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.