What would you do if a stranger gave you $10,000 and said “do whatever you want”?

I still remember the email landing in my inbox 5 years ago.

1 February 2021. Middle of the pandemic. Lockdowns. Loss everywhere. That low-level hum of uncertainty beneath daily life.

“Out of thousands of applicants, you have been chosen to participate in the TED Mystery Experiment…”

Click the link. Decide within a week. No pitch. No expectations. Just one extraordinary sentence:

You’ll receive $10,000, and how you spend it is entirely up to you.

At the time, it didn’t feel like a windfall. It felt like a question.

The question beneath the money

The experiment was run by TED Conferences, in partnership with academic researchers. Participants were split into groups: some shared their thinking publicly, some privately, and some not at all. The aim was simple but ambitious:

• What do people actually do when given meaningful money?

• Does generosity spread?

• And does it change happiness and wellbeing?

The instructions were clear: the money wasn’t to sit untouched. It was meant to move. To be used. Mystery Experiment Instructions…

But for me, the interesting part wasn’t the design of the experiment. It was the moment it collided with real life.

The context I couldn’t ignore

At the time, my children were six and fourteen.

They had already lost their mum to breast cancer a few years earlier. My eldest lives with cystic fibrosis: a life-limiting condition, even as new medicines steadily improve outcomes.

And yet, we were safe.

We had a warm home. Food on the table. Birthdays that still came with presents. A sense - however fragile - that we were held by systems that mostly worked.

That matters, because generosity is never abstract. It’s always relative.

As painful as our story was (and is), there were people hurting more. With less. With fewer choices.

So the question shifted:

If this money is genuinely extra — what responsibility comes with that?

What we did (and what it did to us)

The Mystery Experiment turned into a series of long, honest conversations around the dinner table.

Who should we help? Local or global? Urgent need or long-term impact? One large gift or many small ones?

We ended up donating to around twenty charities. It could easily have been two hundred.

• Local hospices and cancer charities

• National organisations supporting homelessness and crisis response

• The RNLI, quietly saving lives along the coast

• Global conservation and environmental causes

What surprised me was this: generosity didn’t feel like loss.

The money moved outward but something else moved inward. Perspective. Gratitude. A sense of agency at a time when most of us felt powerless.

The ripple effects we didn’t plan

Officially, the experiment ended after three months. In reality, it didn’t.

Two things stayed with us.

First, I invested part of the money through Kiva - issuing small loans to individuals around the world to start businesses or access education. As loans are repaid, the money is reinvested. A quiet way of letting the experiment keep going.

Second, and far more importantly, my children made their own decision.

Each year, they give away one Christmas present. 

No prompting. No moral lesson. Just a new normal: generosity as something you do, not something you perform.

What the experiment actually found

A year later, the purpose of the Mystery Experiment was revealed by Chris Anderson and the TED team.

The results challenged a long-held assumption in economics - that people, when left to their own devices, optimise mainly for self-interest.

Instead:

• Participants spent over $6,000 on average benefiting others

• Around $2,000 went directly to charity

• Generosity was similar whether choices were public or private

• Wellbeing and happiness increased significantly compared to the control group

In short: when people were trusted, they were far more generous than theory predicted.

Generosity didn’t require performance. It spread because it had been received.

Infectious generosity

Reading Chris's book, Infectious Generosity later, the experiment finally clicked into place.

The idea is simple, but quietly radical: generosity scales. Not linearly but socially. One act unlocks another. Trust invites trust.

The TED Mystery Experiment wasn’t really about money.

It was about what happens when systems assume the best of people instead of the worst.

Five years on, in a world still dominated by scarcity thinking, that feels like an important lesson to hold onto.

Not a worthy story. Just a hopeful one.

This isn’t a call to action. And it’s certainly not a template.

It’s just a reminder that - in the middle of a pandemic - thousands of ordinary people were quietly generous when given the chance.

And that the most lasting impact wasn’t the money itself.

It was the habits, conversations, and values that followed it home.

So I’ll end where I started:

What would you do if a stranger gave you $10,000 and said “do whatever you want”?

Sometimes the answer tells you more than you expect.