Lottery Question
What would you do if you won the lottery?
OK, what would you do after you bought that new car (or motorcycle), quit your job, moved into a nicer place, upgraded to non-Ikea furniture, paid off your debt, whatever? I ask because I don’t know what I would do.
This will be one of the themes of my upcoming novel. It will take place over 3-4 weeks while the main character is visiting Seattle and apartment-sitting. He reconnects with old friends and tries to figure out how to spend his time after selling a software business for a moderate amount of money.
The key to the thought experiment is figuring out what you really want in life. The hope is that it won’t really require a $20 million jackpot to achieve.
Things I’ve been addicted to lately: Flickr, RSS feeds, RSS feeds of various Flickr tags, Merlin Mann podcasts, and other podcasts in the TWIT/Pixel Corps sphere.
If I had some extra money in those quantities, I think I’d use it to fund some of the businesses/projects I’ve always wanted to do. Especially if I came into that money through the sale of a previous business, it seems like I wouldn’t be the type to just lounge around. What kind of successful entrepreneur only has one idea?
Like you said, though, that’s after going through the initial toy buying phase.
I wasn’t clear about the possible levels of wealth I was thinking of giving the character. At one extreme I was thinking of having just enough to maybe take a year off. The other extreme was the $20 million lottery jackpot idea.
Yeah, at the $20m extreme, or even anything over a million, I’d definitely be starting businesses. Even if I was totally burned out, I’d just hire people to take care of everything.
I’ll probably go with a character more on the $200,000-$500,000 range (after taxes, in the bank). Perhaps he just sold a bunch of options when a company he worked for went public or was acquired. Not as much of an entrepreneur, more of just some geek who got a little lucky. He has enough money to not work (for a while) but not enough to do anything too extravagant. The choice of what to do won’t be so clear.
To finish that thought…
The goal of this post (and the novel) is to explore the idea of what I’d really be doing if I didn’t have to worry about work. There is the very real possibility that I’d just sit around in coffee shops and surf the web. Perhaps I’d make a bit more progress on my personal projects than I do now, but I’m not convinced I’m currently aware of what I really want to be spending my free time doing. Or perhaps my idea of what is fun in the short term has become totally incompatible with what is fun in the long term. For instance, I’ve always wanted to be known for some great software project, but I’m now burned out on software.
Anyways, those are the kinds of ideas I’ve been tossing around. We’ll see if I can find any answers or if it just makes for a boring novel.
Incidentally, writing is probably the most interesting thing I’ve done lately. It is (currently) satisfying both long and short term happiness goals. Perhaps I should take some classes and pursue it.
OK… with those new parameters I think I’d like to travel. Not extravagant, luxurious traveling. The opposite, in fact. Cheap & roughing it. Motorcycles, backpacks, and bunks on cargo ships. The money wouldn’t necessarily be paying for the travel, it would pay for the safety net–for the comfort of knowing I can come back and start “normal” life again without too much stress.
And the more money there was, the more friends I could afford to “hire” away from their current jobs and responsibilities to come adventuring with me. I’ve always thought that if I won the lottery I wouldn’t be generous by buying friends things but rather experiences.