Kyle MacDonald was having trouble making ends meet and felt like he
was continuously sponging off his girlfriend Dominique. He looks
around his desk and sees one red paperclip, then decides that he's
going to trade that paperclip for bigger and better things until he
eventually has a house. It starts small, trading the paperclip for
a pen, the pen for a doorknob. He meets many different people along
the way and eventually the media starts to catch on, interviewing
him and following his journey.
This definitely is not the best written book in the world (in fact
I think I could have written it just as well), but the journey from
each trade is captivating. It's such a simple idea and yet it
amazes me how much effort was required to make some of the trades.
At the end of each chapter, which is the story of moving from one
trade to the next, there were "lessons" that MacDonald learned from
that trade (or didn't, because some of them honestly had nothing to
do with the chapter before it), which were very out of place in the
book. I stopped reading them after a few chapters because it felt
insulting that a guy trading from nothing to something was going to
try and teach me life lessons.
This is a fun book and should be treated as such, if you're
interested in how a Canadian boy traded a paperclip for a house.