Locking myself into a room until I donate €1M.
Disclaimer: While the ideas and content are my own, I used AI to improve the writing, style, and grammar.
Can relentless obsession turn into €1,000,000 worth of good?
That is the question I am determined to answer for myself.
Until I reach my goal of earning and donating €1,000,000, I will, figuratively speaking, lock myself in my room and dedicate nearly all of my waking hours to my full-time job and building my “founding to give” business alongside it.
I must admit that this is not an original idea. I was inspired by this YouTube video about an entrepreneur who adopted an extremely regimented lifestyle while working toward his goal of earning one million dollars.
I want to apply that same intensity to an objective I find more meaningful: not merely earning €1,000,000, but also giving it away to the most effective charities.
What I mean by locking myself into a room is defined by the following rules:
1) Work 12 hours a day, every day, divided between my full-time job and my founding-to-give business. There are no weekends or scheduled days off.
2) Make the schedule sustainable by sleeping eight hours every night. When working on the business, I work in blocks of 90 minutes, with 30 minutes of rest between each block. Rest can include walking, meditating, journaling, light exercise, or listening to music.
3) Cut out all distractions: no social media, YouTube, movies, television or gaming.
4) Retain only enough money to cover basic food, shelter and essential living expenses. All remaining money will either be reinvested into the business to increase its future earning potential or donated to effective charities.
5) Continue following these rules until I have actually donated €1 million to effective charities.
Why am I doing this?
Because I believe this may be my best bet at doing the most good.
While searching for a high-impact career, none of the direct-work opportunities I encountered spoke to me or felt like a particularly strong fit. I found myself much more drawn to earning to give.
My first plan was to pursue quantitative trading, a field known for both its high earning potential and its highly competitive hiring process. However, after two separate rounds of applications and being rejected everywhere, my chances of landing a quant job seemed close to zero.
During that period, I landed a different job in finance and came up with a business idea.
I truly believe in this business and currently consider it my best personal fit to creating a significant amount of positive impact.
Of course, believing in an idea and working hard do not guarantee success. There are countless variables that determine whether a business succeeds or fails, and most businesses fail. I understand that mine has a high chance of failing as well.
But I would rather make a serious attempt and fail than spend the rest of my life wondering what might have happened if I had fully committed myself.
A personal experiment for myself, not a guideline for others.
I want to make it very clear that I do not necessarily believe this lifestyle will lead to the greatest impact for everyone, nor am I advocating that others adopt it.
There are two main reasons for this.
First, there is much more to life than working and trying to maximize impact. I hope everyone in this community can have a healthy and happy life alongside the impact they create. Finding the right balance between doing good and living a fulfilling personal life is a deeply personal question.
Second, more hours worked do not necessarily lead to greater impact. An additional hour of relaxation or socializing may improve focus, make you more efficient or prevent burnout.
Okay, so then why am I really doing this?
I wish I could say that the answer is something heroic, that I am sacrificing everything for the greater good of humanity.
But the truth is that, for me, this is not entirely a sacrifice. It is something I would probably be drawn to doing anyway.
I have always had an obsessive personality.
When I first discovered chess, I spent my days doing almost nothing else. When I was not playing matches, I was reviewing my games, solving puzzles, or watching educational videos by chess grandmasters.
When I first became interested in fitness, I worked out every day, tracked every calorie and gram of protein, tried very hard to create the perfect workout routine to maximize muscle gain and spent much of my remaining time watching videos of other people vlogging their workouts.
Obsession can be unhealthy, unproductive, or directed toward things that ultimately do not matter. I do not want to glorify it. I simply want to figure out if I can point that part of myself toward something more meaningful.
Instead of obsessing over a chess rating, a physique, or another purely personal goal, I want to obsess over creating as much positive impact as I can. That, to me, is a life well spent.
Thanks for taking the time to read this. Now if you’ll excuse me I’ve got some work to do.
As described, this doesn’t seem to contain
- time with friends
- seeing family, especially if they don’t live in the same city
- recuperation time if you get sick
I suggest having some tripwires built in, like “If my closest friend says ‘you are not ok, you should pause,’ I will take X steps.”
So you have got a question that you want to answer, and the goal is admirable, and you have stated a success criterion. However, don’t you think it might be healthy to also pre-commit to criteria around when to give up the experiment?
All power to you then—what’s the business?
Cool idea! I like the move of taking a selfish ambitious drive and trying to transform it into something more altruistic.
I admire the hustle and hope you succeed.
But as many others have said, this is a recipe for burnout. If a friend said they intended to do this, I would try quite hard to talk them down.
I downvoted your post because I think this is really unhealthy, and that no amount of caveating can save it from promoting unhealthy behaviour to the rest of the community.
It’s plausible to me that it inspires ambitious behavior more than unhealthy behavior. Most people do not have obsessive personalities, and €1M is a reasonable amount for a dedicated person to donate over a few years.
84 hour weeks are also common in industries like investment banking. If someone said they were giving up all distractions, working 84h weeks as an investment banking VP and donating 70% of their salary for 3 years, we would just call them dedicated. So I think the only caveats that are needed are to ensure the path to €1M is realistic and to avoid burnout.
I don’t think this is true for the vast majority of dedicated people, especially someone using € as their currency instead of USD, CHF, or AED. (I would strongly recommend @Andrew Neiman🔸 to focus on moving to a wealthier country with lower taxes before focusing on working hours)
Even when donating €50k a year (the entire yearly net salary or >90% of Germans) it takes 20 years to donate €1M, my sense is that for dedicated solopreneurs even getting €1M in revenue after a few years is considered a huge success, so €1M donated in 10 years would be really impressive.
Median european seed stage pre-money valuation is €5.0 million. People often raise the seed round within 1-2 years of starting. So €1M is donating 20-40% of your company.[1]
Of course a large fraction of companies never make it even so far as a seed round. It’s very hard to figure out what reference class someone should be in but it is worth noting that there are a good number of people who read this forum who have achieved valuations greater than that average within a couple years of trying.
The commitment as stated is “actually donated €1 million”, unclear if donating part of a company counts.
Hmm I think you’d have to really think this is a big threat to justify downvoting rather than disagree-voting. The post itself was well written, so isn’t it something we can discuss and politely disagree with?
I also feel like this meme has been present in EA for a long time already, and although some people have burnout I imagine a lot of others (like me) could do more and might find this kind of post motivating.