If you’ve been following my blog, you know that I’ve been writing about my battle with prostate cancer. If you haven’t seen the articles you can find them here: https://georgeasantino.com/book/blog/ .
The last article detailed my decision to go with active surveillance rather than surgery. This requires me to have follow-up PSA tests and another biopsy in a few months. While I plan to continue to write about this new challenge, there really isn’t much to talk about until I have the surgery or at least the next biopsy.

So, I was sitting here pondering topics to write about in the meantime. I remembered that when I wrote my book Get Back Up I wanted to end each chapter with a list of the lessons I learned that I hoped readers might find useful as well. My cowriter said that the lessons were apparent in the text and that I shouldn’t beat the reader over the head with them. However, after my book was published and I began writing articles, I was told that a great way to end each article was with a list of the lessons or advice I was hoping to convey. As, you’ve seen in my prostate cancer articles I’ve ended each of them with such a list.

While it certainly is too late to go back and revise my book to include these lessons, I’ve decided to use my blog to make them available. Over the next few months I will be writing a series of articles, on a chapter basis, that expand on what I consider to be some of the more important points of the chapter. I hope you find this information useful and entertaining; I know that if you don’t you will certainly let me know.

So, let’s get started with the first chapter: Tasker Street Projects, which talks about the early years of my life growing up in a government subsidized housing project. I was one of a family of nine living off welfare and food from a surplus food warehouse. We were poor but living a short distance from our house were plenty of people who were not.

I remember as a child seeing these single-family homes with their manicured lawns and nice cars in the driveways. I remember watching the kids riding their bikes and playing with their wagons. And I remember talking to some of the kids at school from these neighborhoods and hearing about the gifts they got at Christmas and on their birthdays and the movies they saw the previous weekend.

I wanted these things too, but I knew that having them would require money and, as I say in the book, I knew this wasn’t money I was going to get from my parents. I was going to have to work for it, but how does a little kid not yet 10 years old work for money? At first I worked at finding it and the easiest way to do that was to dig through trash cans for soda bottles that could be taken back to the grocery store for a .02 deposit return. Later I found a job selling tomatoes door to door and I also earned money shoveling the snow off people’s driveways. I found that if I wanted money I had to work for it and the harder I worked the more money I made.

When I first started making money I spent it as fast as I got it. I bought penny candies and I went to the movies. For a poor kid from the projects I was living the good life, but the money ran out fast and soon I had a shovel in my hands or was digging through the trash again to earn more. I knew there had to be a better way. So I tried to figure out how I could use the money I made to earn more money.

I thought about the way the guy paying me to sell tomatoes made his money. It was very simple: He bought tomatoes at one price and sold them at a higher price, thereby making a profit. What could I sell at a profit? One day I took the dollar I had earned and went to the grocery store. I looked around and found a box of ice cream bars. One box had three bars in it and it cost a dollar. I thought I could sell them for fifty cents each. After all, the ice cream truck that came through the neighborhood sold them for that price. I was right, and I sold the bars pretty quickly. I did so again with another box of ice cream bars and then with chocolate bars. At one point I had enough money to buy a small snow cone machine, and I started selling those out of my house’s back window. I had learned that you should use your money to make more money, and it was working.

Sadly, this profit-making venture didn’t last long as my brother and I decided to buy a product from the back of a comic book that supposedly looked like a space alien. We were going to put on a show and charge the neighbor kids to see it. What came in the mail, however, was a toy balloon that popped when we inflated it. So, there was no show and no money, but the lessons I learned have stayed with me to this day.

Lessons:

  1. If there is something you want, work for it. Nothing can stop you but you.
  2. Use your money to earn more money. Your money shouldn’t be on vacation while you’re at work.
  3. Don’t buy crap from the back of a comic book.
  4. If you have start over, start over. Don’t waste your time dwelling on the failure. Learn from it and move on.

George A. Santino helps people who want to break down barriers, including self-imposed barriers, to success. Check out his Amazon bestselling book, Get Back Up: From the Streets to Microsoft Suites.