Announcing The I Will Teach You To Be Rich Scholarship For $2,500

Today I’m THRILLED to announce the I Will Teach You To Be Rich Scholarship for Social Innovation.

You can read the details at the scholarship site, but I want to take a few minutes to talk about giving back.

Why wait for a mythical day?
When I first launched this scholarship in 2006, people thought it was ridiculous for a 24-year old to start my own scholarship. My friends said stuff like, “Wow, I wish I could do that.” They said that while wearing $100 jeans and eating a $20 dinner.

One thing I never understood was the idea that “I’m just doing this for now, but later I’ll do what I really love.” I always get suspicious when people defer what they “really” want to do until later — whether it’s finding the job they love (”I’ll just work in investment banking for a few years”) or giving back to the community that helped raise them.

In a depressing yet bitingly honest post, Philip Greenspun writes:

Ask a wage slave what he’d like to accomplish. Chances are the response will be something like “I’d start every day at the gym and work out for two hours until I was as buff as Brad Pitt. Then I’d practice the piano for three hours. I’d become fluent in Mandarin so that I could be prepared to understand the largest transformation of our time. I’d really learn how to handle a polo pony. I’d learn to fly a helicopter. I’d finish the screenplay that I’ve been writing and direct a production of it in HDTV.”

Why hasn’t he accomplished all of those things? “Because I’m chained to this desk 50 hours per week at this horrible [insurance|programming|government|administrative|whatever] job.

So he has no doubt that he would get all these things done if he didn’t have to work? “Absolutely none. If I didn’t have the job, I would be out there living the dream.”

Suppose that the guy cashes in his investments and does retire. What do we find? He is waking up at 9:30 am, surfing the Web, sorting out the cable TV bill, watching DVDs, talking about going to the gym, eating Doritos, and maybe accomplishing one of his stated goals.

Retirement forces you to stop thinking that it is your job that holds you back. For most people the depressing truth is that they aren’t that organized, disciplined, or motivated.

I’m not sure I would take it that far, but there’s a definite element of truth about how we defer our dreams for a mythical day in the future when we’ll have more money and time. There’s a better way.

The 85% Solution for Giving Back
Earlier this week, I was reading an online discussion about what people would do if they were rich. People talked about traveling, starting a charity, and teaching…all GREAT causes. But why don’t we do it today? We don’t have to quit our jobs to travel — we can do it 4 Hour Workweek style. We can teach little kids by doing one-off seminars or tutoring or help inner-city women manage their finances or find local volunteering opportunities in our neighborhood.

You don’t have to quit your job and become a monk to give back. You don’t have to stop going out every weekend. We can be successful by going 85% of the way there.

My point is, we don’t need to wait for tomorrow.

If you want to give back, you can do it in a thousand ways.

It doesn’t have to be a scholarship. Never before in history have we been able to help so many people with so little. We have tools like Kiva and DonorsChoose and Youtube that allow us to scale our social entrepreneurship to millions of people. And with so many talented people reading this blog, I’m SURE I can find someone who’s the right fit to give back.

About the Scholarship
The I Will Teach You To Be Rich Scholarship for Social Innovation is a $2,500 one-time award for someone with an entrepreneurial background who has a specific plan for a socially innovative project. I’ll fund your idea for $2,500 and provide mentorship and introductions.

The key is that it must scale. Instead of helping one child (which is great by itself), I’m looking for someone who can take that interaction and apply it to 100, 1,000, or 10,000 people. For example, if you were really ambitious, you could fly to another country and donate your time. But if you wanted to make it scale, you could use your video skills videos like this or this. Or your teaching skills. Or your programming skills. How many more people would that affect? How could you measure it?

I’d love to see you apply for the scholarship.

Read the details here. And please tell your friends.