The $1 Negativity Experiment

One of my favorite financial authors, Ramit Sethi, sent one of his free e-books to me 15 Little “Life Hacks” That Can Change Your Life, and it has inspired me to come back and reinvigorate BreakingNorms with a journalistic feel to document my pursuit of BreakingNorms.

As November is coming to a close, his e-book could not have come at a more perfect time for me to kickoff December with an experiment taken from his e-book. For the sake of giving it a more catchy name, I have decided to call it The $1 Negativity Experiment.

To paraphrase Ramit’s description of the experiment, here’s an outline of the experiment:

Goal: Improve the quality of life for myself and the people around me by eliminating negative comments (about myself or anyone else) from my daily conversation.

Procedure:

#1. I will go to the bank tomorrow and take out $50 in single dollar bills.

#2. Every time I make a negative comment, I have to give a dollar to the person I’m speaking to. If I am speaking to the person over the phone or online, then I will ask that person who they would like me to give it to (whether it’s a stranger or whomever).

#3. If I run out of single dollar bills, I will go to the bank and withdraw another $50 in single dollar bills.

#4. At the end of the month, I will record how much money I have remaining.

#5. I will continue this experiment until my monetary ratio of money withdrawn to money given out is 1% or less.

This may sound crazy to many of you, but I’m with Ramit on this one when I think that this will have a dramatic impact on my life if I’m successful. So here’s to the first of many crazy experiments to not only breaking the norm, but living a fuller and richer life.