Could you run an ultramarathon, solve a major scientific problem, or write a bestseller?<\/p>\n
What if you had a deadline to do it by the end of June 2009?<\/p>\n
Sound too hard? What if you placed $10,000 of your own money with an escrow service (say, a beefed up version of stickk.com<\/a>), with instructions that the money is to be donated to an anti-charity that you strongly dislike<\/em>, unless you provide proof that you\u00e2\u20ac\u2122ve succeeded?<\/p>\n In my case, I\u00e2\u20ac\u2122d be tempted to nominate something like the George W. Bush Memorial Library<\/a> as my anti-charity. Maybe ask them to put my name up on a wall listing donors. (If I had more money, I could raise the amount to ten million dollars, and ask them to build the \u00e2\u20ac\u0153Michael A. Nielsen\u00e2\u20ac\u009d wing of the George W. Bush library if I failed. Mmm.)<\/p>\n I haven\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t done this, at least, not yet. But considering the idea at length has sure put the question \u00e2\u20ac\u0153Am I doing everything I can to reach my goals\u00e2\u20ac\u009d into sharp relief. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Could you run an ultramarathon, solve a major scientific problem, or write a bestseller? What if you had a deadline to do it by the end of June 2009? Sound too hard? What if you placed $10,000 of your own money with an escrow service (say, a beefed up version of stickk.com), with instructions that… Continue reading The $10,000 question<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-432","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","entry"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/michaelnielsen.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/432","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/michaelnielsen.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/michaelnielsen.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/michaelnielsen.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/michaelnielsen.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=432"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/michaelnielsen.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/432\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/michaelnielsen.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=432"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/michaelnielsen.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=432"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/michaelnielsen.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=432"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}