Imagine this:  You are sitting on your sofa watching the television coverage of a disaster.  Something like Hurricane Katrina has just happened and you want to help.  You would love to write a check for a thousand dollars, or ten thousand dollars, or maybe even just ten dollars, but you can’t — you’re broke.  When […]

I can’t claim that giving is a prerequisite to amassing a pile of money, because there are so many obviously greedy people getting rich.  However, I would never consider these people wealthy, and I’ve seen a lot of them fall hard in the last few years.  As I’ve said before, wealth goes beyond money.  It […]

With money you can give gifts to charities, build shelters for animals, send food to the starving, erect dwellings for the homeless, and give money to your relatives.  In other words, with money … you can not only do well, but do good.
— Ben Stein, How to Ruin Your Financial Life

… And I hope you will come back here to Harvard 30 years from now and reflect on what you have done with your talent and your energy. I hope you will judge yourselves not on your professional accomplishments alone, but also on how well you have addressed the world’s deepest inequities — on how well […]

Why should you [give]?  Nothing says that you should.  But developing a capacity to give helps demolish the distorted belief that you don’t have anything, that there’s so little for you that you can’t afford to give any of it away.  It mitigates the anger that springs from the old belief that life or others […]