charity – The Corrigan Encore

How to

December 9, 2022 John Corrigan

In his book “Outliers” Malcolm Gladwell goes over a study by Anders Ericsson. The study reviews musicians and their performance in the study Ericsson comes up with the “10000 hour rule”. Ericsson realized that all experts have one thing in common and that is practice and the number of practice hours to become an expert is 10000 hours.

The readers of Outliers dropped the book and started practicing. Some reached the 10000 hour limit and were not experts. Was the rule wrong? Not really. The authors of the study came back and made the rule more robust. That link will take you to the article but if TLDR the answer is that practice must be good and involve teaching and learning.

Every place that I have worked has had campaigns for charity, some of the campaigns allow employees to choose the funds that they can contribute to. When I review the funds I always look for funds that have low admin costs. This way I feel like money is more effectively being used.

There is a new movement now though called Effective Altruism. Effective Altruism EA for short is a movement and a community.

Everyone wants to do good, but many ways of doing good are ineffective. The EA community is focused on finding ways of doing good that actually work.
excerpt from the EA website

The world is bad off right now, and can do much better. Governments are not picking up the slack and doing their jobs (which is to provide for the people that they govern). Because governments ar not taxing correctly (Billionaires pay less tax than the working class) and lack funding to provide for the welfare of the nation altruism is very important and often comes from the working class and poor. It is important to doante to charities that provide the biggest bang for your buck.

Photo by RODNAE Productions on Pexels.com

Education always seems to be the key and this is no different. Know what your charities do and how they do it, if you can get involved beyond just writing a check. You will be helping yourself more than helping others and with education you will be effectively heling everyone.

There is something off…

September 9, 2022 John Corrigan

22 years ago I sat with my kids and watched a cartoon character voiced by David Spade dance around the palace that he lives in until he bumped into a citizen. The character told the citizen that he threw off his groove then he had employees throw the citizen off the cliff. As the citizen fell he yelled sorry.

The movie was “The Emperors New Groove”. The movie explains how a self absorbed Incan emperor changed his “groove” and learned to see outside himself and acknowledge others. Here we are sitting on Friday and I have felt a little off my groove all week. I really wasn’t sure why I was off my groove or how to get my groove back.

Of course like any other problem in my life I was able to solve the problem through the lessons learned from an animated movie. I am just now getting my “groove” back and I am getting it back by focusing on others.

It doesn’t make sense but often the best way to help yourself is to help others.

Help yourself by helping others
John Templeton

The secret to a happy and groovy life is in helping others.

All of it or as much as you can

June 1, 2022 John Corrigan

There is a Sublime song named What I’ve Got and two lines in the song are played

Take a small example, take a tip from me
Take all of your money, give it all to charity
Sublime — What I’ve Got

It’s that time of the year again the weather is nice you are shopping in the stores and college kids have been recruited. What are the college kids doing? They are canvassing in front of the stores that you are shopping in. The kids are looking for donations for charities. All kinds of charities. I know it seems foolish to even mention but you should give to charities. It is good to give to charities.

There seems to be a lot of bad news out there. Kids are dying disease is spreading, racism is running rampant. What can we do? Well, there are organizations that are working on protection for children, there are organizations dedicated to sending medicine and doing research for communicable diseases, and there are organizations focused on social justice and education. I don’t know about you but I am not a policy maker. doctor or researcher. I just go to work and home and pay my taxes and I feel pretty helpless with the hell scape I see on the news. Charity though, that makes me feel like a little bit of a super hero! I can give some of the money that I get from work and help the doctors, researchers and policy makers. Charity gives you your power back.

Charity inspires others. Every time I give I see the college kids at the drive signup and they smile and I like to believe that I help restore their faith in humanity and keep them from becoming cynical.

When you give on a monthly or quarterly basis you become part of community and this is seen by your family and children and another generation understands the importance of charity.

I know that times are tough for everyone and sometimes I feel myself leaning towards this when it comes to giving however I remember that for as tough as it is on me it is even tougher for others and this compels me to be charitable.

Our goals as human beings should be to make the world better for all life. One huge big way to do that is through charity!!! Please donate today! If you cannot afford money donate time (pro tip: money is easier than time!!)