It all started with one red paper clip.

Inspired by a “bigger and better” bartering game he played as a child, 26-year-old Kyle MacDonald set out to do the unthinkable:  Leverage the trade value of a common office paper clip to create a continuous chain of bigger and better trades until he wound up with his very own house.

Posting his red paper clip in the barter section of the Craigslist website, MacDonald received a response from two women who had recently found a fish-shaped pen.  They agreed to meet up and make a trade.

MacDonald now needed to find a pen enthusiast:  When a ceramic artist offered a hand-sculpted cabinet doorknob in return, he jumped at the deal.

Through the power of barter, the doorknob became a Coleman camp stove, which was traded for a portable electrical generator.  Next up was a beer keg and Budweiser sign, a snowmobile, a Canadian ski vacation and a used 1995 Ford delivery van. 

After 14 trades in one year—including a studio recording contract, a year of apartment rent in Phoenix, a fan’s dream outing with rocker Alice Cooper, a collectible motorized snow globe and a paid speaking part in a Hollywood movie—MacDonald was finally handed the deed to a three-bedroom, 1,100-square-foot home in Kipling, Saskatchewan.

Got any spare office supplies lying around?

When I first heard about MacDonald, something about his story resonated with me.  But it wasn’t until recently, as I looked up some old book contracts, that I realized how all of us have our own red paper clips just waiting to be used.

For me, one such “paper clip” came in the form of a weeklong trip to Washington, D.C., that I took during high school as part of the U.S. Senate Youth Program.  Although I could have just settled for a nice vacation, I decided to aim higher.  Approaching my hometown newspaper, I offered to write a column about my trip in exchange for them publishing it.  They agreed to the “trade.”

I also figured that while I was in the nation’s capital, I ought to pursue the possibility of a summer internship with a U.S. Senator.  After meeting with Sen. Mark Hatfield’s chief of staff, I followed up by sending him a copy of the published newspaper column I had written about my trip.  That column helped me get the position (trade No. 2).

My Capitol Hill internship and newspaper credit proved valuable when I discovered that syndicated columnist George Will would be a guest lecturer at my college.  I signed up for his class and showed him some of my work.  He agreed to meet with me weekly to help critique my latest articles (trade No. 3).

Due in part to such preparation, editors at The Oregonian, Portland’s daily newspaper, agreed to send me to the 1996 Democratic and Republican national conventions and publish the youth-oriented political columns that I wrote (trade No. 4).

Because of these columns, I met the national political correspondent for The New York Times, who introduced me to the paper’s op-ed editor, who forwarded me to their education editor.  I ended up writing a column on winning college scholarships for the newspaper’s special education section (trade No. 5).

In response to my column, I received hundreds of e-mails asking for scholarship advice.  The e-mail guidance that I wrote back became the first sections of my first book, “How to Go to College Almost for Free,” which I self-published in 1999 (trade No. 6). 

When a Michigan woman heard about my book, she mentioned it to her son-in-law—who was one of the top editors at HarperCollins Publishers.  And just like that, about six years after my Washington, D.C., trip, I signed my first New York book-publishing contract (trade No. 7).  My “red paper clip” had become a “house.”

Perhaps all of us are “experience collectors”—gathering wisdom and know-how from each new opportunity we create and challenge we face.  Our job as lifelong students, therefore, may be to seek out the best learning experiences we can find and then to use these experiences as steppingstones to a bigger and better future.

But please remember this:  A collection of red paper clips does you no good just sitting in a tray on your desk.  They must be put into use to be effective.