August 17, 2010

Whenever I am worried about money and the future, I tend to think of a giant amount of cash, like 14 million dollars. I think about winning the lottery all the time, as I'm sure many people do, but this is more of a calming mechanism, like: "Fourteen million dollars are out there somewhere and they are going to come to you someday. Everything will be fine." Or it could just be the endorphins flooding my brain when I think of the pleasure of winning that amount of money, which then calms me down.

One day I thought to myself: "Maybe somewhere inside I believe I am worth 14 million dollars; that something I have or can create is worth that amount of money." Now I keep that thought floating around and every once in a while I try to think about how it is that I'm supposed to "win" that 14 million dollars.

I am an idea person. I have tons of ideas, all the time. A lot of them are public art projects that have a societal value but no real monetary value. In fact, I think of them as MLEs or "Money-Losing Enterprises." If I ever start a business or a non-profit, that's what I'd like to name it. Usually I think: "if I had a million dollars, I could do this" or "if someone gave me the money, I could put together this." Recently I've started to think about writing grants and actually asking for the money myself, in my own name. Because usually the stumbling block I come upon is me - I don't think I'm good enough to lead the project or charismatic enough to lead a group or convince people to do what I want to do.

Today I was thinking to myself "if only I could find someone I was useful to" but the real object should be "if only I could find a way to be useful to myself." How do I use my ideas to create a job or an opportunity for myself that I would like and would want to do?

I'm thinking the first thing I need to do is to learn how to write grants and learn who to write the grants to. At the moment I'm thinking of doing things my way, which is just to write a letter to someone rich suggesting the general idea - a letter to Larry Ellison; a letter to former President George W. Bush; a letter to President Obama. My hope is always that my idea will inspire someone who will then contact me to implement the project. I'm not confident that I could implement the project, either, but at least someone would be acknowledging my idea and trying to make it real, which is what I really want.