Why we live
View(s):Written by Anna Vital
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
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