My name is Tobias, I'm 23 years old, I was born in Buffalo Minnesota and raised in the small town of Cokato. It's about one hour straight west of Minneapolis.  I was a rough and tumble kind of kid. I enjoyed playing in the dirt and running in the rain. When I was stuck inside I would disassemble any and every gizmo or gadget I could find; the VCR, old smoke detector, kitchen appliances etc. Electronics were my favorite because they were the most mysterious. At the age of 12 I bought a nitro powered RC car, It was loud and smelled like an old snowmobile when it ran. I'm sure it annoyed the neighbors but I loved it. I had to work hard to get it and it taught me a lot. It lead to me having a way with gas engines. At a later age I would buy old boat motors that didn't run and I would restore them. These boat motors were built anywhere from 1910 to 1920. There was something about hearing the roar of an engine that hadn't run in 50 years that really gripped me. They were simple to work on and it was easy for me to understand how they worked.

 I started working at an early age. I noticed my neighbor rarely mowed his lawn so I went over and asked him If he would pay me to mow it for him. He agreed to pay me $10 dollars each time I mowed. A year later and I was mowing 1 or 2 more lawns, I was 11 or 12 at the time. I got my first job detasseling corn when I was 13. If you want to understand detasseling check out this Wiki article.  All you need to know is it’s a job that takes place in the two or three hottest weeks of summer and you walk around a corn field pulling off the tops of corn plants, 10 hours a day, 6 days a week. It was a right of passage in my community and a good way to connect with friends over the summer. After that first season detasseling I had no plan as far as how I wanted to spend the money. I mad around 900 dollars that season I think. One day I found a riding lawn mower for sale for $400 Dollars. It was nearly half the money I had made. seeing it disappear was definitely hard but I knew it was going to be a good investment. If I was willing to go out and find more lawns it could be a big earner for me. And that's what I did. I think I was 15 yrs old and had 8 lawns at the peak and some were for apartment buildings and I was charging 65 a piece for less than an hour of work. That was my first real business experience. At 15 I continued to detassel and mow lawns in the summer and I got a job at a local pizza place. 

Even thought I had a little lawn mowing operation. Business itself never really interested me. Until my father got involved with something called T.E.A.M. which was going to be the supposed "Walmart of the internet" that then got bought out by MonaVie a health supplement company. It was network marketing and kind of a pyramid scheme but had trustworthy people at the top. They had CD's they would mail out every week or every month. Even though the whole thing was confusing to me and still is these people on the tapes were good at getting you to think. What's valuable to you? How are you spending you time? What are you doing with you future? Is your life what you though it would be? Is your life not the way you want it to be? ect. I don't know if they said this specifically but its what those CD's lead to. Why is one person successful and another is not? Why do some people make millions of dollars a year and others are in poverty? Are some people just smarter than others? Are the successful just lucky?  Is trading you're time for money a good deal? go to school, get a job, get married, have children, retire and die and be unsatisfied the whole time. That's what it seams 90 percent of Americans have planned.  That's when I read the book The Magic of Thinking Big, I think I was a sophomore in high school at the time. Reading was not something I enjoyed at the time. It was the longest book I had ever finished. It seemed so practical and it revealed that the reason most people don't see there dreams come true because they don't even try.  

My freshman year in high school I had room for one or two elective classes. I signed up for Principle of Engineering. The course description stood out to me and my parents always said I was going to be an engineer like my grandpa. Because I was always taking everything apart and wanted to know how stuff worked. Little did I know I would be the only freshman in a class full of seniors. 

It's all right here, my worldview, the lens I use to view the world, what you need to know to correctly interpret my blog posts.

I own this!