When I grow up...
First, let's talk about the life I want to live. I want to marry and have children. I'm pretty sure I want to live in Boulder. I may have to be flexible about that. I know Sarah wants to raise her kids near her family -- somewhere in the New England states.
I want to have enough free time, or a sufficiently flexible schedule to be able to spend lots of quality time with my kids and my wife. And I want to be financially comfortable enough to not be worrying about money. I don't need to be extremely wealthy. I just need enough. I want to be continually learning. I want to remain physically active.
Beyond that, I want to change the world.
I want to maximize the love and joy in the world and minimize the suffering. I want to help as many people as possible as deeply as I can. If I had to choose, I would prefer higher quality helping of fewer people. My hope and expectation is that I can provide deeply meaningful help to many, many people.
I have several areas in which I'm specifically interested: education, environment, and computing and network technology. Through these areas I would like to help people to experience persistent peace of mind and freedom from fear (that's how people can expand their experience of love and joy and reduce or eliminate their experience of suffering). And I want to help them help other people to do the same.
That's the huge picture. But I can get more specific about how exactly I think I can accomplish that task.
I want to create an online community focused around education reform. As an initial cornerstone, I would like to electronically publish Mom's book and then to expand to other contributors. My intent is for the site to become a magnet and a repository for information about education reform. Because education touches on so many other facets of our society, I expect the content will also touch elsewhere. For example, I anticipate sections about parenting skills, coaching skills, relationship skills, and leadership skills. I also anticipate sections about administration and organization of educational organizations.
In addition to collecting content about all these areas, I want to build and offer tools and systems that help people to implement the changes suggested by our contributors. This will be a mammoth task. My further intent is for this to also become a magnet for programmers who are looking for meaningful projects to which they can apply their skills.
The goal is to create a self sustaining online community that continually works toward maximizing love and joy and minimizing suffering through specific areas solving specific problems. I hope to be a leader in that community, but not THE leader. This is about empowering people, not about building an empire.