What I learned: 99% of you just don't care enough

My magic carpet post was meant as a social experiment.

Here in the United States people have been ranting and complaining, protesting and posting, about how much things supposedly suck. So I wanted to put people in the (theoretical) situation of being able to do something about it.

I gave people the opportunity to escape to a new world, where things could be better. I even recommended four leaders I thought might be fitting. Even further, I allowed people the opportunity to choose their own leader.

I invited approximately 700 people on my magic carpet ride to this new world. Of those, only 8 people responded, which translates to approximately 1%. This was a very, very sad statistic for me to review. I spent a significant amount of time trying to find a free and simple-to-use survey website that would allow the opportunity for limitless responses. I figured, how could people not answer just 5 basic questions??

My blog post received 138 views according to blogger, so there were certainly more people who started the journey, just not many who finished.

I began wondering why. I thought of a couple reasons for why people were discouraged:

1) They didn't know what it was for -- they perhaps did not, in fact, trust me enough to proceed

2) There was too much text and/or to much to do to proceed

3) There was too little time (only 60 hours) to execute

I think most people quite frankly got lost and confused.

So what can I conclude from this? Well, first and foremost, if I was to ever find myself in the midst of a zombie land, I thankfully now know the group of people I would roll with. Thank you, all eight of you, for being far more awesome than everyone else.

Next, I can conclude that if I ever want people to act on something, I need to provide instructions fitting for a five-year-old: minimal text, minimal work, and step-by-step how-tos and whys. (smh)

Last, I learned that things rarely succeed with the first round. So, look out, because there's a good chance that I will repeat this or something like it sometime in the near future.