The Sound Of Love

This man was a billionaire. Not just that, but he was a black billionaire. No one but him and other members of the black community knew just how difficult it had been for him to get where he was right now. Nobody would understand the immense struggle he would have had to face while amassing his fortune in a world where the color of his skin would make people think he was a degenerate or dangerous if he did not wear such fine clothes all of the time.

He had faced impossible odds while starting his company, and he had discovered that when one reaches the upper class one doesn’t just face casual racism, thinly veiled racism or unwitting racism. No, one faces open racism in certain situations, because a lot of people that belong to that class have inherited their wealth from ancestors that owned slaves during the time where the rights of black people were non existent and they were bought and sold as if they were livestock.

These members of the upper class did not just inherit their wealth from their slave owning ancestors, they inherited their ancestors’ racist tendencies and ideologies as well, and these were the very same people that gave Michael a hard time while he was trying to establish his company. These were the very same people that made Michael feel inferior even though he was a shrewder businessman than a lot of them combined.

All of this in spite of the fact that Michael did not come from a poor family. On the contrary, his father had been a doctor and his mother had been a university professor. He came from a distinctly upper middle class background, which allowed him to attend an excellent private school and meet a lot of people that would help him later on as he was trying to establish his business.

Michael had sometimes wondered how difficult his life would have been if he had grown up in a ghetto, if he had grown up in poverty the way so many other black people did. He certainly would not be a billionaire right now. He would have been immensely lucky to hit a single million, in fact, due to the fact that people would simply not have given him the respect that he deserved as a good businessman who knew his way around the world of business.

He had started taking an interest in business from a very young age. He had always known that in order to get somewhere in life he was going to have to work, he couldn’t simply rely on his parents money to get him where he wanted to go. No, he would have to be a lot more practical about his life.

Hence, he had started to deliver the newspaper to people in his neighborhood. The pay hadn’t been all that much, but he had only been ten years old at the time and to a ten year old boy even the low pay he had been receiving had been quite a lot of money. He was proud that he was able to earn even this much, because it was indicative of the fact that he did, indeed, have a mind for business, and that when he used this mind properly he was able to earn money. This success was the reason for his confidence later on.

Once he had saved up about a hundred dollars, he decided that he could do a lot more with his time than just deliver newspapers. The newspaper delivery job only took an hour and a half to complete at most. This included the time it took to go to the store and get the newspapers and deliver them to everyone that had a subscription.

He was done with school by three, home by three thirty and was usually done with his homework by four thirty. The paper route was done in the morning before he even went to school. This meant that from four thirty until his bed time at nine he could do a lot more to earn money. He could make it so that he was using every single minute of his free time productively, in a way that would earn him some serious cash and allow him to gain a lot of experience as well. He was not the kind of person to sit on his laurels after all.

He used the money he had saved up from his paper route to set up a lemonade stall. He built the stall with his father, who was very enthusiastic about nurturing his sons burgeoning interest in jobs and businesses, and starting selling lemonade that he would help his mother make. He did not take advantage of their labor either. He told his father very seriously that he had bought the stall from him, and paid him fifty dollars for it. He used the remaining fifty to buy the lemons and sugar that he gave to his mother to make the lemonade with. In exchange for making the lemonade, Michael gave his mother a thirty percent stake in the business.

He started to earn some pretty good money. Twenty five dollars a week from the paper route and the lemonade stall, with a glass being sold for fifty cents each, ended up earning him around the same amount.

He started to expand his business rather quickly. He knew that after the novelty of a child running a lemonade stand would wear off, his sales would start to decline. And so, he started to use gimmicks to get people to come to his stall. He had his friend, Stuart, who had just learned how to play guitar, play a few tunes for him. He paid him for his services, of course, for Michael was a very honest businessman who never took advantage of people’s labor. This ended up being a very smart move because a lot of people came to the busy street corner where Stuart was playing and Michael had set up his stall after being attracted by the music. Michael ended up profiting a lot that day.

Michael eventually saved up enough to set up another stall, thus becoming the proud owner of not one but two lemonade stands at the age of only twelve. He was earning around two hundred and fifty dollars by this point and was very proud of himself, as were his parents. However, things were not meant to be all fun and games, because soon Michael faced the first of the many problems that he would face over the course of his life due to the fact that he was black.