project on the side I was working on in my basement was laughably simple. In fact, no one took me seriously, and why should they have? It was literally a bag of corn! The whole invention itself was a complete accident. I was a stay-at-home mom with two boys, aged two and four, who was just looking for something clever to give to her kids' teachers for a Christmas present. My husband was feeding deer in the backyard of our sprawling tree-lined suburban neighborhood. What did we know? We were city kids with our first official house with a certified yard! I saw a fifty-pound bag of corn he had left standing upright next to my sewing machine and a lightbulb went off in my head. I had heard of rice in socks, surely corn would be better: It had a bigger grain that would hold on to heat longer. I put the corn in a hastily sewn pillowcase, heated it up in the microwave for a couple of minutes, then took it out and held it against my chest. I was blown away by the wave of soothing moist heat that enveloped my body.

The Eureka Moment: When Inspiration Meets Invention

I was overtaken by something that can only be described as a fever. I was possessed during the next three days by a tireless need to work on this thing only. Sewing different-sized pillowcases like an automaton, I experimented with different weights and fills, dragging my screaming, uncooperative kids through blinding whiteout snowstorms to every fabric store within thirty miles, looking for the perfect fabric, the perfect print, the perfect welt cord. I used a hundred-dollar sewing machine I had gotten for free with my credit card points, jamming my fingers under the needle occasionally — I was a lousy sewer — and produced pretty pillowcases with tiny little bloodstains on them where I had sewn over my finger as I tried to turn a tight corner on the cheap, lumbering machine.