My last conventional job was at the age of 20, when I worked the night shift slinging boxes at FedEx in Memphis, Tennessee. The job sucked. One day I came home at 4 a.m.—if you stayed past midnight, you got 50 cents more an hour—and sat down at the table I had snagged for $15 from the Salvation Army.

I looked around the room and thought, “You know, I don’t think I want to do this anymore.”

On a whim, I decided to check out a new website called eBay. Surveying my apartment for a bunch of old stuff I didn’t need, I took a few photos, scanned them at the university library, and posted my first auctions.

My first week I made $19 an hour, which was more than twice as much as I made at FedEx.

The same day the auction sales went through, I was scheduled to return to work after a three-day weekend. It was December, and Memphis was suffering a rare ice storm that left much of the city incapacitated. As I began to back up my car in the driveway, the car slid under the ice, lost control, and narrowly missed crashing into the parked truck belonging to my neighbor.

“Why am I doing this?” I asked myself.

I turned the engine off, went back inside, and never returned to the world of traditional work.