Thought Exercise: Trillion-Dollar Thinking
What would you do with a trillion dollars?
One trillion dollars is an absurd amount of resources. The best way to understand the true scale of a trillion dollars is to compare it to another known sum.
Let’s compare the numbers a thousand, a million, and a trillion in terms of seconds.
- One thousand seconds would be about 17 minutes
- One million seconds would be about 12 days
- One billion seconds would be about 32 years
- One trillion seconds would be about 32,000 years
That’s the difference at each scale.
Thought Exercise
As a thought exercise, consider what would be the most good you could do with given resources starting with $1 million and multiplying each denomination by 10 until you get to $1 trillion dollars.
When you think of impact, think of what is important to you and what would last the longest amount of time.
The denominations to consider are:
- $1 million
- $10 million
- $100 million
- $1 billion
- $10 billion
- $100 billion
- $1 trillion
There is no right or wrong here. The hope is that this exercise helps reveal some of your priorities as you increasingly think at a grander scale and a much longer time horizon.