One 18-year old high school dropout in Florida is making $45 an hour giving gaming lessons to people who want to acquire professional-level skills. Better yet: He has turned it into a web-based business. And he's giving other young videogame aficionados a chance to teach his growing customer base, at rates ranging from $20 to $65 an hour.

And if all that isn't impressive enough, consider this: This kid, Tom Taylor, was recently profiled on the front page of The Wall Street Journal.

Let me ask you a question: Would you say his financial future is looking good?

I love this sort of story because demonstrates two fundamental truths about making money that most people can't seem to understand:

1. Anybody who has modest intelligence can start a successful home business. You don't need wealthy parents, a college degree, or influential friends. What you need is a financially valuable skill.

2. The Internet is the fastest, cheapest, and easiest place to start a business.

I wouldn't have thought of making gaming lessons into a business in a hundred years. But now that Mr. Taylor has provided the seed idea, I can see dozens of possible outgrowths.

The first, and most obvious, is that he should locate experts in other videogames, and expand his business horizontally.

Next, he should promote one or two of his very best experts in each game to "elite" status, and sell their services for $100 an hour. (If you don't think he can get $100 an hour for that, you don't understand much about marketing.)

And then, he should develop packaged offers, combining multiple game lessons or even multiple instructors, and begin to offer longer-term, higher-priced contracts.

He should learn everything he can about marketing, and become an expert in finding new customers and upgrading (i.e., upselling) his existing clientele. And he should hire someone to make sure the quality of his services improves as his business expands.

This kid could easily have a $2 million to $10 million business in three years. The hardest part is already done. If he doesn't succeed on a massive level, it will be a shame.

By the way, one of Mr. Taylor's instructors is an eight-year-old New Yorker who goes by the online name of Lil Poison. He teaches classes after he finishes his homework, and has used some of his income to buy a hamster that he named Cantana after a character in one of the games.

Think about a skill that you have and can teach. Would you like to create an Internet home business based on that?