Doing Good with Charity?

In my class How to Be a Good Person, I asked the audience to tell me what they can do in their daily lives to be a good person

One person said, don't do harm. Another say, don't cheat. One say, do charity. I asked him what is charity. He said usually it means to donate money.

I told him charity means helping people when they need help. It could be money or other things but not necessarily donation of money. If they don't that help, that is NOT charity. It is just your act of service.

I also told him that if he donates money, make sure that the beneficiary really needs the money. If not, that donation is of little value to the beneficiary and is not really charity. It is just for you to claim 2.5 times tax deduction. There is almost no merit accumulated by you.

He asked, what can I do? I told him, do charity in your daily work. Being a Grab driver, I told him if you provide sincere heart-to-heart service, that is already a big charity. If you are not calculative and go the extra mile to help your passengers, that is also charity. Most of all, if you can bring joy to people when they take your car, you are doing a big charity.

He could not believe what I told him and said, "That is not what I was taught!". "That's why you must attend my class, I teach you the real stuff that is not commonly practiced elsewhere".

Comments

What an Executive Coach and Business Coach Does

The Secret Under the Mattress: Why would a 79-year Man Bet So Big on 4D?

It was 2007 when we discovered his secret. While moving my father’s mattress, we found them: heaps and heaps of Singapore Pools 4D tickets. They were stacked in layers, a paper trail of lost hopes. What shocked us most wasn’t just the volume, but the stakes. He wasn’t betting a few dollars for fun. He was punting hundreds of dollars per draw—nearly ten times a month. At the time, my siblings and I were furious. Our father was a 79-year-old retiree. We wondered, with a mix of anger and confusion, why a man at his stage of life would need to win such "big money." What was he going to do with the money? We saw it as a reckless habit, a sign of poor judgment in his final years. Some of us would say, "If I were to give him money to buy 4D, why don't I use the money and buy 4D myself? At least I have better discipline". It has taken me two decades, and the experience of raising my own three grown-up children, to finally see the truth that was hidden under that matt...

Head Bleeding when the Chair Falls

The Weight of Silence: What Were We Really Arguing About? My earliest memories are punctuated by the sound of shouting. In 1970, when I was barely 6 years old, I stood as a small witness to the fierce quarrels between my father and my late eldest brother Kah Yang (he passed away in 1971 at the age of 17). As I grew up, these contradictions became the soundtrack of our lives, usually centered around our family's shoe shop and clothing stalls in Chinatown. In the court of family opinion, the verdict was almost always the same: my father was "wrong." He was judged as a man who didn't fulfill his role, who wasn't "burdening" enough for the family’s success. But as I look back from the vantage point of 2026, I have to ask: Was that actually true? Let me finally put to rest what my father did right: the truths that were buried under decades of criticism: Unseen Labor: He worked grueling, long hours. I remember him hauling boxes of goods and equipment to set u...

Business and Money Tips

Search This Blog