Some Ideas for the New Year - Part 2

Two more intriguing projects I've come across and am considering for 2011. I like them both because they encourage you to think BIG:

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The first one is to start a "101 in 1001," a project in which you set 101 goals to complete in 1001 days, which works out to be about two and a half years. My twitter friend (and fellow Alpha Chi) Mandy introduced me to the concept and set up a great list that she's working on. I had a chance to explore a great website promoting the project dayzeroproject.com/ before it went on an unscheduled outage. One of the best parts of the site is a list of the 101 most popular items people include on their lists (though I laughed to see I had done 51 of the 101). Stay tuned and see if I can find 101 things to include!

The second item also came to me via Twitter - the words consumption offset caught my eye as the twitter stream rolled by. The link took me to this post Continuing the Pledge by a guy named Ping who lives in Berkeley. Actually I doubt that's his actual name... but in any event, he started 2010 with the idea of making donations to charities to offset non-essential consumption in his life. Essential purchases include housing, food, transportation and the like; non-essential are the extras, like eating out, traveling, and buying gadgets, books, and electronics. His goal was to try to offset some of the suffering in the world. I learned more about his concept from his post at the start of his experiment, on Jan 1st 2010: An idea for 2010: personal consumption offsets His pledge: "In 2010, I'll match everything I spend on a non-essential purchase with an equal donation to an effective charity." I was especially impressed with the thoughtful way he approached, successfully completed and continues the project.

While we make charitable contributions and we try to be deliberate and thoughtful about it, Ping's project put a new spin on the questions of how much and why we give.