Guys from Anybe.com felt that their offline experiences with extraordinary people (they call them gurus) are able to help other people who are stuck in Groundhog Day. We found that they are much more transformational.
Ok, so what is this all about?
The basic concept is simple: you can live a day of anyone you want. From homeless to someone extraordinary like an astronomer or microbiologist. There are tens and hundreds of gurus who will be happy to show what their real day is, and the team will do the rest to let you live it by yourself.
And what is the point?
Well, many people today live quite a monotonous life. It’s traditional and starts from school years when our environment pushes us to get a certain education, choose a certain profession and live a certain life. Defined by whom? Do not ask, it happened.
Every day they get up at same time, eat the same breakfast, have the same route to the same office, do the same job, and go back to the same home. Over and over and over again. Month by month. Year by year. No matter how good it is, it may become boring.
Alright, makes sense. What confused you?
Anybe team’s intention was to help people to take a break, toggle themself, and have some fun. A mix of digital detoxing, changing a context and having a new experience. “Isn't it great to become a tram driver, farmer or coffee roaster for a day? This will definitely reload you!”
In Impactful we look on things through an impact perspective. This means asking a main impact question every time: “What deepest, longest and strongest change may this make?”
So we asked the team: what if they will design those experiences not only to entertain people, but also to ease them real changing of their lives?
“— What could it be? Will it be better for them? What do they really want to do with their lives?"
At the beginning the idea was to organize a practical test-drive of the potential career path, but it looks too difficult at first glance, that's why we decided to start from entertaining people by "social tourism" in the same way as geographical or regular cultural tourism. But after such impact–thinking inception and working with Impactful on modeling it became obvious that the effect could be much wider and deeper—we can provide real life–changing experiences.
Antonina Fedorova
Founder of Anybe Been asked delicately, many people will say they live not the life of their dream. As well many will say they do not know what exact life they want to live, but their current one does not inspire and fulfill them. And it’s not a question of being someone either rich and famous or extraordinary. Actually not so many people will choose extraordinary life if they know all it’s sides. It is mostly about what people want to do to feel happy.
Changing a life is not easy, at least how it is considered to be. Learn a new skill, master a new profession—sounds like a hard thing. And when people do not exactly know what they want, it turns into a black hole for their money and efforts. So we thought we can use the ability to live a day with so different people to try on these lives on ourselves.
In this impact-chain we have also seen a wonderful side effect—experiencing respectful feelings to very different people who are happy in their places. In our ordinary life we often subconsciously believe that our own way is the best one (even if we already lost all the joy and curiosity of walking that way). And that other people “just not yet understand some truth about life”. When suddenly we meet happy people who do something we never thought to make a part of our own life. And they share the inner beauty of their business or hobby, show their philosophy, open a vision from very different perspectives. Our vision of life turned from a railed way to a magic forest full of paths.
Quantification and measuring
So we decided to start building the impact-model from a pair of these effects. Are they measurable? Could they provide us with useful data for reasonable conclusions? We definitely think yes.
We know that there are many people unhappy with their jobs. There are many studies conducted and statistics aggregated.
We can calculate the price of a “trying a new life” and compare Anybe’s method to others such as professional orientation services.
We can also estimate likelihood for people to choose one method or another. Means what average people would prefer, to go to a professional seminar, or to have a day-long tour to a parallel universe where they really are those professionals?
And finally we can measure the efficiency. Means a percentage of people who decide to change something in their lives after a seminar and after a day of becoming someone else.
We also agree with Anybe team that feelings and emotions during the process are very important. And changing a life should not look like a classroom with a talking expert. It is much more impressive, inspiring and transformative to become someone and try different life on ourselves than to listen about it.
Conclusion
With an impact mindset we are able to see much more potential in familiar things. It may be both negative and positive. And our goal is to define it and build a system to minimize negative and maximize positive impact effects.
The problem is that our mission is so wide and sounds too general. That's about freedom. To empower people to be anyone they want, follow their curiosity and be free at exploring themselves and the world around. But we need to focus on something much more specific, clean and measurable. I truly believe that only in this way we can succeed.
I don't like common words “for peace in the whole world". I don't trust it.
But I want to make a significant change in this world, to make it a better place. And you can "make impossible possible" only if you know exactly what you want and how to measure it.
Antonina Fedorova
Founder of Anybe In our next articles together with Anybe team we plan to show what else we already have been able to see inside their product, and how we rebuild inner team motivation, and external communication of the product itself.
And maybe we will unveil a little about how the investors of Anybe met such changes in the vision of the product and the company.
