How Would You Invest $100 in a Meaningful Way?

On the last evening of the World Domination Summit, Chris Guillebeau gave everyone in the audience $100 to invest in a meaningful project or person.

Yes, all 1,000 attendees walked away with $100.

It’s a cool idea on many levels: it’s great promo for Chris’ new book, The $100 Startup, and it directly supports the idea of giving back that we talked about so much at WDS. Even better, many conference attendees are online influencers, which means they’ll share the story of their investment with their community (like I’m doing now) or even ask their community to participate. In many cases, that $100 will multiply.

But two weeks after the conference, I still haven’t decided how to invest my $100.

I’m a big believer in giving back; I sponsor a (polygamous) Cameroonian family (with 18 kids) every year so all the kids can go to school and university, I used to organize a holiday adopt-a-family program when I worked in a newsroom, and I look for opportunities to mentor other side-hustlers and newbie entrepreneurs.

But I don’t just want to give this $100 away. I, too, want to think of a creative way to help it multiply.

The bar is high: WDS participants are doing COOL things with their money (here’s just one example). But every time I try to think of a creative way to invest, I’m paralyzed by that high bar. No idea seems good enough!

Does this ever happen to you when it comes to writing, starting a company, creating a new product? Yeah, so you know how it feels. Sometimes when we set expectations too high, we never even get started.

So right now I’m throwing that high bar out the window — both for myself and for YOU. Because I’m hoping YOU will help me figure out how to invest this money, how to use it to inspire and encourage others. And if we ditch the high expectations, our brainstorm is likely to be far more fruitful.

How would YOU invest $100 in a meaningful way?

(Unless you request otherwise, I reserve the right to steal and act on your ideas.)

Oh, and I have a copy of Chris’ book, The $100 Startup, to give away. If you leave a comment here, you’ll automatically be in the running. I’ll pick a winner randomly on Thursday night (7/26) and announce it on the blog Friday morning.