Curating Your Dream
When “no” is not an option.
What do you do if you’ve got a dream? You can see it. You can touch it. You’ve asked for it, and been given permission to go after it… except one little problem:
Your dream is going to cost money to achieve.
Yesterday I met Meagan Nowacoski. She was sitting at the front desk at Grind, a co-working space in NYC. I know most of the Grind team, but she was a new face, so I asked: Who are you?
“Oh, I’m their first Fellow.”
Really? Fellow doing what? I didn’t get the answer I expected.
Work it
Meagan always knew she wanted to study abroad for part of her schooling. When she found an exchange program at the international business school ESCE she applied with the intention to complete that semester in Paris. Having met her, I’m unsurprised she got in.
The next part was the problem. A money problem. A $15,000 money problem.
Sure, there were loans that could be taken out. Sure, she could do an IndieGoGo fundraiser. But that didn’t sit well, didn’t feel right, and as she told me, didn’t really align with the whole point of her education.
So Meagan decided to try something different.
The Contrib(YOU)tion Experiment
What if, instead of just getting a hand out, she could get some experience to fund her way to Paris?
Meagan’s seat there at the front of Grind was part of this. Her “Fellowship” gives her access to the $15K she needs. Not directly. Not in some outright lump sum.
She’s been given access to to a pool of people that always need something done, and Meagan is really willing to do anything. From miro-projects to massive, the span of what she’s willing to do is inspired.
She posted up some suggestions of projects on her site.
Here are 5 examples of what that might look like:
1. An individual would like to minimize. Instead of dropping their discarded items off at Salvation Army or Goodwill, they ask me to spend a day finding people who could specifically use the items being given away. While doing this, I would have the opportunity to collect the stories of each person and possibly help them more.
2. Coca-Cola challenges me to spend a day “Sharing Happiness,” in New York City as a public CSR stunt for sharable video content. The specific ways to go about the actual “sharing of happiness” are endless (and up to some collaboration with the creative team.)
3. A creative agency would like me to do a special study on a certain demographic of Parisian culture that requires a lot of positive interaction with individuals in Paris.
4. A person keeps planning to donate a certain number of hours to a soup kitchen, but something always comes up. It is one of those things that nags at their conscience, so they ask me to go on their behalf and sleep easy knowing that it was done because of them.
I have to say, talking to Meagan was a serious kick in the pants. I felt like I’d somehow missed the boat suddenly, that we all had. She was so excited and energized about every project she was getting to work on. This wasn’t just drive to succeed. This wasn’t born of a desire to improve resume, or to make that first million, or some other abstract socially constructed .
She had a goal.
Every drop in the bucket and every minute spent working was getting her closer to something very specific: Going to Paris.
Goal Oriented
People are always putting “goal oriented” on their resumes and I’ve never really understood this. I mean, doing work is being “goal oriented” otherwise it wouldn’t be work, would it?
Meagan’s project reframes all this. She’s taken it back a step or to to gain perspective and make things all more obvious.
She’s teating work like some folks treat “hiring a milkshake.”
Gerald Berstell conducted some now rather famous research to increase McDonald’s milkshake sales. Everyone else was asking people if they wanted their shakes to be chocolatier, thicker, chunkier or colder. They’d change these things up, give people what they were asking for, and guess what?
The sales didn’t budge.
Berstell was the only one who went and sat at a resturaunt all day. He watched who ordered milkshakes,who they were with, what time they were buying them. After a day or so, he found that 40% of milkshakes were being bought in the morning. They were the only thing the person would buy. The person would be alone.
What?
He went on to find out the why. By asking the right people the right question, the ones who were already driving the milkshake market Berstell discovered “the job” that the milkshake was doing. It was occupying people during their long, tedious, traffic congested commute. It was thick enough to last the thirty plus minutes, it was contained so wouldn’t leave them covered in crumbs, it wasn’t going to burn them [McDonald’s had some trouble with that one time…].
What does this have to do with Meagan?
She’s asked the right question of the work she’s doing. Not only that, but she’s asking people to give her jobs to do in the right way. Every hour she puts in is getting her closer to Paris. It’s a bit longer of a “flight” than other folks will take, but it’s also winding up a lot more enjoyable. Certainly more enjoyable than so many folks find the work they do each day.
Meagan’s “flight” includes these projects so far:
GEEK SEARCH: Chris Duggan
Challenge: Research project in the tech industry focussed on various avenues in web development.
Status: Complete!
Scholarship: $175
DOMAIN GAIN: Mike Schroll
Challenge: Come up with a creative and accessible domain for new web application that filters through your mass consumer email subscriptions. Title must be the base for a fresh, recognizable brand.
Status: Complete!
Scholarship: $50
GAMES AND NUMBERS: Jeffrey Gural
Challenge: Research project on the historical data of the gaming industry.
Status: Complete!
Scholarship: $2,000
Why am I doing this?
It’s easy these days to forget why we’re roped to a computer all day. It’s easy to escape, to procrastinate, to wind up making work take longer than it should.
Is the problem really that we don’t like our jobs? Is the solution really to somehow fit everyone to a job that’s perfect for them? Or maybe, is it that we’ve thorougly obscured the point of our work. Where is each dollar is going? Maybe we need to tie back to the satisfaction we’d get knowing when you sent off that pitch deck “That’s another week of rent paid” or when you shipped that design “That’s another day visiting mom.”
I think we could all afford to think a bit more like Meagan. At the very least, I think we’d all be a bit happier.
In the meantime, I’ve got a project for her.
