A Billion Pounds And Six Months

I was waiting for an AI to finish something and didn’t want to start another task. I was trying to get one creative thing right.

BrainFM was boring the shit out of me. Music was good, but I wanted something to get curious about. So I ended up listening to Kevin Kelly talking to Tim Ferriss.

Two questions caught me. My version of them:

If I had six months left to live, how would I spend my time?

If I had a billion pounds, what would I do with my life?

Then put them together. A billion pounds. Six months left.

Whoa, dude.

Obviously I fed the questions straight into a large language model. It has loads of context on me. I wanted to read its answer and see what I agreed with.

Very efficient. Outsource the first attempt at working out what I want to do with my remaining life.

What came up was relief.

In the imaginary billion-pound life, I could stop trying to get somewhere. The money was handled. I could relax about becoming exceptionally successful and enjoy an extraordinary, normal, ordinary life.

Then the six months added: shit, I better live today.

There isn’t time to keep postponing the life I’m trying to make possible.

I would laugh more. Love more. Probably cry a bit more too. With happiness, with whatever needed to come out. Enjoy ordinary things without having to explain what they were contributing to.

And I would still want to make a lot of weird shit.

Deep, funny things through media and technology. Cartoons. Websites. Strange ways of solving problems. Things that make me laugh before I can explain why they’re good.

I’d want cool people around me who wanted to make them too. Good creative souls. Technicians as well. A band, basically.

With the billion, I could pay everyone. We could try things, change them, make another one.

Maybe three people would get something out of a project. Maybe nobody else would. It could be a complete flop and I could still be happy we made it. We had a fun, wacky exploration together.

I don’t know whether to call that art, entrepreneurship, solving problems or having a laugh. I don’t particularly need to know. It sounds really fucking fun.

Back in actual life, I probably have more than six months. Hopefully. And I still need money.

So yes, I still want to build the jewellery brand well. One brand done well feels like enough.

My mind can produce a much bigger plan. Brands, data, agents, systems, acquisitions, teams, owners. A whole machine for winning systematically. Part of me thinks I could pull that off if I worked hard enough and stuck at it.

But when I imagine spending my life doing it, my heart and soul aren’t particularly interested.

I want the stupid cartoons. The stupid website. They give me a thrill. I don’t need to scientifically understand the inner nature of my psyche to notice that I’m laughing.

For the things I’d make with the band, I keep wondering about patrons or Kickstarter. People backing something because they want it to exist. The actual model is still an open question. I’m drawn to the possibility of making things together without every idea having to justify itself through the money it takes home.

And some of this is already happening. I’m making things. Enjoying them. Feeling less resistance and less of the inner judge.

There’s still some there. I haven’t become a completely free human being because I listened to a podcast.

But imagining the billion made me smile. Adding the six months made me notice how much postponing I’ve been doing.

I want to make things with good people. Laugh a lot. Give love. Enjoy my days.

I’d like to do some of that today.