What if ?

Ted Turner tells the story about his Dad and how he wanted to own a big company, have a yacht and be a millionaire before his middle age. He accomplished the big company becoming a billboard magnate along the way joining the millionaire club and buying the yacht, then finding he had nothing more to accomplish because his goals had all been attained. He shortened what should have been a life of further achievements by suicide, having lost direction once his boxes had all been ticked. Without purpose of acquisition he didn't have a life definition. As far as he was concerned he was defined by the money and recognition and when he couldn’t go beyond that, life wasn’t worth living.

So it begs the question, what would you do if you didn't need money or attention? What would you do if you were the centre of attention and the house on the hill with the big cars and the yacht in the harbour was guaranteed? What would you stop doing and start doing if all of that were yours?

The majority of our lives so revolve around the accumulation of money, we rarely think beyond the next mortgage payment or credit card repayment to what else we could accomplish. Money like recognition has a way of defining us and our actions, to the extent we can't see any way to change direction. How often do you see the sportsperson doing one more round, one more year, tarnishing their reputations because they can't see themselves unrecognised once the cheering has stopped? How often do we see people continue to accumulate because they have not thought past goals they achieved long ago? Being defined by money or recognition leaves no room for any other actions beyond the original decision to make more of both.

Ted Turner decided long ago, not to be like his Dad. Sure he gained fame winning America’s Cup yacht races and owning the Atlanta Braves baseball team, making a fortune building the first 24/7 news channel CNN and parlaying that into a media empire including TNT, MGM and Time Warner, even helping develop Glasnost with his Goodwill Games, but he has long since moved beyond those early goals. Today Turner is making a difference beyond his achievements, donating a billion dollars to the UN, joining Warren Buffett, Bill Gates and other billionaires for the “Giving Pledge” to donate their wealth before they die, cultivating a herd of fifty thousand American bison to halt their extinction, helping cure children’s cancer with his blood foundation, fighting for nuclear disarmament and generally finding inventive ways to make a difference.

Not many people are in Ted’s position of power, recognition and monetary insouciance able to make such grand philanthropic gestures but then the thinking behind his gestures are the same as you and I helping out on a much smaller scale. Think as if you have enough money, enough recognition and then what difference can you make? What do you do well, what are your passions, how can you focus them on others? A good friend of mine, always testing herself physically via triathlons and extreme training sessions, has decided to run a 250 kilometre race across the Gobi desert to raise money for Riverkids charity to help abused children in Cambodia. Lisa is not independently wealthy, nor living with celebrity recognition but she has chosen to make a difference beyond those parameters and won’t let herself be defined by her job, her car, where she lives but rather her actions spurred by a question, what if?