Be Passionate Like a Kid
Adults either want children or don’t. Sometimes the adults who don’t want children experience something that changes there minds. Some friends of mine have told me they don’t want children, but upon meeting my child, they will tell me, “if I ever have kids, I want them to be like your daughter.” I recently came across a video and had a similar experience.
Caine is a ten-year old boy who has a passion for arcade games. He loves them so much that he wanted to bring his passion and love to others. He decided to build his own arcade to share that passion.
Caine's Arcade from Nirvan Mullick on Vimeo.
Using anything he could find, in his father’s auto parts shop, Caine began building his own arcade. With very little resources he built something amazing. He focused on having fun and built cardboard arcade games which he enjoyed.
Like all great entrepreneur’s he had an idea, implemented it, and then faced a roadblock. Caine didn’t know how to acquire customers. Customer acquisition strategy, even for adults, is hard and for physical locations even harder.
One day, Nirvan stumbled into Caine’s Arcade. Nirvan needed a part for his car and Caine’s Arcade was located in his father’s automotive shop. Caine had found his early adopter.
Nirvan liked the experience so much he wanted to share it with others. He used his social network to find Caine customers. Nirvan’s plan was to flashmob Caine’s Arcade. The flashmob was successful. Customers showed up and paid Cain to play his arcade games.
Caine has now experienced the power the Internet. With the Internet, Nirvan coordinated customers to take action. I’m sure this experience has had a strong impact on Caine and hopefully he’ll figure out how to harness the power of the internet in the future. Not necessarily with Caine’s Arcade, but with his next entrepreneurial endeavor.
Watching the video, you immediately understand why Nirvan wanted to share his experience. Caine is an amazing kid who has a passion which is visible. Caine’s passion is noticeable when he crawls inside a machine to push tickets through a cut made in the box. It’s the attention to small details that makes Caine’s machines great.
Caine also lives in East Los Angeles. A place where college opportunity isn’t a common path. At the end of the video, I noticed a link where you can donate to Caine’s scholarship fund. Caine should never have to pay anything for college. He has a natural talent for delivering something amazing with very little. For instance, the fun pass system uses decoy pricing. Caine discovered decoy pricing independently. He also created a hashing algorithm to validate fun passes. Since he’s ten, I’ll let him slide on the strength of the algorithm.
If he was given the opportunity for an education in engineering, how far would he go? What amazing things could he present to the world?
Caine is passionate about what he builds. However, you can already see the world is beginning to change him. Caine created a shirt, which he is proud of, saying he is a staff member at Caine’s Arcade. His father says that Caine doesn’t want to wear the shirt to school because he’s embarrassed about what other kids may say. This pains me. Even at his age, he is afraid of failure. He is afraid of what other’s think. He is beginning to lose a part of himself, which makes him great.
At some point, we were all like Caine. We played with things and didn’t care what others thought. We were selfish and only did things we enjoyed. We didn’t care what other’s said. But, as we age we place value on what other’s think about us. Value that shouldn’t be given. We need to change this about ourselves. We should be more like Caine and share with other’s what we’re passionate about regardless of what they think or say.