Why Robert Nikic wrote Problems Pay
Robert Nikic didn't set out to write a memoir. "A memoir pays one man," he writes. "A method, if it works, pays everyone who picks it up." Problems Pay is that method: the one thing almost no man is taught, which is what to do with a problem besides hide it.
The whole book rests on one rule. Every problem has a price, and every problem pays. Carry a problem and it charges you interest. Collect on it and it pays you. The six moves are how you collect: say "Good," own it, find the root, price it, make the smallest move into uncertainty, and make it stick.
Where he started
He made his first dollar at thirteen, selling a virtual private server from a closet in his parents' house. He worked a hotel front desk and a restaurant floor through high school, and left community college within twenty-four hours of a conversation with a teacher who asked him for a job.
Years of failed ventures followed before anything worked. He maxed out his credit cards on one of them and was left with nothing. He has stood in a restroom minutes before signing a deal, having just learned the money behind it was gone, and had to decide what his face would do when he walked back in. Those failures became the method in this book.
Where he comes from
Born to a Croatian father and a Serbian mother, Robert came to the United States as a child refugee from the former Yugoslavia after his family fled the Balkan wars. The family arrived in New York with five suitcases, spent its first months in a refugee shelter, and started over in Kentucky before settling in Florida. He was the first in his family to learn English and translated for his parents from the age of four.
"When my family came out of a war, we learned how to take nothing and turn it into something," he writes. "You don't need a war to learn it. You need a problem, and you already have plenty of those."
The work now
Today his work focuses on the basics that decide whether a small business survives. He calls them the rails: getting paid faster, fair access to credit, selling across borders, simpler rules for starting a business, and real second chances for people with a past. As he puts it in Chapter 13, it's not the capital. It's the rails.
"I'd rather you spend your time on your problems than on my past."