Sometimes the keys to wealth lie literally under your feet. Or maybe in a garbage can, bathroom or anywhere else where you don't expect to see something unusual and worth hundreds of thousands of dollars. Don't believe me? Then we will tell you about the most common things that made their owners very rich.
10. Surname
Someone likes to be the owner the most unusual name or very funny surname... But American Jason Sadler didn't have either. But there was a great desire to make big money and an interesting idea of how to come to success.
In late 2008, Sadler created the IWearYourShirt website and, for a fee, pledged to wear a sponsored T-shirt with the company's logo. He posted photos in a sponsor's T-shirt on Twitter, Facebook, YouTube and Flickr.
For this service, Sadler asked for just a dollar a day. With the growing popularity, the cost of his service increased to $ 2, and then to $ 5, and every day this amount increased by another $ 5.
Sadler said he wore one T-shirt for 800 days, seven days a week.
Then Jason had a more interesting idea: What if he ran an online auction and legally changed his last name to whatever company offered the highest bidder?
Between 2012 and 2015, he became Jason Headsetsdotcom, then Jason SurfrApp, and then became Jason Zook (after his great-grandfather).
Of course, the new surname had its own limitations. The ban includes porn terminology, political and religious names.
9. Cup of coffee
Sometimes the path to hundreds of thousands of dollars is through pain. Literally.
In 1992, Stella Liebeck from Albuquerque, USA, doused herself with hot coffee from McDonald's. She received burns to her thighs, buttocks, and genitals. All burns, according to surgeons, accounted for six percent of her total body area.
This case received wide publicity and became a prime example of the most expensive lawsuits in US history. Liebeck initially demanded three million dollars from McDonald’s in compensation, but later the amount was reduced to $ 500,000.
Representatives of the respondent company admitted that they kept the temperature of their coffee between 82-87 degrees Celsius, based on the advice of a consultant who considered such a temperature range to be optimal for the best taste of the drink.
8. Spring
The idea to create a toy from a spring came to Richard James when he accidentally knocked a spring to the floor. Instead of falling to the floor, the spring “stepped” in the form of a series of arcs from the shelf onto the stack of books, then onto the floor, where it curled up.
James' wife Betty came up with a name for the new invention - Slinky (translated from English - graceful, smooth). In 1945, James exhibited his new toy for the first time at the Gimbels department store in downtown Philadelphia. Four hundred slinks were sold in 90 minutes. This was the beginning of a sensation that continues to this day.
In Russia, this spring toy is known as "Rainbow".
7. Tulip bulb
In the 17th century, the "tulip rush" began in Holland - a speculative bubble in which fortunes were created and disappeared.
In the early 1600s, these flowers came to Holland from Turkey and were soon discovered to be susceptible to the tulip variegation virus (aka tulip mosaic virus).Because of it, strokes, stripes and spots of a different color appeared on the petals, which made the flowers even more beautiful. They became a real luxury item, and shoppers craved colorful tulips the way they hunt for rare brands or Pokémon these days.
And the bulbs affected by the virus cost enormous money at that time. In early 1637, some tulip bulbs were asking for 10 times the annual income of a skilled worker.
However, the market drastically "blown away" at the end of 1637, ruining hundreds of people who did not manage to sell the bulbs they had bought at exorbitant prices.
6. Stone
This is perhaps the strangest member of the top 10 common things that helped their owners get rich. And its strangeness lies in the fact that the stone was positioned as a pet.
This absurd idea came to Gary Dahl when he was sitting in a bar with friends and listening to their reasoning about how hard it is to look after pets. Without thinking twice, he said that the best pet in the world is a stone. He does not ask for food or drink, and does not require any care at all.
Amazingly, Gary managed to find two investors to bring Pet Rock's vision to life. Together with pet stones, buyers were offered a box with holes (so that the baby does not suffocate) and a bed of coniferous shavings. And also instructions for care and maintenance. In it, the owner was advised to get the pet out of the box and transfer it to an old newspaper, where it would lie until it was remembered. Advice was also given on how to train the stone for different commands.
In 1975, Pet Rock swept the United States. Already in the first two months of sales, stone pets were sold in the amount of 1.5 million copies at a price of $ 3.95 each. And the first six months of sales brought the author 15 million dollars.
Let's say that Gary was pretty drunk when the thought of such an unusual pet flashed through his mind. But most of the stone buyers were probably sober. Would you buy a stone in a box?
5. Garbage
Now we pay for the garbage (more precisely, for its removal), not us. However, Justin Gignac, a designer and artist based in New York, uses garbage in his own way. He packs old discarded items in attractive packaging, and then sells to everyone. Think Gignac has no buyers? No matter how it is!
He has been selling waste since 2001 and has sold 1,400 cubic meters of New York waste in 15 years. Small cubes with trash cost $ 50, while larger cubes dedicated to important events (like New Year's Eve in Times Square) start at $ 100 or more. After all, people love with their eyes. And the content of a beautiful wrapper is no longer as important as the appearance.
4. Excrement
There was already garbage in the top 10 things that will help you get rich. And now we are talking about a different kind of waste - biological. But even it can be valuable if it belongs to a famous person.
The eccentric Italian artist Piero Manzoni carefully laid aside 90 samples of his own feces and in 1961 tried to sell them to his patrons. Thus, he wanted to draw the attention of the public to the "credulity of buyers of works of art."
Less than two years later, he traded 30 grams of the substance for the same amount of 18-carat gold.
There are reports that some of the jars of "Artist's Shit" (as Manzoni himself signed each jar) exploded, possibly due to corrosion and gases accumulated in them.
3. Air
Why go somewhere to get some fresh air? After all, it can be delivered directly to your home. In the bottle.
This is the business that two Canadians are doing. They bottle air in the Rocky Mountains and sell it for $ 24 a can. Chinese shoppers, gasping for breath in smog-filled metropolitan areas, have begun buying bottles to protest the poor air quality.
2. Red paperclip
Canadian blogger Kyle MacDonald's unusual success story began with a red paper clip. In 2005, he traded it for a fish-shaped ballpoint pen. After another 13 exchanges, he traded his role in Donna on Demand for the two-story house he had long dreamed of.
In 2007, MacDonald released a book in which he talked about all the stages of his exchange.In the Russian translation, it is called “We are not looking. One red paper clip that shook the world. "
1. Two boxes of pizza
On May 18, 2010, American programmer Laszlo Heinitz, now known as the Bitcoin Pizza Guy, promised 10,000 bitcoins to anyone who ordered him two pizzas. At that time, this cryptocurrency was very cheap (about $ 40) and Heinitz had to wait five days before someone agreed to buy him the coveted food.
At the moment, the cost of the pizzas that Laszlo delivered on May 22, on behalf of Jeremy Sturdivant, is about $ 80 million. And in honor of this event, which vividly demonstrates how high the value of cryptocurrencies can skyrocket, Bitcoin Pizza Day is celebrated annually.
By the way, in February 2018 Laszlo repeated his experiment. This time, the pizzas cost him 0.00649 bitcoin.
Sturdivant didn't become a dollar millionaire either. He paid for the trip with his girlfriend around the country.