Why We Live – Counting The People Your Life Impacts

If you were to have your last party, ever – how many people would be there? If this question itself is unsettling it is because you want your life to have an impact. A big one. Counting the people we impact, I made the following estimation.

Source: Funders and Founders

Wanting impact goes back to the question of why we are alive. Often we answer it by saying what we want to do in life. To grow, to learn, to experience, etc. Counting the people we impact, there is another way to think of this. You can focus on the impact of what you do rather than on what you do. Once you do that, you might see that you want to do things with the biggest impact.

My generation of people, Gen Y, wants to have a big impact on the world even before they figure out what they want to do. And that is a good thing. The scale of what you do is probably more important than what you do. Someone who gives wonderful haircuts in their town makes less of an impact than someone who opens a successful national haircutting chain. You can scale your vision to fit within your city, or your can scale the world to fit your vision. That is the startup way.

Counting The People

On average we live for 78.3 years. Most of us remember people we meet after age 5. Assume we interact with 3 new people daily in cities, 365 days in a year plus leap yeas days is 365.24. In total it will be (78.3 – 5) x 3 x 365.24 = 80,000 people. Is it a lot?

Either way most of us will meet around 80,000 people in the course of our lives. These are people you could offer something. There are many more people who you will never meet, and yet they might love to have what you can offer.

Sources for the infogaphic:

• Startup failure rate is 75% Wall Street Journal</li>
• Life Expectancy World Bank
• Startups grow at 5% Y Combinator
• 1000 early users – based on analysis of Y Combinator startups at YClist
• Childbearing Age is 25 CDC
• Average firm size (to determine average number of colleagues) U.S. Small Business Administration

[Editor’s Note:  This article was written by Anna Vital and originally published at Funders And Founders. Copyright 2013.]

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