“We make a living by what we get. We make a life by what we give.”
Winston Churchill
I hate being told what to do. I venture to guess most other people do as well. This is just as true for bad advice as it is good. When I start saying mhm and getting fidgety, that’s usually a sign that I don’t want to hear it.
But I love learning what other people do. That is how I found index fund investing and the thankfulness list. It’s why my phone alarm is on the other side of my bedroom. Somebody in my life was doing something interesting and I got on board by choice.
In my experience, the best alternative to being proscriptive – you should do this – is to simply be descriptive – I do this – and to let other people make what they want of it. Not only is it more impactful, but the people who get on board will be more likely to stick with whatever it is you’re evangelizing. Good ideas sell themselves.
This is particularly true for what I consider in-your-face behaviors: healthy eating, exercise and charity. If someone tells you to double loop your laces you’ll probably just shrug them off. But if someone tells you to eat more vegetables, or to get off the couch, or to volunteer? Who the f*** do they think they are?! Mother Theresa? Those conversations don’t go so well.
For charity in particular, this is a problem. There are a lot of people in need out there. And the enterprising young volunteer, fundraiser or nonprofit worker would like more people, not less, to care about their unique subset of need. So they try whatever they can to get people on board, from polite emails to obnoxious calls on the street, clipboard in hand.
But giving is intensely personal. I’ve never played the violin, so have little connection to a charity like the Black Violin Foundation. Ditto for rare diseases, or contributions to museums. And the combinations are infinite: some people need a personal connection to a cause; others want their dollar to go the farthest; others still tie their giving to religion or politics. Some people want credit, others don’t. And some simply have less interest in sharing what they’ve earned.
I’m reminded of this every October, when my company begins its month-long employee giving campaign. It’s relatively standard for big corporations: Donate up to X dollars to an approved charity, and the company will match your donation. It’s a chance to double your impact, earn free money and feel good while you’re at it. What’s not to like?
Quite a lot, in fact. Many new employees, who receive a nominal amount, scot-free, to donate, never go in the system and do so. Many others simply donate the minimum in order to put an end to the barrage of emails soliciting participation. If good ideas sell themselves, then this one is clearly a bit of both – some employees love the giving campaign, and others find it annoying.
This could easily drive me crazy. I am one of those people who loves the giving campaign, and each year I’m surprised that others don’t see it like I do. But what have we learned about telling people what to do? It’s about as helpful as asking your teenage son to put down the Xbox controller.
With that in mind, my plan this week is to share my own approach to giving my time and money. We’re heading into the holiday season, when people feel the most charitable, and so it seems like as good a time as any to get the juices flowing. Do with it what you will.
The Basics
On a fundamental level, I view charity as a redistribution of resources from someone with too much (me) to someone with too little. This can be money, sure, but it can also be time, health, or education. Helping my grandfather reset his password is “charity” in the sense that it takes me five minutes to save him two hours. Helping someone grab the cereal on the top shelf is “charity” in the sense that I can reach it and they can’t. You get the picture. I’m pretty loose with my definition of giving and I find it makes doing something for others much easier that way.
Believing that humans will redistribute in this way is critical to my understanding of life on Earth. The opposite of a world in which people share amongst themselves is one in which they hoard and fight over things, and that sounds awful to me. So I see opportunities to help others as opportunities to make the world – or the U.S., or New York – a more pleasant place to live, for me as much as for anyone else.
A lot of my approach comes from growing up in an environment that prioritized this stuff. One of the three dollars of my childhood allowance was for the alms basket in church. One in three! That seemed so unfair at the time but it had an effect to this day. And from an early age, my dad taught me the basics of his company match program that would go on to inform how I thought about my own.
Finally – and this one’s important – I know that doing things for others makes me feel good, and I like to feel good. I view it like anything else that makes me feel good, from getting enough sleep to spending quality time with Anne. As Dale Carnegie put it in How to Stop Worrying and Start Living:
“Why will doing a good deed every day produce such astounding effects on the doer?”
“Because trying to please others will cause us to stop thinking of ourselves: the very thing that produces worry and fear and melancholia.”
My Causes
Once I’ve established the why, I look to the where. The organizations and people I choose to help are highly personalized to what I like to do, what I’m good at and how I like to give, and can be bucketed into three main categories:
- Hunger and homelessness
- The elderly
- Mentoring/education
Why those three? Let’s start with my guilty conscience first: I do not like giving money to homeless people on the street. It makes me uncomfortable, despite the fact that I believe homeless people are well deserving of my help. So instead of doing so on a case-by-case basis, I give to organizations that fight homelessness through donations and volunteer time. That way, when I pass someone in the street, I know that something I’ve done that month has helped them or someone like them.
As for the elderly? My grandfather is one of my best friends, and he’s fortunate to have a strong support system in place if he ever needs it. If that weren’t the case – if he were living alone in New York City, for example – I’d like to think there would be someone out there to help take care of him. So I try to do the same for someone in my neighborhood just like him. Plus, I get along very well with elderly people. Call me an old soul.
Then there’s mentorship and teaching, which is a lot more selfish. I love doing it. It’s fulfilling to support someone and watch them grow, and if it weren’t for those moments each week I’d find myself smiling much less. Which would be bad.
I can point to many examples over the years of ways I’ve enjoyed supporting these three causes, which is a good sign that these are the right ones for me. I could copy what others like to do, but I can be much more effective identifying areas I care about to dedicate myself to longterm. I once met someone who spent a ton of his time teaching children chess. What an awesome way to help out! And a cause I’d never really get behind.
A cool place to discover great organizations in the city is New York Cares, but before I lived here I just googled the things I was looking for. Corporate events are another way to get turned onto good charities.
How Much Is the Right Amount?
Once I know why I want to give and where I want to give, I have to figure out how much is the right amount. For both time and money, I make sure to cover my own bases first. Secure your oxygen mask before helping others. Anytime I have felt over-extended or worried about the financial commitment of something, I’ve become bitter and frustrated by what should otherwise be a positive experience. So before I think about any sort of help for others I make sure that I am well slept, well fed, and devoting plenty of time, energy and resources to the people in my life that matter (which includes myself!). Then I start looking elsewhere.
What does this mean in practice? It’s not always straightforward, but here’s the gist: Is the best use of this hour/dollar on myself or on someone else? If the answer to that question is clearly me – buying myself groceries or paying rent, for example – then that’s that. If the answer is a bit nebulous – maybe a new pair of work shoes, or another chunk of money saved or invested – then I usually look to myself as well. Like I said, bitterness is the enemy.
But if it’s not clear what use I’d be getting out of something for myself – if I’m thinking up dumb things to buy or have hours to spend at home, watching TV – then that’s my signal that I could be doing something for someone else. Nowhere is this more evident than with Flora, whose groceries I deliver each week and who would never in a million years be able to carry two heavy Trader Joe’s bags for a block, let alone for a mile. I figure that’s a pretty good use of one to two hours of my time.
Obviously this has its limitations. There are a lot of people like Flora, and the last thing I want to do is spend all my free time delivering groceries. But it’s not too hard to figure when too much is too much. If I’m rolling my eyes or muttering under my breath on my way to do something for someone, I’ve starting eating into time I should be spending on myself.
Everybody’s acceptable range will look different here. Peter Singer’s The Most Good You Can Do, an excellent book about this topic, features many regular people who donate half of their income to others. I am certainly not there yet, and that’s ok. But I like revisiting this question every once in a while and asking myself whether circumstances in my life have changed in a way that makes “the right amount” different than before.
The Nitty Gritty
Finally, there’s the how. The simplest part of the equation, but the most important:
- I double my impact by maximizing my company match as much as I can
- I “set it and forget it” via automatic deductions each pay period
- I use Charity Navigator to find for 4-star organizations that use money effectively
- I don’t make small, sporadic contributions to causes I’m not passionate about or don’t know much about
- I gameify my volunteering as much as possible:
- I track my hours in a spreadsheet
- I calculate how much I would have earned had I been getting paid
- I compare those figures to the prior year and look for growth
- I use volunteering as a way to meet interesting people and practice skills I wouldn’t otherwise
- I commit to a regular schedule to avoid making tough decisions when there are other things I want to do
And that’s that. Like anything else, giving slowly builds into a habit, then a behavior, and before long it becomes something you feel is part of who you are.
What’s your approach to giving?
– Emmett
What I’m Reading:
Why Do So Many Incompetent Men Become Leaders? – Harvard Business Review, 2013
“The truth of the matter is that pretty much anywhere in the world men tend to think that they that are much smarter than women. Yet arrogance and overconfidence are inversely related to leadership talent.”
The Teenager Economy – Margins
“The more I think about all this wackiness and assholery across the economy, it becomes clearer that there have simply been no parents around. The institutions or financial constraints that are supposed to teach a well-formed, but still developing mind, the difference between right and wrong haven’t been around.”
What I’m Listening To:
How I Built the Tim Ferriss Show to 700+ Million Downloads – The Tim Ferriss Show
“What constraints could you apply so that it does not become a monster you need to feed or a distraction?”