The 1+1=4 Project

Blog

  • A Month of Photos

    Back in February and March, I completed the Month of Photos project, posting all my pictures to Facebook. Today, I thought I’d share all the photos together in one post here. I’ve rearranged the order in a few places to keep the heights of the photos on each row more even. You can click on the photos to see a larger version of each.

    It was a bit of a challenge some days to think of something to photograph — admittedly, some were more “inspired” than others. I’d imagine it would be easier for someone who works outside of the home, since you see more variety on the average day. But it was loads of fun. And I still have people asking me occasionally to share some more photos.

    Feb 19 Feb 21 Feb 24
    Inside a Piano

    		Shadow of Blinds

    		Fence Rail
    Feb 22 Feb 23 Mar 1
    TV Pixels

    		Wainscoting Lines

    		Tree Bark
    Feb 25 Feb 27 Feb 28
    Classical Guitar

    		CD Reflection

    		Zoey Feeding a Chinese Lion
    Feb 26 Mar 2 Mar 3
    Xavier Playing the Saxophone

    		Ceiling Fan Through an Ice Cream Glass

    		Between the Library Shelves
    Feb 20 Mar 6 Mar 16
    Spring

    		Two Mirrors

    		Pin Face
    Mar 4 Mar 7 Mar 8
    Flourescent Lights

    		Living on an Asteroid

    		Tree Panoramic Shot
    Mar 5
    Blinds
    Mar 9 Mar 10 Mar 11
    Roof Flashing

    		Tree Branches

    		Feet
    Mar 12 Mar 14 Mar 17
    Washing Machine

    		Motherboard Metropolis

    		Shrub Covered with Ice Cicles
    Mar 13 Mar 15 Mar 18
    Slinky on a Mirror

    		Laser Mouse Flower

    		Christmas Tree Lights

    I’d love to see what someone else would come up with during a Month of Photos. If you join the project, let me know where to follow your shares!

  • “Double Your Influence, Change the World”

    The 1+1=4 Project’s motto is “Double Your Influence, Change the World”. What that means is that you find a worthwhile cause, complete a simple project that helps the cause, and then recruit 2 more people to the project. When the people you recruited recruit 2 people, your influence gets doubled.

    Think that can’t change the world? Here’s how it can.

    Imagine you have an empty chess board. On the first square, you place a single penny. On the second square, you place 2 pennies — twice as many. On the third, you double again to 4 pennies, and so on.

    By the end of the first row, you will have placed 255 pennies on the board (128 on the eighth square). $2.55 isn’t much. But look at what happens on row 2.

    The first square gets 256 pennies. The second gets 512. The third, 1024. By the end of the second row, your total will be $655.35. That’s when things really get rolling.

    After 3 rows, you’re over $167,000. After 4 rows, the total is nearly $43 million — and you’re only half way across the board!

    When the last penny is placed on the last square, the board will hold over $184,464,259,873,280,000 — more money than exists in the entire world. If you stacked all those pennies on top of each other, they’d reach 2,420 times distance from the Sun to Pluto!

    Take a second to visualize that stack of pennies…if you can! Here’s a way to look at it: if the distance from the Sun to Pluto*1 were the size of one pixel on your computer screen, the stack of pennies would reach beyond the edge of your screen — possibly even twice the width of your monitor!*2 Look at your screen and visualize that.

    Now you understand the power of doubling.

    Are you willing to make a small commitment — to pay it forward to just two people? If so, you can help us change the world. Use the “Projects” menu above to find a project, or create one yourself.

    1. about 3.67 billion miles.
    2. a typical monitor is 1024 or 1280 pixels wide. Even a 1080p (HD) monitor is only 1920 pixels wide.

  • The 1+1=4 Project is Now Live

    The idea was born while I was brainstorming viral marketing ideas. It evolved into a plan to spread great ideas of all sorts. Yes, it took a while for me to write the code. But now it’s finally ready to go.

    What is the 1+1=4 Project? It’s a vision. It’s a philosophy. And now it’s a website you can use to get involved and recruit people to your great ideas.

    Vision

    If you want to change the world, how do you spread your influence? Unless you’re King Midas, you don’t buy up a bunch of media and politicians and push your ideas out on the world. Instead, you get people involved, and they spread the movement in the most powerful way possible: person to person.

    Think about it — which are you more likely to respond to: an ad or a friend? Yeah, the friend wins every time. You know them. You know they don’t have a hidden agenda. You trust their judgement. So the best way to spread ideas is person to person.

    A recent example that proves the point is the ALS Ice Bucket Challenge. Thousands upon thousands of people poured buckets of ice over their heads to raise awareness of a disease called ALS. Why? Because some company spent a fortune advertising how great an idea it was? No. Because someone they knew issued the challenge directly to them.

    Philosophy

    Here’s my philosophy: the smaller and simpler the better.

    Would you rather make a big commitment, or a small commitment? Would you rather do something complicated, or something simple?

    Given the choice, most people will choose “small” and “simple”. And that’s okay. Our lives are already filled to overflowing with commitments and complexity. We’d like to make a difference, but nobody has time for everything they’d like to do.

    Sure, there are people in the world who will take on big, complex challenges. But if you want to start a movement, you’ll get a lot more milage asking a little of a lot of people than a lot of the few who are willing and able.

    So the key is to find a way to turn small commitments into big results. That’s why the 1+1=4 Project only asks you to recruit 2 other people to each project you chose to participate in. And the great thing is that that’s all it takes. If you follow through on that one small commitment, you’ll have done your part to double the size of the project. Then it’s the job of the 2 people you recruit to help double it again. And so it goes.

    Website

    This website is now yours to use to find worthwhile projects to participate in, to post your own projects, and to use the tools we offer here for free to change the world.

  • Hello World. I’m Here to Change You!

    Normally, I’d delete the “Hello world” placeholder post that automatically shows up in a new blog. But this time, I’ve got something to say to the world: I’m here to change you, and to help other people change you.

    The world is full of people with ideas that could change the world, if only they had a little help spreading. The problem we run into is that the founders of many great ideas only have enough influence to make things happen with the few people in their social circle. They may get a few people involved. But then growth fizzles, they burn out, and the movement never reaches a tipping point.

    Last weekend, I was thinking about how to start a viral marketing campaign that wouldn’t require constant work from the founders to keep it growing, and I came up with a simple idea: ask each participant to make one small commitment. All they have to commit to is spreading the message to two other people.

    Just two.

    That’s a small and easy enough commitment that anyone could do it. And it won’t burn anyone out. And yet, it’s all that’s needed, because each new person in the movement will become 3 new people (their self plus two more), which will then become 7, then 15, then 31, 63, 127, 255, 511, 1023, 2047…

    Sure, there will be people who don’t keep their commitment. But there will be people who catch the vision and spread it to more than 2. And the easiness of the commitment, along with a little follow up from each person’s “Leader” should make any worthwhile Project easy to sustain.

    Movements will spread from person to person, friend to friend. The effort required to make it grow will be spread between all the participants. Each generation that meets its commitment will double the Project’s size.

    The idea for the 1+1=4 Project started as a marketing plan. But it didn’t take long to see that its potential was too powerful to limit to just that. This website is for all you visionaries who have an idea — big or small — that the world could benefit from, and for the rest of you who are looking for a place to get involved, improve yourselves, and build your communities.

    Are you ready to commit to spreading a movement to just two other people? If so, join us. Together, we will change the world.