Scavenge For Your Own Mystery Box can be used to report on a wide variety of random trivia questions. I generally use it as survey software, but it can also be used as a scavenger hunt (hence the name) and as a ‘trivia’ mini-site. You can easily mix and match these three approaches to create your own custom approach.
Find a big box and label it ‘Mystery Box’
Start by finding a big box, preferably the biggest you’ll be able to carry. Then label it “Mystery Box.” Put it in a prominent place where you can see it everyday.
When you open the Mystery Box, do it slowly. Examine its contents for a while; savor that anticipation.
Now close it up again for at least an hour. When you come back to the Mystery Box, ask yourself: What was I hoping for? What would be in the box that would make me happy?
Make sure you really want these things before you put them in the box. It’s much better to put something in the box that you already have than to put in something you’ll just get rid of later when you find something else in the box that seems better instead.
You don’t need to tell anyone about your Mystery Box. That would ruin part of the fun—that feeling of discovery when you open it again and find what’s in there.
The Mystery Box is not just about getting stuff. It’s also about being grateful for what you have and being excited about what’s next.
Come up with some random trivia questions about your content/business
To create your own mystery box, you need three things: a list of questions, a timer, and someone to quiz.
The questions should be trivia questions, like the ones on quiz shows like Jeopardy or Who Wants to Be a Millionaire? The advantage of trivia questions is that there are usually only three or four possible answers. That greatly increases your chance of getting it right.
The number of questions will depend on how long you want the game to last. If you have all the time in the world, there is no upper limit. But if you want to fit it into an evening, you might have twenty-five questions.
Quiz night at our house starts with everyone writing their own question on an index card. Then we put all the cards in a hat and draw one at random for each round. I call out the question, everyone else writes down an answer, and whoever wrote the question scores one point for every person who got it right. If no one else gets it right, then the person who wrote the question also scores one point for every other person who gave a wrong answer.
If anyone gives two answers that are both correct or both incorrect, they are out of the game. The last person standing is the winner.
Put your mystery box somewhere in the office where people will come across it
Put your mystery box somewhere in the office where people will come across it. Putting it on one of your bookshelves is kind of lame, because they probably won’t notice it or think they have time to open it.
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The key here is that this should be a mystery box that someone will see and walk over to. It’s not a secret. The key to making this work is that you want people to walk by and be curious about the mystery box, not that you want them to hunt for it.
It can’t always be a surprise if the same people keep finding it. So make sure you put something random in there from time to time. You don’t have to replace everything in there each week, but make sure you don’t put in the same thing as last week either.
