The Dream Year Lottery

On my way walking to the U2 concert last week, I noticed a few people along the way asking for spare change. I didn’t think much of it until a little later in the night. Standing inside BC Place, full with 60,000 people, the thought just dawned on me: This is a lot of people. What if each person in here just threw $1 into a giant hat and gave it to one of those people outside asking for spare change. What would they do with that money? Then the self-interested part of me kicked in, and this got me thinking. What if 60,000 people chipped in $1 and gave that all to me? What would I do?

I equate $60,000 to roughly a year’s salary – a little high for some, a little low for others, but you get the idea. If you think about it in those terms, you can look at this scenario and basically ask: If you were given the means to take 1 year off from your job, what would you do?

It’s an interesting thought experiment that reveals a lot about your values and ambitions. I’m still undecided on what I would do, but I think in general my goal would be to spend that time trying to find a way to extend that same opportunity to others, and to do so in a way that would allow me to turn my “one year off” into a more permanent lifestyle.

This is also a similar premise to the idea behind Kickstarter, a funding platform that harnesses elements of crowdsourcing and micropayments to help fund creative ideas and endeavours.

Rather than funding a full year’s worth of salary, Kickstarter provides the tools for selected individuals to make a pitch to get funding for a particular project. The project creator sets a target total they aim to raise, people can pledge money towards this, and if the total is reached, the project is a go.

It’s presumably up to the project creator to do their own due diligence in terms of the economic viability of what they’re proposing, and part of what they would need to factor into the budgeting is the incentives or rewards they offer in return – a fairly typical model found in fundraising initiatives or sponsorhip arrangements where the funding recipient finds ways to acknowledge thanks for the support they receive based on the size of contribution.

With Kickstarter, a $2 pledge, for example, could get your name on a project website as a “contributor”. For some projects, chip in something in the range of $200 or $2000 and you could be invited to the official launch or some similar type of event. It’s up to the project creators to work out a rewards model that fits and makes sense for their project.

Thinking about Kickstarter and going back to the idea of a paid year away from work, I’d be curious to see what other projects are out there that aim to do something similar. It’s similar to DreamBank, but a little more like a dream year lottery.

I think it’s a pretty interesting experiment, give it a thought:

If you were given the means to take 1 year off from your job – to do anything you wanted to do – what would you do?