Ever since I can remember, I’ve loved reading and writing, and I owe that to my family. I remember being seven or eight years old when I started my first business: a small lending library with about twenty to thirty children’s books. I would lend books to my friends and neighborhood kids. No money changed hands, of course; instead, we traded favors and other things. For example, I might get some time playing on the game console owned by the boy across the street, borrow videotapes from a neighbor, or exchange books with a girl who lived a few houses down.

It was a wonderful experience and the starting point of what I have become—and what I still aspire to become: a business and marketing strategist and developer who writes stories, narrates society and everyday life, and, before too long, becomes a filmmaker as well.