I was accidentally involved in hearing a Ted talk by Paul Dunn on YouTube.  I heard about Paul Dunn and his ideology via the author Adam Houlahon.

I was reading Adam’s LinkedIn Playbook where he describes Paul’s work on B1G1 …. Buy One Give One.  If you would like to know more about this simple concept you can view his 4 Ted talks on YouTube. If you are not able to watch all four watch the Power of Small for sure

However this post is about one of the statistic that he showed in the Ted  talk which was titled Impact, Habit and Connection.

He showed some very glaring statistics on the need of funds to solve global problems. As per him it needs only $13 Billion to handle basic health and nutrition issues globally. This is such an amazingly small number to handle this global problem.

If we just do a small piece of maths…. if we can only give,$100 (or Rs7000/- ) and only 130 Million people (13 crore) globally do this, we would have eliminated such a major global issue will get handled.

Now a lot of us after seeing some program which shows the plight of people, feel the guilt and think we will some day help. Unfortunately the “some day”  never comes.

Which brings me back to Paul’s simple initiative of B1G1. Here he asks small and medium-sized businesses to contribute a very small amount of money each time they sell an item. Assume you sell a $3 coffee and you contribute 10 cents to one of the charity projects which are part of B1G1. If you sell 100 coffees a day, you end up contributing $10 per day or $3650/- per annum.  This seems to be a small amount in absolute terms but if you see the earlier numbers, we only needed $100/- from 130 million people to handle basic health and nutrition issues. This figure then is much larger than the $100 we were targeting.

Imagine how these kind of simple initiatives can eradicate so many issues being faced by our world today.

Obviously this may not solve the vexing problems like eradicating malaria which the Melinda and Bill Gates Foundation is trying to achieve.

However for the remaining issues this model seems to be so good.

I got so influenced by this concept that I intend to give away $1/- each time a new unique follower starts following my blog.

If you have been following my blog since the beginning I had the intention of feeding school going children in India by donating to the Akshay Patra Foundation

However I was also doing it randomly. Also I have not yet monitized my site by putting referral links or advertisements.  I do intend to do that in the in the near future so that I can achieve the same objective faster.

But before I can reach that stage, this idea from Paul has appealed to me a lot.

If each time a new person starts following my blog I will donate $1 to the Akshay Patra Foundation. By donating a hundred dollars the Akshay Patra Foundation will feed 7 kids one meal for one year.

I would recommend if each of you can also figure out a small action each time some activity takes place in your business or life, we can really make a massive difference in this world.

So what’s this got to do with achieving financial freedom.  Quite frankly I don’t know if there is any direct correlation. However there may be a Karmic relation….. like my father used to say if you give away X to someone in need, God will give you 100X.

Even if it does not give any immediate financial return, giving definately helps me feel good. And when I feel good I perform better and that may result in better financial health.

So till next time see if you can also take some small consistent steps to make g this world a better place.

And till then as the followers to my site increase I will work to donate to the Akshay Patra Foundation.

Carpe Diem!!!