My daughter never became a collector. However, she did benefit from her time in the hobby as a child. She is now 25. I asked her what she learned working in a coin store and what she learned as a YN page at conventions. Her first answer was "Not much. I never collected coins." I asked her what Life Lessons she learned and she rattled off this list: 1. Be on time. 2. The more you work, the more you make. 3. Huge sacks of money have no value. 4. Sitting around is not an option. 5. Work can be boring. 6. Education matters. 7. Tip the bartender. 8. You don't make money sitting down. 9. It is all about trade. 10. You make more money working for yourself. Selene's 10 Rules of Work pretty much stand on their own. I do want to go into some detail on 3, 6, and 9. Working for a coin store pretty much got her over the childhood idea that large amounts of money objects must equate to riches. The coins, etc., had "no value" until and unless someone bought them. They were no different than clothes on a rack at the Gap. Education to her meant both schooling and knowing your business. While arithmetic and English are pretty well universally required, none of the people she knew actually had any kind of high school or college classes or degrees in numismatics. Obviously, however, they all knew a lot of about different aspects of coins, paper, etc. So, she learned that there are two equal sides to "knowledge." You need school, but school is not enough. While working in numismatics, she kept track of the spot prices for silver and gold, mostly for her own needs as a consumer of jewelry. "Trade" meant knowing the markets, a clarification of the education issue. You could "know" a lot about coins and still lose money all the time -- which she saw collectors doing all too frequently. "Trade" is about charisma and that truth was reinforced by Moria, a Dungeons and Dragons role playing game we all ran on VAX accounts when my wife and I worked at the local community college. So, the bottom line is that I am sorry that the kid never got the collecting bug. The best I can get is that she does swap out any "interesting" coins from work and throws them in a jar at home. Mostly, working with money taught her about money -- and I guess that is something.
If she learned that in 25 years then she is doing good, I know a lot of people twice her age that still han't figured that out. M
