How My Grandpa has Influenced Me
Over the course of my life there have been many people who have influenced me. I would have to say that the person who has influenced me the most is my grandpa. My grandpa has been teaching me to seize every opportunity there is to do something that will benefit me since I was a little kid. My grandpa has always shown me how to manipulate any situation so that I come out on top.
One time when I was about seven years old I was watching a football game with my grandpa, my uncle, and my older cousins. We used to like to bet on each play’s outcome and being only seven years old I’d usually loose. My uncle and cousins all wanted to go get food on the commercial so they ran to kitchen to tell my grandma what they wanted her to have ready for them on the commercial. As they left the room my grandpa put a tape in the VCR and set it to tape the channel the game was on and then switched the input of the TV so the cable box would still read the channel the game was on even though we had switched to a channel that was showing commercials. When the rest of my family came back into the room they saw the commercials on the TV and went back to the kitchen to eat. My grandpa and I then watched and taped the next seven or eight plays until the commercials for the game really started, at which point my family was coming back into the room, and then played the tape during the commercials and bet on each play. I won like 150 dollars. It was awesome.
It might be a little puzzling that I was so happy that my grandpa had seemingly robbed his own family. There is another side to my grandpa that has influenced me a great deal. My grandpa is extremely generous and he is perhaps the most selfless person I’ve ever met. The thing is that my grandpa didn’t want my uncle, my cousins, or myself getting into the habit of gambling away our own money, so before each football game he’d give us some of his money to bet with. My grandpa would always give me more money than anyone else; he’d always say that he’d rather me have the money than my uncle or cousins because they all had jobs and I didn’t. When I won all that money it was, at that point, the happiest I’d ever been. My grandpa let me keep it which made me even happier.
Though my grandpa was successful in teaching me the value of money he also managed to inspire a lifestyle that has not yet created a problem for me, but that I fear will be a problem for me in the future. I’m extremely fond of money. Ever since that day when I won 150 dollars I’ve always been looking for a ways to make more money. In the last 10 years I’ve managed to increase my 150 dollars by about 40 fold. Keep in mind this does not include the money I’ve earned at work or that that my family has given me, this is money I’ve earned from hustling people. Though now and for the past 10 years I’ve only been hustling people in video games, ping-pong, pinball, and foreign soccer games that I’ve already watched, in four years I will be 21 and I fear that I may be tempted to bring my scamming into the world of gambling.
My grandpa comes from a family of entrepreneurs. When my great grandpa and his brother, my great, great uncle, came to the United States from Russia with nothing they began manufacturing a certain kind of curtain and selling them in a store. When my grandpa and his brother, my great uncle, were old enough they expanded that store into a huge factory. I hope that I will take my knack for squeezing money out of people, which I can attribute to my grandpa, and apply it legally to a business of some sort once I finish college.