How Can You Help Someone for Free? A Social Experiment
Dear Readers and Amazing People,
Greetings from Austin, Texas. I had a fun time yesterday with many SXSW attendees and residents of this great city. Special thanks to BookPeople for hosting, to Betty Jean for coordinating a large amount of beer and cupcakes, and to everyone who showed up.
Life is good and I’ll be going for some of Austin’s famous breakfast tacos right after publishing this post.
Let’s Have a Social Experiment
Last week I briefly mentioned an idea to think about how you can help someone. There’s no time like the present. Let’s kick this off!
A few principles:
Despite what you may have heard, there is indeed such a thing as free lunch. We get it all the time. Plenty of people have done plenty of good things for you and me, without asking for or expecting anything in return.
Lately I’ve been thinking about scaled generosity, about how helping people in one way can lead to helpfulness elsewhere.
Last year at WDS we had a lot of fun giving every attendee $100, along with the suggestion that they put the funds toward a project or person they believe in. Since then we’ve been collecting stories on what happened with the money.
Some of my favorite stories have involved scaled generosity or multiplying effects—see Lissa’s project, Natalie’s project, Sarah’s project for our friends at Charity: Water, and many more.
This Week’s Experiment
So here’s how it works. Figure out something you’d like to give away for free. Do you have a skill you’d like to offer—something you can help someone with?
Is there something of value that you no longer want, but someone else could put it to good use?
Is there something you sell that you can give away to a few people, or to everyone on a certain day?
If you sometimes charge money for this free thing, that’s OK—nothing wrong with making money! Many people in our community are self-employed. I’m gearing up for my own overdue product launch in a couple of weeks.
But this is all about helping someone for free. So for this experiment, make sure you really offer it with no strings attached.
You can share your offer by:
a) Writing a blog post that links to this one. Our system will automagically see it and add it to the trackbacks on this page.
b) Posting a comment that explains what you are offering for free. It can be anything you’d like, and if there’s a website related to your free offer, include it in the URL field (not the comments field itself).
On Monday, March 18th (one week from today) I’ll share an upcoming roundup post with a summary of many of the links, offers, and stories. Cool?
There aren’t really any other parameters. If you read AONC you’re a smart person, so I bet you can figure something out. And I bet you’re a generous person too.
And now for those breakfast tacos…
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*The ambassador application for the 2013 World Domination Summit is now open! If you live in Portland and want to help this summer, fill out this form.
*Later this week I’ll be in Newark, and next Monday I’ll be in Anchorage. Free tickets are still available.
Image: LoopOh