One of the things that I didnt like about the ‘life goes on’ ideas shared recently is that they seem a bit insensitive. You dont have to wait until something bad happens to YOU before declaring it a problem — just sitting and moving on with our businesses and lives with mass injustice on innocent lives.. with people of dignity being dragged through streets and hurled into vans like dogs.. just moving on sometimes feels like we’ve lost our humanity.

Enter FreeRice though to help me reconnect with it. It is a wonderful idea and the types of things you would feel proud of being a part of no matter who you are.

FreeRice gives you a word and four possible definitions. If you get it right, they will donate 10 grains of rice through the United Nations to “help end world hunger”. While you are doing that they also show ads from supporting companies (and so far they have some top brands advertising on them)

Its philanthropic, which not only encourages people to participate but also gives top brands a massive incentive to advertise.

It is also incredibly easy to make — one designer doing this after hours could make the site in about a month or less.

Heres another fascinating statistic – FreeRice launched just a month ago on Oct 7. On that day they donated a total of 830 grains of rice. Exactly a month later on on Nov 7, they were donating 77 million grains…. see the stats here. Can anyone say Network Effect?

So the next time someone says “Ideas are worthless … its your ability to execute that matters… do you have any?” show this to them.

The next time someone says “Aw who cares nothings going to change life goes on” Tie them down to a chair and make them use FreeRice for 6-7 hours until they get some of the humanity back.