It might seem a crazy question – it’s an amount way higher than any of us can ever get our hands on, after all - but your answer will reveal your authentic personality and values, as well as a key to the image you want to project to the world.
Two things have prompted me to reflect on this. The most obvious is the book How to spend a trillion dollars by Rowan Hooper. It’s a thought-experiment that poses a very sensible question: a trillion dollars might be more than we can possibly visualise, but it’s not a crazy sum at all. In fact it’s only about one per cent of global GDP, and roughly the valuation of Google, Microsoft or Amazon. It’s less than governments around the world have spent on bailing out the banks, and less than they’ve spent on the COVID response. It is however enough money to end global poverty and save the Amazon rainforest. And that’s just two examples. So surely the question should really be ‘why on earth wouldn’t we ‘club together’ to change the world for the good of all humanity?’
Over the past few weeks I’ve also spent some time interviewing year 10s at my old school to give them their first interview experience. One of the wild card questions I decided to ask them was;
‘If you won £10m on the lottery, what would you do with it?’
Their responses were wide ranging and it was particularly fascinating to hear because (unlike most adults) they’ve probably never given a moment’s thought to this question before, so their answers were completely spontaneous.
It got me thinking – if we all really thought about these two questions seriously (rather than just repeating things we may have heard others say, or the most obvious things that spring to mind), what would they show us?
And how would the things they reveal stack up against the way we’re living our lives right now? What is your intrinsic values system? What really matters to you?
And knowing these answers, what can you do or change in your life today and in the future to be more authentically you?
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Photo by Micheile Henderson on Unsplash