How will you invest your dollar?

If you had one dollar in your hand and had to invest it for the future, what would you do?

This is the question Melissa Batchelor Warnke asked this question to over a dozen people some years ago, and I keep coming back to the answers that resonated most with me, that most closely echoed what I would do if I was able to think as creatively on the spot.

From Serena Keith, Director of Product at Lovely:

I’d buy a (cheap!) cup of coffee for someone I admire and pick his or her brain for a half hour. Right now I’m focused on hiring and managing smart people, so I’d ask for advice, which I think would be worth far more than one dollar and the lessons of which I could pass on to many more people.

From Phillip Stockton, Filmmaker:

I would bury the dollar in the most beautiful place I could find. I would then create an elaborate map to the dollar. I would hope someone would discover this map years from now and have an adventure to go on.

From Filip Marinovich, Poet:

Give it to the next person
who asks for money on the subway:
disobey the robot Adam
telling you “not to give.”
You are not Eve.
You are Marvelous.

From Xanthea O’Connor, Street Performer:

A single dollar will get you pretty much nothing these days, but a crowd of dollars can mean a street performer making a decent living. I get down off my crate after a few hours as a living statue certain I’ve brightened the day of countless passersby. Invest that dollar in something that makes you happy or captures your imagination.

How would you invest your dollar bill—or here, in Canada, your shiny loonie? It’s a question that plagues me some days; I come from a family where money was tight, in our early years, and still have incredible anxiety when it comes to financial matters. Because of this background, my first inclination is to put it into some kind of retirement savings plan, but I know that a single dollar could be much better used if I really thought about what is important to me.

How would I invest my dollar? I would probably leave it in a library book I recently read, with a note to whomever sees it next to place it into another book that they have read if they could, or if they really needed it, if it would make a difference in their lives, to spend it on what they felt was important to them. It would be my silent way of supporting the library, and my way of reminding people that there’s always something to be gained when they crack open a book—and something to be shared with others, too.

If you had one dollar in your hand and had to invest it for the future, what would you do?