thats very encouraging!!!! :)
everyone can make a difference in someone else's life, and that will be enough :)

is very encouraging.  pennies don't break down, neither do ideas. keep on keepin on dude.  :) 

HEY who said you can't write? that's a masterpiece up there.
just letting you know that your little cousin is praying for you. =]

Dan,

Dude, whoever told you this was a bit mixed up.  Think about it... Toronto has a population of what, 5 million people?  If you wanted to collect at least a million dollars in pennies, that's 100 million pennies.  That's an average of 20 pennies per person, which includes babies, the elderly, and the poor (who already collect pennies).  I don't think I "throw away" more than 5 pennies per year, and those probably end up in a landfill site.  Homeless people ask for our pennies every day, and none of them become millionaires doing it, eh?  Further, the whole dying and passing along a penny thing... what's going to stop the next generation from throwing out your penny and starting with their own?  Why are you starting from scratch?

I'm not trying to be a jerk or anything, but I honestly don't agree with the metaphor or the point it makes.  Plenty of people will say that they have "big" ideas - but few have the integrity or the courage to expose their ideas to others, compare, revise, learn and adapt (in short, education)!  The great and influential thinkers through time - Kierkegard, Locke, Descartes, Mohommed, Jesus, Hamumburi - did not simply inherit a bunch of pennyworth ideads from other people and add their own tweak at death.  They were people who won influence on the sheer strength of their statements and (often) their willingness to put their own lives on the line to back it up.

Got a dream?  Got an idea?  Let's hear it.  We don't have time to wait until you die, and neither do you :)  Here's one of mine: you and I probably ARE insiginficant to history, but that shouldn't bother us one bit.  Let's live our lives with our own thirst for truth, rather than worrying about being incorporated into the rhetoric of a future generation.

I think what you said portrays an excellent message! This idea of gathering small, almost worthless pennies to make something large is something we all should work towards to. Not necessarily monetarily (i.e. going around collecting pennies), but as a group of people working together to collectively further ourselves in many aspects.

Certainly when you get down to the "nitty gritty" and we say babies, the elderly, and the poor don't throw away their pennies it seems your metaphor is off key. However, the beauty of it is that even these people (sometimes considered the lower end of society by some people because they are babies, elderly, and poor), nevertheless have a "penny" to contribute. Everyone can contribute, everyone has something to offer!

As far as I'm concern you should pass your "penny" along to others in your lifetime here. If this idea is worth more than a "penny", in today's world that idea will be passed swiftly about.

Notwithstanding, isn't it silly that we're spending all this time talking about Dan's idea in the abstract, without any idea what it actually is? WTF are we actually talking about?

You have ideas, I have ideas. Some of them are worth saying. Some of them aren't, so I 'toss them away'. Ought we to pretend that these ideas (ones that make so little sense that we can't even articulate them) are like pennies added together to become worth more than carefully-thought, well-articulated ones?

"Blabadeebloo" is a penny-worth idea. You can keep it. Good luck reaching the million (presumably the metaphor for a really important contribution to knowledge).

The metaphor is sexy and seductive because it lets us off the hook. Why endure any real search for truth, any pain, any risk, if everybody's first-run crap is equally useful? Isn't it safer and easier to pretend that all our ideas have intrinsic worth, such that they don't even need expression? Then we can be satisfied to just coo "I have a dream" and feel like Dr. Martin freaking-Luther King Jr.!

With as much loving honesty as I can muster, I'm saying no. Luther King Jr. had more to say beyond those first famous words, and so should we. All of you have a great deal more to contribute to this world; if even just knowledge - you've got post-secondary education! That's a priviledge that is tantamount to millionaires saying "I'm sure glad we've all got a penny to give."

dan! how's the penny theory going. let's hear an update.