Since this seems to be the week of trying new things, I’m going to take a shot at a different approach to our weekly A-Team mission. Usually I assign the missions to team members via email, and occasionally I’ll share some of the results with the general public here on the site.
But today I want to try something different. I’m going to share this mission on both the site and via email, thereby giving all my regular readers a chance to “test drive” a mission if they want to.
If you’re not familiar with what our A-Team does, you can learn more here. We are a group of hundreds of people in dozens of countries who spend 15 minutes a week making a positive impact in the lives of the people around us. We all work together on a small assignment each week, and then we share what we’ve done and what we’ve learned in a private discussion forum on this site.
So here’s the background story on this week’s mission:
I was reading a newsletter from Chris Brogan today, and he was talking about a new site called Skip1.org. Here’s what he had to say: “Their basic premise is drop dead simple: skip something of value like a meal or a new purse or whatever, and give that money to a cause. 100% of the money you donate by skipping goes to the cause itself.”
Go check out the site — very cool. I thought we could do a mission this week to honor that idea, so here it is.
Skip something that you would normally do for yourself, and give that thing to someone else instead.
For instance, if you have season tickets to a sporting event, give this weekend’s ticket to a friend. If you normally spend thirty minutes reading in the evening, spend tonight’s time reading to your kids instead. Instead of buying your own lunch at work tomorrow, buy someone else’s. Get the idea?
I’ll be interested to see what cool and unique things you guys come up with to do, and I look forward to hearing about the results when you’re done.
A-Team members, the link to the discussion board will be in the email, as usual. For all the rest of you readers, please give this mission a try sometime this week, and then come back to this article and leave a comment telling us what you did, and what you learned (or how you felt about it).
Oh, and if you enjoy the idea of doing stuff like this on a regular basis, feel free to join our team. You get about one email a week — it’ll look almost exactly like the note above . . . except A-Team members get access to the discussion board and a couple other things.
Let’s do it!
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