Needle, Meet Haystack

What’s your dream job?  Do you wish you were an astronaut?  Or a pirate?  Maybe you have a secret desire to be a chef, or to try your hand at politics.  Are your dreams a bit more altruistic, like speaking to thousands as a motivational speaker?  Hell, maybe your dream job is winning the lottery and having no job at all.

My ideal employment situation is a bit different.

I want people to buy shares of me.  Like with a corporation, you purchase stock in Andrew.  You hedge your bets on my future success, and your investments go towards an ROI based on my career, education and life paths.  Maybe I’ll turn out to be some super-genius inventor, or a keen analytical mind.  Maybe I’ll sit on the couch and eat cheez doodles all day.  Basically, I want people to pay me to be myself and do what I want to do.

Like, let’s say I want to take piano lessons so I can work on music production.  Stock in Andrew will appropriately rise or fall depending on how smart or stupid they feel that this goal is.  Market forces may drive some of my decisions, leading to a more positive outcome overall.  I’ll be crowd-sourcing my future.  Financially.

If this seems far-fetched, consider how scholarships and employment are given out.  A prospective student will receive financial aid based on their previous performance in hopes that they will (at least) replicate that success on campus.  Universities bank on these students bringing the school more rave reviews, boosting some of its student population stats, and maybe even getting them some news coverage, all of which serves to bring in more students.  An office will hire someone and pay for them to work on the hope that they will increase office productivity, deliver more results, and contribute to the corporate culture in a positive way.

So this is really just an extension of that – investing directly in a person, with payouts given based on their success.  Or, to look at it another way, it’s a non-artistic, non-political patronage.  Heck, I could even get the government in on the action and apply for a grant.

Maybe your dream is like mine, to have a whole mess of people paying you boatloads of money to look at stupid stuff on the Internet all day.  But maybe there’s already some people paying you to do your own thing, having invested in you because they believe that you’re capable of great things.

Or maybe they just want to watch you sit on your couch eat cheez doodles all day.