A bone to the dog is not charity. Charity is the bone shared with the dog, when you are just as hungry as the dog.
-Jack London
Recently I have been engaged in working with a charitable organization… this organization provides a superior education to our children at a very reasonable cost but convincing people to give money has been an arduous task.
I think that many people feel that Charity is giving a few dollars to make themselves feel good, but real charity in my opinion is giving so much that you have to either sacrifice something or you have to worry and hope that more money will come your way in the future.
I’m often skeptical of the word “karma” but sometimes, just sometimes things come back on you two-fold and make you say “whoa”.
In the past 6 months the following events surrounding charity have happened to me:
I donated a sizable amount of money to a charity, put in time and served on a few comittees. At the same time I was purchasing a new house. The new house was substantially more expensive and left me carrying two mortgages… two VERY BIG mortgages.Literally the day that we closed on our new home purchase, a random family out of the blue contacted us about our existing house (our existing house was not on the market). They had been looking for a home for over a year, drove by our house, fell in love with it and absolutely “had to have it”.
We paid no brokers and walked away from what could have been a burdensome financial obligation. An amazingly random turn of events. 3 weeks later we closed on our old home at 10% over what we had paid for it only a year prior. In this market, many people would call that a f**king miracle!
I agreed to donate $200,000 to the same charity… the following morning an extremely wealthy individual whom I had never met or corresponded with contacted me and offered me $300,000 for something that had cost me only a few dollars (a domain name) several years ago.Not only is the donation tax deductible, but the profits on the name are long term capital gains on intangible property which means we get to take advantage of the 15% tax rate on those profits.
I am not foolish and have received many offers on this particular domain, so I took it. Truly an unbelievable turn of events.
In any case, I wrote this post in an attempt to inspire those who hoard their money and to encourage those people to GIVE money that they think they can not afford.
If you’re reading this and wondering “is he talking about me?” then the answer is probably yes, especially if you or your children are part of the organization to which I am referring.
I’ll end with this anonymous quote:
I’ve learned that money is a lousy way of keeping score.
So my partner Andy and I invented this pretty neato company a few years ago named iCall and it essentially breaks down barriers to communications because it lets people make 100% free phone calls. Pretty neat huh?
Well when the iPhone came around and Apple opened up their developer store, we knew that iCall on the iPhone was a match made in heaven. We put together this video (sorry, there was a baby screaming in the background before we got booted out of starbucks for filming).
So anyways, everybody pretty much flipped out about it, we made the new york times, washington post, tech crunch, gizmodo, engadget, and many others… the blogosphere has been buzzing with the fact that we put something simple together. Our phones have been ringing off the hooks, deal after deal has been just handed to us, and we’ve received more than the normal number of inquiries from investors interested in giving us money.
One thing even more amazing happened though, we started selling iPhones, literally hundreds many thousands of people have contacted us telling us that they have bought an iPhone now, only because the iCall app will give them the ability to ditch their landline for good. Why couldn’t they ditch their landline for good before??? Because AT&T has bad coverage in many areas, so despite the fact that people LOVE their iPhones, they are unable to use them in their primary place of business or home quite often… iCall to the rescue! The bells and whistles are all great, but it turns out that what people really want from us is just the ability to make and receive calls when they are at home.
Interesting how you can invent a product for one reason, expecting certain features to be the hot ones, and then it turns out that other features/reasons are the hit.
In any case, i’m off to watch some cheap tv, but iCall will be on the iPhone soon.. very soon, we’re just polishing up a few items so that our app (like many in the app store) isnt riddled with bugs.
I’m sitting here at Newark and my plane departs in 20 minutes. The moment they announced boarding everybody rushes to the front as though they are giving away money inside the plane.
This is a 7 hour flight to Vancouver. What is the hurry to get seated? I understand if you have a huge carry-on that you need to get in the overhead, or even if you’re flying first class because you want to chug your first free drink as quickly as possible… but given that coach class is essentially as comfortable as standing in a New York subway during rushhour, why would people possibly want to spend an extra 20 minutes on the aircraft if they don’t absolutely have to?
Herd mentality at it’s best “everybody is in line, I better get in line too, I better hurry!”.
Ok… now they are making final call and me and 3 other smart passengers are walking up to the gate with no line and will spend 20 minutes of our lives doing something more fun like blogging or watching the news.
So it’s been about 3 months since my last flight. Why is that do you ask? What does the picture on the left have to do with my lack of flying?
Well, basically that is what flying at night is like and about 3 months ago I took my last night flight. It was… how do i say… frightening. Every blinking light looked the same, the night sky made it visually obvious how many planes were around us at all times, and out of these 9 million blinking lights, supposedly one of them was the runway. In addition to the visual difficulties, my ability to judge my altitude was completely thrown for a loop, 200 feet, 20 feet, 5 feet from the runway all felt the same. Basically like trying to fly while taking LSD and covering one eye. Thankfully my instructor knew which one was the runway but until we were about 40 feet away from the runway I still had a very hard time identifying it. I’m not color blind, have good vision, I guess it takes some practice, in the mean time I plan on avoiding night flying like the plague.
If I ever get stuck up in the air at night, my solution is just to circumnavigate the globe until I reach a country with sunlight.
Seriously though, I’ve gone through my usual personal cycle of becoming completely immersed in work for a few months and at the end of these cycle’s I usually start looking for things to buy and things to do…. So I’m really looking forward to getting back to flying but I’m having an instructor with me at all times until I get over my jitters and get comfortable with landings again.
Ok I admit it… when I was a teenager I was a video game nerd and my favorite game of all time was Street Fighter 2. The graphics were great for the day and age and my friends and I blew every allowance playing for hours during the pizza buffet at Mr. Gatti’s. There were 6 buttons for the game, 3 variations of punch, 3 variations of kick, and a joystick. The moves were easy enough to learn that within 10 minutes, anybody could be good enough to compete.
Time went by and games got more complicated, by the time I was 25 I felt like an old man trying to learn modern video games, 12 buttons, combinations involved lots of different combinations of buttons and joysticks and gamepads… it was overwhelming and I generally thought “if this is gonna be so much work, why don’t I do something that will actually pay off, like meeting girls?”
Then a few weeks ago, my colleague Andy showed me this video game system that you can buy at x-gaming, it’s a full sized video game (the kind you stand in front of with a friend) and it came with none other than Street Fighter II. I bought it immediately.
It arrived, the delivery guys unpacked it, and in 10 minutes I was playing. What a blast I’ve had down in the basement reliving my younger days, eating pizza and drinking beer… it feels so decadent. In any case, if you’ve been trying to find me on icq or aim but I’ve been unavailable…that’s what I’ve been doing with my free time for the past 3 days!
