danpallotta

[danpallotta]

Success, Suffering, and the Self-Pity Cycle

Gore Vidal once said that, “Every time a friend succeeds, a little something in me dies.” Many of us don’t like to admit it, but we feel the same way. We secretly hope that eventually this person will fail. When they do, many of us feel a strange sense of something coming back to life in us. We don’t like that we feel this way. We admonish ourselves for it.  We feel ashamed. And then we feel this way again the next time someone succeeds or fails.

This feeling of grief when someone else succeeds is self-pity. I’ve been doing the uncomfortable work of deconstructing this pattern in myself and have come to see that there is a vicious and unproductive cycle at its core. The recognition of this cycle has been very liberating.

The first stage in the cycle is comparison. “Look at Elon Musk. He’s created Space-X, PayPal, and Tesla. I haven’t created anything close to any one of those. He raised hundreds of millions in capital for each of those. I haven’t been able to raise five million for my idea. He’s 44. I’m already 47.” or, “Tim Cook is 54 and he runs the most successful company in the world. He gets to meet with the premier of China today. I’m 54 too. I run a struggling business and am meeting with the plumber today to figure out why the bath tub is leaking.” Have you ever noticed that this is not productive? That it has never once improved your ability to raise capital? That it has never once lowered your age, or increased the age of the object of your comparison?

The second stage is self-judgment and self-loathing. “I should have created at least one company the size of what Elon Musk has created. I should have been able to raise at least one-tenth of the amount of the capital he has raised. I’m just no good with people. People don’t like me. There’s something in me that repels people and there’s something in him that attracts them. And I’m not that smart. I’m really a loser.” You could do the same thing with the Tim Cook comparison. Or a Marissa Meyer comparison. Or Michelle Obama. Have you ever noticed that this punishment you inflict on yourself doesn’t exactly get you jumping up from your chair to launch your next idea?

The third stage is self-pity. “Why am I this way? Why can’t anything good - something good - some success - come my way? What’s wrong with me? The world has no purpose for me.”

From this place of self-pity all of your enthusiasm and aliveness and all of your defenses are weakened. Conditions are ripe for the cycle to repeat. From the depths of self-pity you read in the news today that Elon Musk is actively making plans to realize his idea for the hyper loop. Just shoot me.

This cycle creates more productivity loss that almost anything else I can think of.

We’ve been taught to address self-pity from a moral context. “Stop feeling so sorry for yourself. Look at that woman who lost both legs in a drunk-driving accident. She’s raising three kids and she’s the CEO of her own organic convenience store chain.” This makes us feel even worse about ourselves. It’s just another cycle of comparison and self-loathing leading to more self-pity. “Look at the 9 year-old on Facebook who just started a lemonade stand that raised $72,000 for education in Africa. Stop feeling so sorry for yourself. Snap out of it. Self-pity is a sign of sloth.” More self-loathing and self-pity.

What’s the answer? Have compassion for yourself. Compassion is very different from self-pity. Self-pity is a self-inflicted wound. It feels good. It feels like you’re being empathetic toward yourself. In reality, the whole cycle is really harming you. Think of it that way. Would you stick yourself with a pin fifty times a day? That’s what you’re doing to yourself when you engage the cycle. You have to re-wire the way your brain thinks about what your doing. You’re not sympathizing with yourself. You’re injuring yourself.

So, instead of approaching self-pity from a moral context, approach it from a clinical, non-judgmental context. There’s a saying in Zen that, “What you resist persists, and what you allow to be disappears.” When you resist the self-pity by telling yourself that it’s wrong and you shouldn’t be feeling it, you strengthen it. When you observe it – simply say, “Oh look, I’m in that comparison/self-loathing/self-pity cycle again, and that’s not helping me” – it loses its power.

And that gives you the freedom to feel genuinely happy for people who break through life’s inertia and actually create something new.

There’s another saying by Buddha - all suffering comes from a sense that things are not as they should be.” In other words, you feel self-pity. Then you feel badly about feeling self-pity. Now you’re dealing with a compound problem. Now you’re really suffering. Things are as they should be. If you’re feeling self-pity, it’s because you’re comparing yourself to others. There’s nothing broken. Comparing yourself to others produces self-pity. Once you really understand that and see the pattern for what it is in yourself, you can begin to stop comparing yourself to others and get free of it.

And by the way, it’s not a problem unique to you. Every president wants to be on the, “Top Five Presidents of All-Time” List.  It’s not enough just to be President. And it won’t stop if you create the next Tesla. It won’t stop itself. You have to do that. And like alcoholism, the first step is acknowledging that you have a problem.

[danpallotta]

The Paradox of Selflessness

This is an excerpt from the end of my book, “Uncharitable,” in which I was reflecting on whether or not it was a cold, soulless world for which I was advocating in the book:

"Here I have written a book on self-interested charity, and yet I find a few lines about mate- rialism and selflessness from Thomas Merton unsettling. A Trappist monk himself, he talks about why people become Trappists:

‘What is the use of living for things that you cannot hold on to, values that crumble in your hand as soon as you possess them, pleasures that turn sour before you have begun to taste them . . .? Men have not become Trappists merely out of a hope for peace in the next world: something has told them . . . that heaven can be theirs now . . . if they give their lives to the one activity which is the beatitude of heaven. That activity is love: the clean, unselfish love that does not live on what it gets but on what it gives; a love that increases by pouring itself out for others, that grows by self-sacrifice and be- comes mighty by throwing itself away.'

By contrast, I seem to have painted a picture of a cold, materialistic world, where no one helps the poor unless there is something in it for himself. Isn’t Thomas Merton’s world a far more beautiful one? Shouldn’t we try to get everyone to be selfless?

First, Thomas Merton’s is not a selfless world. It is quite the opposite. The monks give themselves to others because of the joy they receive in return. Indeed, in the same book Merton writes, 'A monk is a man who has given up everything in order to possess everything. He . . . has abandoned desire in order to achieve the highest fulfillment of all desire.’  If giving to others brought the monks nothing in return, it wouldn’t be long before they were out looking for something that did. We confuse everyone and everything by use of this word ‘selfless' to describe something that is actually self-fulfilling. The monks may be smarter or more enlightened than the rest of us, but they aren’t more selfless. They are as interested in themselves as the next guy. They’ve just figured out that doing for others delivers a better rate of return to self than a Maserati. They have found a way to do for others and self at the same time. To go around asking the rest of us to be selfless is to ask us to live up to an impossible standard, which even the monks themselves don’t attempt to meet.

Second, Merton paints a picture of a highly spiritually evolved world. We don’t live in that kind of world, at least not yet. We will not get to it by lamenting its absence or sitting around wishing for it. If we want a world where people are at their maximum potential for giving to others, we had better start promoting the idea on a massive scale. People aren’t going to get interested in it by osmosis. We had better start proactively competing with the world that pummels them with messages about golf clubs and Botox. Thomas Merton may have lived in a cloister and wore a robe, but in his heart he was an advertising man. He had a message, and if his message never got to me I would never have been moved by it. I bought his book from a for-profit bookseller. It was printed on paper made at a for-profit mill. It was delivered on a truck made in a for-profit factory financed by a stock market that allowed it to raise capital. Thomas Merton’s message about the joys of helping others were delivered to me by capitalism.

No matter how you slice it, the only way you get to a world that has more love and less materialism is through the system that sells the world on materialism. What is the other option? Just ask people to be more loving? By what means? You are immediately faced with the fact that to mount a campaign to convert 6 billion people to love—which is essentially the role of charity—takes a lot of money. The most efficient system for asking 6 billion people to be more loving and more giving is capitalism. Raise the capital to promote the idea by offering a return on investment, hire the best people to manage the effort, and run the advertising to spread the word. You beat capitalism at its own game. And it is entirely willing to allow you to do it. Capitalism didn’t stop the truck that delivered Merton’s book. It created it. It is indifferent about its end products. It is just as happy to produce charity as it is to produce video games. All you have to do is ask.

One thing is certain: we’re not going to finance a global love campaign by selling monk-made cheese from a nonprofit monastery via mail-order catalogues. Thomas Merton’s abbey at Gethsemani sells cheese, and in the 160 years since it was founded it has grown from forty-four monks to precisely sixty-five.

In a world where we free the nonprofit sector to use the tools of capitalism, we won’t get more materialism, we’ll get more giving. We won’t get a colder world. We’ll get a warmer world. And a smarter world to boot."

[danpallotta]

Solace & Sanity from Thomas Merton

Howard Zinn once wrote to me (I know, isn't it cool that Howard Zinn once wrote to me?) that Thomas Merton was in his "pantheon of great human beings." Merton is in mine as well. He was a Trappist monk at the Abbey of Our Lady of Gethsemani in Kentucky and the best Catholic writer of modern times. I got to see the monastery this year and was able to visit Merton's grave. In this frenetic world of activity, achievement, inauthenticity and false exteriors, Merton has always given me great comfort and perspective. I read this from him the other day and it really moved me. It spoke to my own tendency to let obsession with Internet news sites get in the way of my life and my center, so I thought I would pass it along. I hope it is of some value to you today:

"Nine-tenths of the news, as printed in the papers, is pseudo-news, manufactured events. Some days ten-tenths. The ritual morning trance, in which one scans columns of newsprint, creates a peculiar form of generalized pseudo-attention to a pseudo-reality. This experience is taken seriously. It is one’s daily immersion in ‘reality.’ One’s orientation to the rest of the world. One’s way of reassuring himself that he has not fallen behind. That he is still there. That he still counts! My own experience has been that renunciation of this self-hypnosis, of this participation in the unquiet universal trance, is no sacrifice to reality at all. To ‘fall behind’ in this sense is to get out of the big cloud of dust that everybody is kicking up, to breathe and to see a little more clearly.”

– Thomas Merton. Faith and Violence (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 1968), 151.

[danpallotta]

My New Talk on Purpose & Innovation

Hi All, I used to be a singer and a songwriter. Long hair, late nights, playing smoky clubs all over Los Angeles, trying to get a record deal. Made my mother cry—“where did I go wrong?” she'd ask. My music made her ask the question way more than my being gay ever did.

I spent many hours alone writing songs. Getting to finally sing them to someone was like being let out of a cage.

Creating a great talk is like creating a great album of music. You plug away at it in lonely isolation, delivering it to the walls for many months, telling yourself, “It’s great!,” and then, “It sucks!!” until you feel it’s finally ready to be sung to the world.

Well, I’m ready. And it’s great! For the last 24 months I have been building and refining a talk on the intersection of purpose and innovation. It’s a subject I’m extremely passionate about. Something about our modern-day obsession with innovation has always struck me as a little mindless, kind of dumbed-down, often ill-considered. We’re asked to innovate without really addressing the purpose of the innovation at the outset. Is its purpose only to obey what the cutting-edge business books say we should be doing? I wanted to take a counter-cultural look at the subject. I’ve delivered the new talk five times in the last few weeks to standing ovations and wonderful feedback. The talk addresses these themes and question:

Great innovation comes from great purpose;

Are you innovating out of love or out of fear?

Frustration is the fuel for innovation;

Even purpose-driven organizations, like nonprofits, can’t count on themselves to be methodically and consistently coming from a place of love;

The power of an idea whose time has come, over an idea whose time has been forced;

The role of patience and presence in innovation;

Thinking outside of the box is not the way outside of the box;

If you’re not taking risks, the risks will take you;

The power of commitment;

Don’t be discouraged by the tyranny of practicality.

Here’s some of what people have said about the new talk;

“His message and presentation was SO powerful. I can't think of a better speaker or way to end the conference. I have told so many people about him and his speech in just 4 days. Thanks for lining him up!” — Guenevere Morr, Bigger Game Expo Attendee

“The feedback is incredible.” — Mark Newman, Founder and CEO, HireVue

“My team and I were inspired by his ability to articulate innovation in a poignant and personal way...his approach and presentation were thought-provoking...we were honored to have him...” — Scott Seese, Chief Information Officer, eBay, Inc.

"He was a breath a fresh air in the midst of our governmental bureauracy. Smart as a whip and funny to boot...inspiring and practical at the same time; schools need this type of leader.” — From Sonoma Innovation Audience Feedback Survey

"Our events are intended to provoke attendees’ thinking and challenge previously held assumptions, and Dan’s talk did exactly that! - [a] rare speaker who is able to both entertain and enlighten those lucky enough to hear him speak.” — Dan Blake, Curator, Innovate/Educate Sonoma

The talk is for nonprofit and corporate audiences that really want to shake up peoples' thinking. I hope I’ll get the chance to deliver it for you. Contact us today, here,  if you’d like more information.

[danpallotta]

Today’s Historic Gay Marriage Ruling

I didn’t foresee all these tears. Everybody figured the Supreme Court would rule this way. There have been lots of gay marriage victories lately. This was kind of expected. But it wasn’t expected in 1981 when I came out, ashamed and terrified. It wasn’t expected by all those closeted men and women who grew up in the 20s and 30s and 40s and never loved, or had to hide their love. It wasn’t expected when everyone was dying of AIDS in 1990, 91, 92, 93, 94, 95. There is something uniquely momentous when a body that speaks for the whole of society, the whole of history and the whole of the future says, “I am sorry. We are sorry. You were not wrong. You were not sick. You were not  degenerate. You were not dirty. You were not disgusting. You were not inhuman. You did not deserve the way we treated you.” It hits you in the solar plexus. It’s the power of love. The Supreme Court didn’t just rule today that love is legal in all of its forms. It acted with love. It exemplified the very thing about which it was writing. How rarely does government love. Oh, God. Imagine the world that would be possible if the place the world was coming from was love, as it is today. The tears would never stop.

Today’s ruling is about so much more than gay marriage. It’s about the possibility of possibility.

[danpallotta]

The Moon and Table Service - Today's Speech at the Society of St. Vincent de Paul Annual Hope Breakfast

Good Morning,

I hope you are all well.  I want to thank all of the beautiful people at theSociety of St. Vincent de Paul for inviting me to come this morning, and as a person who cares  deeply about the future of this organization I want to thank you all of you for getting up early and getting all dressed up to be here. Thanks for saying Yes to the possibility that this morning represents. The world needs more people who say Yes to great possibility. 

I want to talk about the moon and about table service.

It was 45 years ago that Neil Armstrong, a 38 year-old American, stepped off the ladder of the descent stage of the Apollo 11 lunar module and  onto the surface of the moon. I was eight years old and like so many other eight year-olds and eighteen year-olds and eighty-eight year-olds, my eyes were glued to our black and white television set. I’d never seen anything like it before, and I’ve never seen anything like it since.

Apollo was powerful not because eventually twelve human being got to walk on the moon, but because human beings everywhere got to see that it was possible for human beings to walk on the moon. And that changed the way we thought about everything. The picture on that black and white TV was very fuzzy, but the message was abundantly clear - anything is possible. If we can do this, there is nothing we cannot do.The implication so frightened us that we stopped going. It showed us that we might be capable of building a world without poverty or cancer and I think the thought of the work that would have to go into it so overwhelmed us that we decided to keep things pretty much as they are. We decided, as a nation, to stop dreaming. Apollo 18 never lifted off the ground. It’s a museum piece today. It looks sad. Its destiny was the moon. Its eternity will be spent on an exhibit field at the Johnson Space Center in Houston, Texas.

Apollo was also powerful because of the risk that we took. These days people have a watered-down definition of risk. Sure - I’ll take a risk, so long as I know that it will all work out. But that is not the nature of risk. The nature of risk is to stare the possibility of failure in the face. It is to have the possibility of failure stalking you at every step of the journey and being willing to make it anyway. It is the willing ness to put lives, and time, and money on the table. The willingness to be laughed at. The willingness to be made to look a fool, with the whole world looking on, if things don’t go as planned. Taking a risk takes courage. And Apollo was the last time this nation put its you-know-what on the line for something truly great and daring. And the achievement of it made grown men and women weep. I believe we all yearning for a world in which we can weep at the beauty of some great collective human achievement again. 

And last, Apollo was powerful because we set a deadline. It was 1962 when President kennedy said, “before this decade is out,” and we were there within eight years, in an age with no computer more powerful than a modern calculator and at a time when we hadn’t even yet orbited the earth. If you ask experts today how long it would take to get back to the moon they will tell you ten to fifteen years. How is that possible when we got there in eight back in the 1960s? And the answer is the absence of a deadline. A deadlines creates accountability. It accelerates everything in its path. It forces us, as President kennedy said, “to measure the best in ourselves.” I remember Kennedy saying that, “we seek to go to the moon and do the other things, not because they are easy, but because they are hard.”

Back here on earth, in this beautiful city, just a few miles from here, there is a dining hall, operated with great love by the Society of St. Vincent de Paul. It’s a place where people without money or means can go and get a decent meal.

When we were introduced to this place our first job was to come up with an ad campaign that could describe it to the community in a new way, and that could inform people of the many things it does, most of which people don’t know about. People think, “oh that’s the organization that runs those thrift stores.” And we looked at that name - the Society of St. Vincent de Paul. It sounded kind of ancient. It smelled more than a little like incense. It felt a little distant and abstract. We watched and we watched and we watched all of the things that go on here. And it didn’t take long for us to see that while it may have been inspired by St. Vincent dePaul, today, in 2014, it is the Society of Friday night pizzas. It is the society of little kids cavities filled. The society of home delivered meals. The society that says to veterans, You fought for us, now we’ll fight for you. And the society of a hundred other things, any one of which would make you smile, or weep.

And the thing that most moved me was that it is the society that operates a dining hall where families and their little children get waiters and table service, just like they would at a restaurant, so that the children don’t feel like they are at a soup kitchen for the poor. So that their mothers and fathers can enjoy a meal with them in dignity, without feeling ashamed that they have to be there. I have tried to understand why this one feature of this place moves me so. And I guess it’s because, like many of you. I have kids of my own. I actually have three little kids - triplets - they’re seven years old. Sometimes I tell people I have triplets and they say, “Really, how many?” true. Human intelligence. And I think about how I would feel if I couldn’t afford to take them to a restaurant. How I would feel if at this young age, when they are just forming their opinions about themselves, they were they ever made to feel less than the other children around them because of their economic circumstances. How angry it would make me, perhaps at myself. How ashamed I would feel. A feeling no decent parent who is trying their best should have to endure.

But they come to the Society of dinner with table service and they are able to enjoy a meal in dignity.

What does Apollo have to do with dinner with table service?

Well, for every child that gets table service through the Society of St. Vincent de Paul there are a dozen others that don’t. Because it is also the Society of we’re not large enough to reach and  serve everyone. And those families consist of little girls and little boys to whom we can extend a feeling of dignity as well. And maybe it is time that someone in this nation applied the principles of Apollo to the possibility of table service for everyone.

And maybe that someone can be us. And maybe that city could be Phoenix.

What if the city of Phoenix said that, in the next five years, we are going to rid this city of the scourge, not of poverty, but of abandonment. Not that we will give everyone wealth, but that we will let no one suffer indignity. That we will leave no one without a place to take their children for dinner where they can get table service. 

And what if this became the Society of we are so well backed and supported and funded by this community that we are able to serve everyone. The Society of St. Vincent de Paul could be Phoenix's NASA. The crowned jewel of the city. A mission control for the end of abandonment. A place where the blueprints for that achievement are envisioned and engineered and executed and funded by this city and the people in this room.

As teenagers, we thought we had dreams of changing the world. We thought we were greater than the problems that confronted us. But as we grow older we let go of those dreams, and we are taught that that letting go is wisdom, maturity, adulthood.

But sometimes, despite the fulfillment I know we all have in our lives, when we look at the whole of our lives something whispers to us, I thought there would be something more.And I believe that something more is our natural human propensity to think bigger than our circumstances, calling out to us from inside the closet in which we have hidden it.  The video said that the plants want to prevail. And I think human beings want to prevail. And when we deny that tendency  in ourselves to dream, we suffocate something vital  and important, and something God-given in ourselves.

Wisdom does not mean we have to diminish our dreams to a whisper.

The presence of grace does not have to mean the absence of greatness.

It is not hubris to think big. If God give us the ability to think big then it is hubris to think any less than big. If we were not able to make dreams come true we wouldn’t be endowed with the ability to dream in the first place.

Humility does not require that we think small. Humility requires that we think no smaller than we are capable of thinking.

There are little children all over this city who don’t eat their dinners in dignity. And they are waiting for the scale of our thinking to reach the top of her table.

At the end of  the day this is the Society of you and me and what we want our society to look like. Imagine what it could look like if we adopted an Apollo program for the Society of St. Vincent de Paul and if this morning were remembered as more than another nice charity breakfast, but as the morning we all decided to get really excited about that?

“The Moon and Table Service,” Dan Pallotta Remarks, Society of St. Vincent de Paul Annual Hope Breakfast, November 21, 2014, Biltmore Hotel, Phoenix Arizona. Approximately 1,200 attendees.

[danpallotta]

Friday's Excerpt from #UncharitableBook

"Moreover, there is an unintentional cruelty at work in the demand for charities to be more effective. It is a bit of the blood-from-a-stone syndrome. How can charities become more effective overall if we won’t let them use the tools everyone else in the economic world uses as the fundamental basis for effectiveness? It is no blessing to throw a charity a million dollars to achieve a result and then tell it that it must apply the same set of seventeenth-century rules that have heretofore left it incapable of achieving the result in the first place. The demand for a crop won’t produce anything if you deny a man a plow. It doesn’t matter if we change what we’re measuring. If we don’t change the rules, charities will never be able to measure up."

"Uncharitable," page 11

[danpallotta]

Tuesday's Excerpt from #UncharitableBook

Funny to read this paragraph five years later. There is such a movement now!:

"No one in authority is suggesting that we give the nonprofit sector the far-reaching freedom we really give to business. There is no new movement demanding that the nonprofit sector place efficiency a dis- tant second to a great vision. It is simply not a discussion that is happening. It is sacrilegious to question the importance of efficiency."

"Uncharitable," Page 10

[danpallotta]

Monday's Quick Excerpt from #UncharitableBook

"When charities are told to act more like businesses they are, by and large, being told nothing more than to be more efficient, as if efficiency were a substitute for vision. The term is used in the narrowest sense— read: less money spent on overhead, with no understanding of what “overhead” really is and what it really isn’t. Whoever believes that this and this alone is what it means to act like a business never ran a successful one. Great businesses grow on great vision. Efficiency is a secondary matter. How the business people who sit on the boards of our charities  have allowed an obsession with efficiency to become conflated with what it means to act like business is one of the great mysteries of mod- ern economic history."

"Uncharitable," page 10

[danpallotta]

Thursdays Hit from #UncharitableBook

"As if this were not enough, the cultural pretense of the past decade is that capitalism in charity is encouraged. One of the cruelest and most dangerously disingenuous messages being preached to the nonprofit sector today is that it should act more like business—cruel because we don’t allow it to, and dangerous because it creates the illusion that we do, preempting any initiatives for change under the guise of its already being under way."

"Uncharitable," page 9

[danpallotta]

Tuesday's Hit from #UncharitableBook

"It is a further irony that we prohibit charity from using the tools of capitalism to rectify the very disparities some would claim capitalism creates. We allow people to make huge profits doing any number of things that harm the poor, but prohibit anyone from making a profit doing anything that will help them. Want to make a million selling violent video games to kids? Go for it. Want to make a million funding the cure for childhood leukemia? You are a parasite. The illogic is breathtaking. The ramification is even more so: if free-market ideology could rectify the disparities some claim are created by free-market practices, isn’t the nonprofit ideology that obstructs it the problem in the first place?"

"Uncharitable," page 9

[danpallotta]

Monday's Hit from #UncharitableBook

"Ironically, by denying charity the tools of capitalism while allowing the for-profit sector to feast on them, we place charity at a severe disadvantage to the for-profit sector, on every front and at every level. The hands of charity are tied, while the for-profit sector scoops every penny off the economic table. Charity is segregated from the rest of the economic world. And this apartheid is the result of its own ideology. It is in the name of charity that capitalism is banished. Indeed, charity could not be undermined with more homage paid to charity. But the only beneficiary of this charity is the for-profit sector. The poor are left to take some solace in the fact that charity observed all the discrimination with great frugality."

From "Uncharitable," page 9 

[danpallotta]

Friday's Hit from #UncharitableBook

"An ambitious reporter puts a sentimental photo of a child with leukemia in the newspaper and asks, “How can you be so cruel as to want to earn a profit from his situation?” I put up the photos of a million others like him and ask, How can you be so shortsighted as to deny me and a thousand others the monetary incentive it would take to devote our life’s work to helping these children? You have just robbed them of our talents. What if your moral compass is wrong?"

From "Uncharitable," page 8

[danpallotta]

Thursday's Hit from #UncharitableBook

"We learn that someone has made a great deal of money in some char- itable endeavor. We are taught to feel morally outraged, regardless of how much benefit the person has achieved. We learn that some charitable director’s salary is modest. We are taught that this is good, regardless of the fact that she may be making little progress—regardless of the fact that someone who commanded a salary three times higher could make ten times the difference. What an inferior satisfaction is the good feeling we get from a modest executive salary compared to the feeling we would have if we ended hunger on this earth. Gold stars over church bells. We have settled for scraps."

From "Uncharitable," Page 8

[danpallotta]

Wednesday's Hit from #UncharitableBook

"Our charity is conducted within a context that measures morality by loyalty to the religion—loyalty to the means. It is not conducted within  a context of what will produce the best end result and what will not. It is not conducted within the ultimately moral context. Predictably, then, we are taught to feel good or bad on the basis of things that don’t make an impact or that unexpectedly make a negative impact, like modest executive salaries, donated equipment, donated advertising, low spending on administration and “overhead,” instead of on the basis of the real moral questions, like whether hunger is being ended or cancer is being cured. We have been taught to judge morality by tactics without regard for the morality of the outcomes."

From "Uncharitable," Page 7

[danpallotta]

Why? Tuesday's Hit from "Uncharitable"

"Why are we so success- ful at making sneakers, Ipods, entertainment, and countless other dis- cretionary products, and at selling them too? Why does the for-profit sector consistently attract those in the upper percentiles of the world’s best business schools? Why does the for-profit sector attract all of the investment capital? How does it monopolize the world’s advertising? Why do businesses grow to be huge while charities, particularly those working on behalf of the world’s most needy citizens, remain quaint and small? As of 2004, about 72 percent of America’s nonprofits had annual revenues less than half a million dollars. And while the non- profit sector may account for about 5.2 percent of U.S. gross domestic product, by at least one account as of 2004, spending for “public and societal benefit” amounted to only 5.5 percent of that, or just 0.39 per- cent of America’s gross domestic product. Spending on “human services” amounted to 13.6 percent of the total nonprofit sector account, or just 0.71 percent of America’s GDP. Why do the organizations dedicated to our greatest needs have the fewest resources?"

From Page 5 

[danpallotta]

A Hit from "Uncharitable"

Starting today I will periodically post  brief excerpts from "Uncharitable," as a way to keep the book's ideas alive for all of us. We don't listen to a song just once. Why bury the ideas in a book between the pages after we've read it? I hope these are of  value to you:

From Page 3:

"The word “profit” comes from the Latin noun profectus for “progress” and the verb proficere for “to advance.” Thus, the term “nonprofit” means, literally, non-progress. It is a dangerous unconscious statement of intent, or lack of it. No advance. No progress. This is not a simple case of mistaken meaning. The Puritans’ conviction that the self was depraved required that it be negated, whether it wanted to profit, progress, or advance. Charity, as they constructed it, became the epicenter for this negation. To these roots we will return. 

Even on the basis of the modern understanding of profit—as in fi- nancial surplus—the nonprofit sector suffers from the distinction of being the only sector whose name begins with a negative, as Harvard Business School Professor Allen Grossman has noted. It apologizes for itself before it begins. It seems to understand only what it is against and is rudderless with respect to what it is for. It is from this starting posi- tion that we attempt to transform society or, put more accurately, do not attempt it, under the false impression that we do."