The chief problem I find with most charities is either one of the following:

• You have to give away your money to help.
• You don’t know how well your money is being spent (are the poor starving children ACTUALLY getting all that money, or is most of it going to the charity organizers?)
• You have to keep giving and giving, at no point do the people start becoming self sufficient.

About a year ago I discovered a charity that solves all these problems, and does so in a truly remarkable way. Instead of giving a man a fish, they teach them how to fish.

The charity is known as Kiva, and instead of just donating money they allow you to loan money out to entrepreneurs in 3rd world countries. Then those entrepreneurs use that money to grow their business, employ locals and boost their countries economy. Eventually once they have made some more profits they pay the loan back and you get 100% of your money back.

So far I’ve loaned $400 and have not had a single person default on their payments, in fact the overall repayment rate is 98%, so you’re practically guaranteed to get all the money you donate back. Oh yes, and 100% of the donation goes to the entrepreneur, Kiva asks if you’d like to make an additional donation to them to keep their operations running but you are never forced to give to Kiva themselves.

Once you’ve been paid back, you can withdrawl that money, or lend it again and again and again, helping thousands of people with the same $25. So rather than just feeding a child for a few days as with other charities, you can really help rebuild a country, improve their economy, give locals jobs and more.

… and it doesn’t cost you a cent.

I’ve started donating 1% of all company profits to Kiva (and continually reloaning when those donations are repaid) and may increase that amount in the future.

If you’re still confused here’s a nice video that explains the concept better than I ever could:

So start your first donation today at http://www.kiva.org and start helping make the world a better place

There are only differences of opinion.

There’s no such thing as a stupid person. Everyone always makes the smartest decision given what they know.

Everyone has biases, prejudices, judgements which is why we believe *others* (never ourselves) are stupid.

The next time you meet a “stupid person” try to think from their point of view. Not this fake thinking it through, but truely drop all your biases, prejudices and judgements and think exactly as the other person.

Their opinion doesn’t look so stupid now does it?

It’s all you have to do.

As much as I dislike Apples business practices, they are currently booming, and they’re booming because they build remarkable products.

Take the smartphone, for going on 10 years we’ve had pocket PC’s and smart phones. HP made iPaq’s, Dell made Axims, always one upping each other slightly, small incremental improvements. In this time the market barely grew, geeks of course all had one, but they were never really a mainstream item.

Then apple came along with the iPhone, and they didn’t just build a slightly better smart phone, they completely redefined what a smartphone was. They built something remarkable.

They took something complex and made it simple, sleek and sexy (half the people I know bought one simply because of how it looks and feels…) and it took off.

Blizzard did the same with World of Warcraft, they took a standard MMO Formula, made it simple and beautiful and gained 10 million players in just a few short years (the previous record was held by Everquest with a whole of 400,000 players)

How did Microsoft become such a huge company? They redefined their market. While everyone else was using dos and text based applications they went ahead and built a graphical interface that was simple and easy to use: Windows.

Google simplified finding information, they didn’t build a massive directory with thousands of links everywhere like yahoo and altavista, they just had one box, you enter what you want to find and it finds it. Simple. Sleek. Sexy.

If you want to grow your company fast, don’t just one up your competitors. Redefine your market, build something different, build something worth talking about, and your profits will soar.

A Thought just occurred to me on how similar life is to sultana bran, and people treat life in the same way. For those that don’t know sultana bran is a cereal that contains flakes and sultanas and often there are many more flakes then there are sultana’s.

It seems that the flakes of sultana bran are life’s problems, while the sultanas are the rewards. Often we get far more problems in life then we get rewards as thats just the way life works, it doesn’t give rewards unless the person works hard for it and if the person gives up then they don’t get anything.

So people spend their lives digging through the problems (which are the flakes of sultana bran) in search of rewards (the sultanas), in order to get to the sultanas they must constantly tackle the problems first. So they dig away dig away and eventually they go through about 3-4 problems then they decide its just too hard and the reward isn’t worth it. When there was a sultana just below that last flake! So they start on a different stack of problems, digging away, digging away in search of sultanas, and in that pile too they get through 3-4 problems then give up as they decide there are no rewards there. Meanwhile, just below this thin layer of flakes lies a hidden cache of amazing sultanas!

Far too often people continue to look for the sultanas in life but never receive any (apart from the few crappy ones on top) because they give up just before they reach them. Its true the rule I heard before that 90% of people give up when they are 10% away from success. So continue to push yourself that 10% more in every area of life and I guarantee you’ll reap massive rewards.

Are you constantly giving up just before the sultanas of life, or digging your way through and reaping the rewards?