The age Maxim Harris was when he was diagnosed with cancer. At 13, he runs a company.
Maxim Harris was nine years old when his life changed. He was diagnosed with Ewing's Sarcoma, a rare and aggressive childhood cancer, and what followed was more than thirty months of chemotherapy, three surgeries, and months of radiation. Through it, he kept pitching a baseball whenever his body would let him.
When the illness finally took baseball away, he needed somewhere to put the frustration. The answer started as a school class project: invent a product, price it out, define an audience, build a marketing plan. Harris designed RagePADs, a shock-absorbing gaming and sports accessory made to safely handle the frustration of competition, and refined it over months of prototyping, much of it during treatment.
The class project became a company. Now thirteen, Harris has shipped RagePADs to 46 US states, 8 countries, and 3 continents, and recently sold the 1,000th unit as he expands internationally. He also gives it back: RagePADs donates at least 20 percent of its profits to St. Jude, and as a Make-A-Wish kid himself, Harris funnels money toward children fighting the same battle he is still in.
"He built it from the hardest chair in the room, and gave the profits away."
That is the part that reframes everything. Most people wait for the right conditions, the health, the time, the green light. Harris built through the worst conditions imaginable, as a kid, mid-treatment, which quietly makes every ordinary excuse look a lot smaller.
This is the definition of a builder ANF wants people to see. Not the easy version. The one who made something real from the hardest place, and reached back to help the next kid while doing it.
He did not wait to feel ready. He built anyway, and gave it away.