How I Made 5 Million By Just Winging It

Chapter 1 -The whole truth and nothing but the truth

The story starts out a number of years ago while I was in my senior year at Harvard University. I considered myself quite fortunate to be there, so I spent most of my free time studying.

I had won an athletic scholarship; everyone back home was quite proud of me. Lettering in Football, Baseball and Basketball while in High School was considered quite the achievement. I was also a surprisingly good pool player. My best game was pocket pool.

One day, while taking a math exam, I believe it was advanced integrated and differentiated calculus, I noticed this geeky looking guy with thick telescopic eye glasses cheating off of my paper. I didn't turn him in, but I did go up to him after the exam to see what's up.

He thanked me for not turning him in and told me his name was something like William Henry Gates III. I was thinking what kind of dufus name was that. I actually told him, if you want to get ahead in the world you should just call yourself Bill.
He started wining to me that if he couldn't get his grades up, he'd probably have to drop out. If he dropped out, his big shot lawyer dad from Seattle would surely make him get a job. He felt he was destined to do something big in the field of computers and didn't want to get tied down to a job. You had to feel for the guy - he looked like such a dork.

He started going on about this guy in Portland that had this operating system (?) for personal computers (?) and if I could just lend him a thousand dollars, he'd make it right with me.

I was thinking this guy seems like a pretty honest guy. I didn't really have a spare thou at the moment, but I knew of some brushes I could sell door to door that would probably raise a grand or two.

The next time I saw Bill, he told me that he was in fact dropping out. That he was headed back to Seattle and could really use the cash. He promised that if I came through for him, it would be worth a lot more later. He had a strategy to sucker IBM. I bought his story and kissed the thou goodbye.

Just last week I sold the stock he gave me for a cool $5,000,000.

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Sheldon Goldberg is a serial entrepreneur. He is currently the CEO of Dream Realty and Thorotek, Inc