Michael Strong's Entrepreneurial Solutions
My father was an elevator repairman who bought a farm in Minnesota when I was ten. My mother was a high school dropout who conceived me when she was 15 and gave birth to me when she was 16. My sister and I are eighteen months apart. While I was always a more capable student than she was, the discrepancy was not especially significant until high school. We were both tremendous readers, living on a farm in northern Minnesota with long winters and almost no TV reception. I was reading an average of about 200 pages every night from sixth grade onward, as did she.
Socially I became an increasingly introverted geek, and escaped the cruelty and boredom of middle and high school by reading more. My sister gradually became more social. In my junior year of high school, her sophomore year, our family farm was failing. Our family moved into my grandparents’ mobile home in Aspen, Colorado, where there were abundant construction jobs for my dad. When we moved to Aspen, I continued to be the socially isolated geek. My sister joined the “party crowd” of wealthy Aspen kids who indulged in abundant drugs and alcohol.
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