On Episode 205 of Joe Polish’s “I Love Marketing” podcast he did an interview with myself and three other entrepreneurs on a plane ride from St. Louis, MO to Manchester, NH. This is the second in a series of stories where I will dive a little deeper into the answers I gave to the questions Joe asked. His second challenge to the group was, “Share some of the things that are important to you beyond business, because for some people that are not entrepreneurs they have a completely skewed perspective of these greedy business owners that are doing a lot of stuff, but in reality everyone here is on a trip like this, and have come together, because they are trying to make a dent in the world to whatever degree they can and they are caring, contributing, human beings.”
Tony Robbins talks about contribution being one of the six human needs. If my memory is correct he also talks about contribution as a growing circle that starts around yourself (think like the flight attendants tell you about putting on your own oxygen mask first), then grows in ever expanding circles around you — from family, to friends, to community, all the way out to possibly the entire world for the rare few that can make a difference at that level.
Sure, there are exceptions, yet for the most part people that have become successful entrepreneurs also have a desire to expand this circle of contribution in addition to their businesses — after all, it is not just one of the six human needs but rather it, in itself, actually helps fulfill the other five as well.
As I told Joe, education is where I have my passion outside of my business interests. Our family has sponsored a “John Raymonds (1986)” scholarship for MIT. 1986 is the year I graduated with a BS in EE and this scholarship fund was an ideal way to both give back to an institution that gave me so much while staying connected in the years to come. It is available for under grads that are going to MIT and scholarship support continues to be a top priority for President Reif and the Institute. Since the fund was established in 2005, there have been four Raymonds scholars and two of these students received support from the fund throughout their four years as an undergrad. Though it is a small drop in the bucket of the current aggregate value of all undergraduate scholarships at $1.7b, it is still having an incredible impact on undergraduates and will continue to do so for years to come. At MIT the largest source of undergraduate financial aid is the MIT Scholarship, a need-based grant. These are packaged based on a family’s ability to contribute towards the price of education. Students need to apply for scholarship aid annually. Once a determination is made about a students need, Student Financial Services then matches the student with the appropriate aid/scholarship fund or funds. Of the almost 12,000 endowed scholarship funds that MIT has, about 90% of them are funds established by individuals. The balance of the funds are Class or Club funds. Almost every graduating class from 1938 onward has established a Class scholarship fund.
Reading Rainbow. Okay, this one is a for profit effort but its foundation fits into education and its destiny is to help build a legacy that was founded in the non-profit world. LeVar is well known for Roots and Star Trek, but where he is the real rock star is Reading Rainbow. When walking around with him it is amazing to hear the call outs of the memories he brings back and, in turn, the lives he has changed for the 26 years the show was on PBS. Back then the TV was the after school focus of a young child’s attention. Today the digital world of tablets trump the TV and to learn more about the incredible story of the journey to bring Reading Rainbow back in the form of interactive digital children’s books please read the story: “Life is really unfair, maybe…maybe not”
For those looking for a chance to relive the classic episodes you can get them on iTunes, Amazon, and now Netflix.
The last thing I mentioned to Joe was being one of the benefactors of the Global Learning XPRIZE. Long before becoming a benefactor I first met Peter Diamandis by the happenstance of supporting another cause by winning a ticket for a Zero-G flight with Tim Ferriss, James Cameron, Elon Musk, and more. Yes, the flight was amazing, as was the chance to meet and to talk with the people who were also on board but the surprise of the entire trip was hearing about this XPRIZE Foundation that was actually more than just the Ansari XPRIZE that I only tangentially knew about. Speaking to Peter he approached me about the idea of doing some kind of XPRIZE for education. Being the engineer, I immediately began to wonder how that would be possible — how would you ever define point A (the starting point) and point B (your goal) for a prize in education? Education is not like space where the idea of your starting point, the Earth, is pretty easy to understand, and the end point is just agreeing how far away from the Earth you want to get. So, to summarize the beginning of my involvement:
Peter: “I would really like to develop an XPRIZE in education.”
Me: “Sounds impossible, how can I help?”
About a year after that initial conversation I became a Spirit of Innovation member for the foundation in support of developing a prize in education to which three years later the Global Learning XPRIZE was officially launched. It challenges teams from around the world to develop open source and scalable software that will enable children in developing countries to teach themselves basic reading, writing and arithmetic within 18 months. Once the 18-month field-testing phase concludes, the prize purse will be objectively awarded to the team that generates the best international standardized test scores within the group of participating children. Our goal is an empowered generation that will positively impact their communities, countries and the world. Technology is scalable — people and schools are not. For the regions this prize will target there are no schools and there are no teachers thus the resultant change for the lives of these kids growing up will literally be a night and day difference. I am proud to not only have contributed to the development effort but also to the prize itself as a benefactor. My hope for the long term future of what is gained from the winning teams is to also bring change to the way we educate in schools as well. The fact of progress is that it is sometimes far easier to make things obsolete than to change existing systems for the better.
The examples above, given to Joe in the interview, are more donation or investment centric but the real joy I have begun to experience in my later career is being a mentor. Having gone through both good times and bad…scratch that, having gone through really great and terrible times, being able to share the wisdom gained has become the most rewarding part of the life I lead today. If there are follow ons to anything you see from me on Medium you can obviously make comments directly here or hit me up on Quora.
(Originally posted on Medium)