How a wrong number became a fourteen year old's first real business

Allen was fourteen and wanted a summer job, mainly so he'd have money for dates. Filling out applications bored him past the point of finishing any, so when a local rug cleaning company's phone number turned out to be one digit off from his family's, and their house started getting a steady stream of wrong-number calls looking for the rug cleaners, most teenagers would have just hung up, annoyed.

Allen didn't hang up. He saw an opening. The next time someone called looking for the rug cleaning company, he answered in his most charming voice: this is not the rug cleaning company you're looking for, but I can do a better job cleaning your rug than they can, and I'll charge you less. Within weeks he and an older friend with a car had rented a rug cleaning machine and were making four hundred to seven hundred dollars a weekend, in 1975 money.

That was just the start. Cleaning rugs in a professor's office, Allen noticed an old film-editing machine and asked what it was. Curious enough to watch someone clean it, he realized the process was simple, and started cleaning film equipment too, which led to a job at a production company, which led to meeting well-known Bostonians. When the governor needed asbestos removed from a house he wanted to buy, and a realtor mentioned that Allen knew a little something about cleaning all kinds of things, Allen took a three-day course and got the job.

Edward Hallowell and John Ratey use Allen's story to make a specific point about ADHD and what they call VAST, the variable attention stimulus trait: boredom is close to unbearable for this kind of mind, but genuine, engaging difficulty is the opposite of unbearable, it's fuel. Allen's real gift wasn't rugs, film equipment, or asbestos. It was pattern recognition and nerve, the ability to spot a problem worth solving and grab it before anyone else noticed it was there.

The challenge, Hallowell and Ratey argue, is that not every difficulty is the right difficulty. Digging a hole and filling it back in is hard, but it's not interesting, and a mind like this will wilt doing it. The real task is finding your own version of the wrong-number phone call: the specific kind of hard that lights you up instead of grinding you down. Allen, now in his fifties, still hasn't stopped finding them; he recently patented a dustless dumpster system.

Sit down with someone who knows you well and work through a short set of questions about what you're best at, what earns you praise you tend to shrug off, and what feels easy for you but hard for almost everyone else, and have them write your answers down so you have a record to return to. Start paying attention to your own version of the wrong-number phone call, the odd, sideways opportunity you'd normally dismiss as a distraction. Look for the place where what you love, what you're actually good at, and what someone will pay you for all overlap, and try to spend more of your time there. And if you want to go deeper, consider taking a conative assessment like the Kolbe Index, which measures how you instinctively take action rather than how smart you are, and can explain why some tasks feel impossible no matter how hard you try.