Pete Michaud is on a Mission

I have this audacious plan that started when I was seven. There's a story here.

At seven, I realized I couldn't be an astronaut. My Dad accidentally hit me with his truck that year, and I lost my right eye.

I wasn't as disappointed as one might expect. I have this compulsive need to rescue everyone. I want to save the kitten from a tree and the geek from a bully.

The microgravity and moon cakes sounded nice, but there are no kittens in space to save, so instead I was going to be an inventor. I doodled bionic eyeballs and floating barge cities that people could use when humanity ran out of land. When I was 12 I proved that time travel was possible if the vessel was cooled to absolute zero (given E=mc2 then mass wouldn't expand indefinitely if E = 0). My algebra teacher let me down gently, but the damage was done. Inventing useful new things was difficult. I'd have to set my sights a little lower.

Instead, I thought, I'd be the president of the world.

To a 12-year-old, success is a matter of control. The more control I had, the more I could help the world. Give money to poor people, give food to hungry people, give puppies to sad people. Problem solved.

That idea changed when I was 15 to being a billionaire. Of course I couldn't simply order the world to be a better place, but at 15 I figured it all out: I could buy a better world.

I'd start a conglomerate. It didn't matter what the business did, just that it made me filthy rich. Then I'd spend the rest of my life giving the money away to charitable causes.

This plan was fine with me until I was about 18. When I was 18, the little detail of exactly how charitable contributions (point A) made the world a better place (point Z) finally got the better of me.

I realized that in order to make a real impact on the status quo, it would take more than a title and more than arbitrary charitable gifts.

The ape in 2001: A Space Odyssey grabs a bone from the ground and thinks of a new way to use it. The bone changes everything. Henry Ford has an idea for how to make cars efficiently. The production line changes everything. Some business guys in the early 90s think they can sell goods on this new worldwide network thing. The Internet changes everything.My theory is that meaningful changes in society comes with tangible changes in technology.

People smarter than I am have said that everything moves in circles, and I'm no exception. Seven-year-old Pete had it right: inventors have the true power. They have the power to change the way the world operates, and the way people interact with each other.

When I framed my life goal in terms of specific technological advances, I lost the ability to say I was out "to save the world," and leave it at that. Now I have to be specific: how do I plan to save the world?

What can I do that would make a dramatic impact on the world? There are lots of things, but how about world peace?

How?

Well, peaceful people tend to be educated people. It's not perfect, but there's a correlation between being thoughtful and well-read, and being reasonably peaceful. Plus an educated population is tougher to subjugate. So to promote world peace, provide education to everyone.

How?

People can't be educated without having their basic needs taken care of.

How?

Food and water have to be available.

How?

They have to be cheap enough for someone who is destitute to get.

How?

What if there were some device or network that could deliver water to anywhere on the planet, on demand? What if the devices were cheap enough to give away?

How?

I don't know, but it sounds like a pretty well-defined engineering problem, and I can handle that.

So that's where I begin. I design a device that can make clean water freely available. Then I have to get it manufactured. Then I have to negotiate with whatever despot happens to be preventing the shipment that month. But, let's deal with first things first.

The prototype of my Dynamo Water Device is designed. I submitted it to Google's 10 to the 100th project, so I'll find out if the idea is funded in a little while.

If it's not, no problem. I have other ways.

You might consider taking a short break since you've read this far. Research suggests that taking breaks while working on the computer decreases fatigue and eye strain. Just looking out for you!

That's not the intermission I'm talking about, though. When someone like me has a star in their precious little eye, and they are out to save the world sometimes it pays to take a step back.

Wait a minute, Pete, time out. What about your family? Your health? Your cashflow?

Ok, so I have to feed my children before I can feed everyone elses'. I have a plan for that too.

I have this thing called goal mapping. I'm writing some software for it, but it can be done on paper. First I make a flowchart from point A (the present) to point Z (the end goal), with all the steps in between.

Then I decide how much control I have over each step and what the chances of that step happening on its own are. So each step in the chart has a rating (higher is better).

I combine the scores of each path through the flowchart, and which ever path has the greatest chance of success is the one I take. It's not perfect, but it's better than wandering aimlessly.

The path I'm taking has steps in parallel. One step is to get a job to cover my expenses but it specifies that the job should take up as little time as possible. The extra time goes into developing products that I can monetize, which is another step. Last step, I am writing a book with my wife. I know how hard it is to get published because my wife was published for the first time this year, but I am working with a fantastic agent from a respected agency who is really excited about it. The story I have to tell is remarkable (literally), and I am confident it will create cashflow and momentum when it'd published. We'll be done with the manuscript in around a month.

Those products, so the flowchart says, will provide me with enough passive income to focus on the really important projects, like the Dynamo Water Device.

A whole warehouse full of my Water Devices is sitting in front me. Now what? Do I have the knowledge, skill, and network to move them from my warehouse, across the world, and into the hands of the people who need them? What about my next project, the Food Device? What about the project I haven't thought of yet?

I need to make sure the answer is yes, so I put myself into situations that test my metal. I've been building skills since I was a wee lad. I'm not naturally talented at anything in particular, but as of this writing I have taught myself:

• Programming
• Graphic Design
• Construction Trades
  • Carpentry
  • Electric
  • Plumbing
  • Plaster
• Fine Art (Painting)

Those are the areas I am professionally competent in, that I could get a regular job doing right now.

This year, at 23, I convinced the CEO of a $40m software company that a billionaire owns to give me the technical reigns. I saw this as an opportunity to achieve two goals: maintain positive cash flow, learn to mingle with CEOs and billionaires. I'd also learn a thing or two about organizational change.

It turned out a lot like college. I put my all into college. I had a 4.0, officer positions in the business organizations and the student senate.

Both the company and college took too much time from my real work, and neither was the learning experience I'd hoped it would be.

Having tried and failed to work more closely with the board and not so closely with the dubiously ethical president of the company, I left a month ago. I knew I'd eventually need to address the cash flow situation since my passive income projects hadn't built enough momentum yet, but while I was looking, I found something else on my RSS feed.

I will be successful with my passive income goals. Money is too simple to really fail at if one is smart and diligent about it. The real question is: will I have the metal to take my resources and use them to create a network of people who are passionate about changing the world? Would I be able to handle the complex and delicate negotiations that would be required for my network to be allowed access to change the world in the places where the world most needs changing?

I've follow your writing because I know you are a guy who knows these things. Who has harnessed a network of people for positive change. Who has designed products that address peoples' tangible needs. Who has operated at a high level among people who are professional politicians (in the business world).

I follow your writing because I want to understand how you think and what your methods are. I'm applying for your apprenticeship for the same reasons.

Save the world. I'll make water as freely available as air. I'll make nutrition a given in the most isolated and desolate regions of the Earth. I'll give computers the ability to work jobs that no one really wants so that people are free to learn, live, and love together.

A problem I am always beating myself up about is that my big plans are future tense. I'm building this, and learning that -- I feel like I am not doing anything.

So I thought, I'll keep planning and learning, but I'll also make an impact in small ways right now. I do that in two ways.

The first way is my children. I have a 9 year old son and a 13 year old son, and I have taught them that world is not made of parcels of land, iPods, or buildings. It's made of people, and creatures who deserve our protection.

For Christmas, our family donates to charity. Every year my 9 year old asks for the same thing: a gift card to PetSmart that he can use to buy dog food and other supplies. We take that stuff to the Humane Society and spend time with the animals there. This year he asked for us to give money to the World Wildlife Fund to save pandas as well.

My other son has been spending his personal money to sponsor a child in Africa. A kid named Million is going to school in Ghana thanks to my son. He also sponsors a local child with disabilities, spending time with him each week and writing to him regularly.

These things make me profoundly proud -- I think kids making choices like my kids make would start a fire around the world that no hatred or sloth could douse.

The second way I do it is through my weekly Joy Drops. In a nutshell, I perform random acts of anonymous kindness in an effort to restore faith in humanity. I hope it has a ripple effect.

Here's more information:

What is a Joy Drop?
Joy Drop Mission Parameters

I'll give you an excerpt of a recent dip I powered through (you'll have to read the book to learn the rest!):

I was 21 when my dad died unexpectedly. He was a career man at a big company, well-respected, and an amazing guy all around. Highway Patrol found him parked on the side of the road just outside the little town where he lived at the time. That was the first I knew of his drug problem. It was also the first I knew of my mom's drug problem.

So I was 21, I had a wife and sons, 6 and 10 years old. I went to college full time, and worked on my own business full time. Dad died, Mom needed me, my brother and sister needed me more.

After trying to get Mom into rehab, it was clear that she wasn't ready, so I convinced her to let me take my 14 and 16 year old siblings.

I flew them home with me and I began building a different life--literally.

The only house that I could afford as a 21-year-old college student with a Brady-Bunch family of 6 was a crack house. I spent three months inside that house, in heat that made the stifling Florida summer outside seem like a cool breeze in comparison. I taught myself the trades as I went along, ripping it apart and rebuilding it into a place we all could live.

Meanwhile, in my matchbox rental house, the kids are stacked, my sister sleeps in the entry, my brother in the family room, and we make do with the little we have.

So while Mom injects her savings into her arms and between her toes, I've gone into serious debt to make the house livable. I'm trying to take care of my children, and I'm trying to get my delinquent siblings' lives back on track.

I'm also trying to go to school, work, and continue to rebuild the house ("livable" doesn't mean "pleasant"). My mom is getting worse by the day, and disrupting our lives by being paranoid and undermining what little parental authority I had over my sibs. My marriage is cracking under the pressure.

Did I mention I have a thing about rescuing everyone?

Until one day, I came home bone tired, and they were gone. My sister didn't like my rules and was trying her very best to get pregnant because she saw it as her ticket to adulthood. My brother was a couple weeks shy of earning his GED and going to community college, but he'd follow my sister off a cliff to protect her. My mom knew I'd stop them from going back, so she booked the plane tickets secretly, and they left without a word.

So if my life, which I'd carefully built around principles of compassion, courage, and hard work, could be broken so utterly, what of my grand plans? My 4.0 GPA did not save me, so surely an Ivy League MBA could not either. The people in the organizations I'd led didn't lift a finger to help. My educated mother devolved into a senseless junkie, and despite my most profound efforts, she dragged my brother and sister down with her.

How can I save the world, if I can't save my family? What if education is bull? What if love and compassion are for pushovers?

If this is not a Dip in the life of a philanthropist, I don't know what a Dip would look like.

But I know better. Anecdotal evidence is meaningless when you're trying to effect systematic change. I was down but not out.

School had proven worthless to me, and I was in debt. I was prepared because I had been programming professionally for years by that point, so I went out right then and I got a job as a Senior Developer at a Fortune 500 company. My debt dwindled to nothing as my marriage strengthened, and my life stabilized.

I knew a cubical farm was no place for me, but it got me back on my feet and created momentum. I learned what makes a faceless corporation tick, and how to navigate those murky waters. I was back working on my projects, able to move on to a serious managerial role, all while honing my craft.

Now, a year and a half after landing my corporate gig, I am not only back, but I have a wealth of experience, knowledge, and contacts. I'm making bigger moves, and I have more freedom that ever before.

I have not met my goals yet, but I am well on my way, my resolve made all the stronger by obstacles I've faced in my life.

Maybe that story wasn't astonishing. How about the time, when I was 16, that I created an electronics black market in Mexico City backed by the mafia, then barely escaped with my life after a car jacking gone wrong?

It's a long story, about what can happen when a kid with a lot of energy puts his mind to the wrong things. I told you, you'll have to the read the book - it puts everything in context. I'll give you a copy when it's finished, if you're interested.

You mentioned it, so I mention it -- as soon as I saw this opportunity I shared it with my friend and business partner first.

He will change the world some day. He's working with a hot shot entrepreneur right now on a start up in Philadelphia, so the timing is wrong for him.

I also shared the link with a group I belong to called The Root 42. The Root is a invitation-only group of creative professionals and students from all over the world. It's a "tribe" in every sense that you would use the word. The talent pool there is staggering, and I'm honored to be a part of it.

When I told them about this I received the feedback you might expect: a healthy proportion of "not for me"s and a few "I'm going to apply"s.

Finally, my wish.

I wish that for just a moment, the world would stop. There's an eerie silence, maybe a bird chirping in a nearby tree, as everyone, in every city around the world, just pauses. They all look around, as if they are seeing an alien landscape for the first time. They notice how profoundly beautiful the sky is. They look at the artistry of the building next to them. They reflect on just how much they love the people around them, and all the reasons why.

Then they see more deeply. They look at their clothing, and they see it for what it is: it's a tool, not a symbol. Their Mac Book Pro stops being an icon and becomes a tool to connect with. Cars are vehicles and nothing more. Money is means to an end. The only thing that matters - really matters - are relationships.

Then the moment passes. People begin walking, speaking, and moving forward once again.

I wonder what happens after that.