The other day I was in an aquarium. Don’t judge me, it was the only thing to do in that place. I watched the different species of fish for a while and pretended to be interested in the facts provided on the information boards.
On the way out I looked at a giant shark tank – a real shark tank, not the TV show. I thought: “Poor animals, they are not free to go where they want.” A blink of an eye later my train of thought came to a ear-numbingly screeching halt at another thought: am I really free?
We all might live in our own invisible prison: the walls made of limiting beliefs, work or personal situation. The bed is made out of a foul mood or bad habits.
How do you break free of your own prison?
Firstly you need to realise that you are stuck or in a bad spot.
Then you have to have the will to change it.
The key to leave your own prison is your mindset: if you can change it you can change your approach to things. Remove limiting beliefs, change the situation you are in. Improve your mood and replace bad habits with good ones.
Where I grew up it was all about avoiding mistakes and failures. Everything and everyone seem to have told you: “Plan ahead, don’t do something stupid. Don’t make a mistake, it will look bad on you.”
Later in life I came across the mentality of making mistakes, plenty of mistakes, the more the better. Best known as Silicon Valley’s “Fail Fast” mantra: Fail, move forward and fail again. Learn from it. One of my favourite saying for a while was “It’s only a mistake if you don’t learn from it”. I believed in it.
Mistakes and failures – could it be a good thing?
But does everything need to be a mistake? I think I like the approach of experiments better. Do lots of experiments, small ones and big ones: Test which website converts better. Test what works better in a business pitch. Test out where you like living. Try things in a controlled way.
Do experiments instead of mistakes
First of all, it does not sound as negative as failing or making a mistake.
Secondly, it’s controlled. You are in control and any outcome is a good one because it’s an answer.
In 2016 I wanted to run an experiment I later called “my year of charity”. The goal was to support a good cause every month for a year. I wanted to spread the donations across different charities and regions. In this review you’ll get to know about the…
Challenges I faced
The positive impact and
Why I failed to finish the year
First hurdle — how to find a ‘good’ charity
Where to start? Let’s find a charity that is doing a good job and a cause I would like to support. After a bit of research I realised it’s not that straight forward: the charities differ in how they represent themselves.
It starts with the information that’s available online – or rather the information that is not there. Like with regular companies, some websites are better than others. Of course, you can’t expect those organisations to blow a lot of money for online marketing or SEO, you want them to spend almost 100% on their cause. But how would you and I find out about them, get to know what they are doing and get to understand the impact they are having if those things are not easy to find or represented in a good, modern way?
Second hurdle — how to measure impact
My investor mindset made me asses the impact my donation would have in a specific way: Investments are measured by ROI (return of investment) – how much your money you will get back. For a charitable cause you don’t expect to get something back for yourself of course, but you want to make sure your money is spent wisely and effectively.
In the end it comes simply down to how much money is really spent (the money you donated minus the cost the charities face) on the things you want to support (for example the environment) and what it turns into (for example number of trees planted and amount of CO2 absorbed). If you look for these kind of measurable outcomes it allows you to compare the charities with the biggest impact.
This is not the only way to measure efficiency but for my approach I needed something straightforward to work with; I wanted to donate to several causes and needed a way to help me make a decision.
Third hurdle — payment
I did not expect this to be a problem but the payment experience differs greatly. I would have liked some options to choose from, including PayPal or Debit and Credit Card. But it’s not a given that all or any of those options are available.
Some only offer bank transfer. Others offer debit and credit card but via an unsecured connection – that’s like sending a postcard with your card details via mail, hoping no one reads it on the way to the recipient.
Success by the month
Good news is that I found some really great charities over the months! Here is the detailed view, month by month
Tree Aid in January
1 Watering Can
1 Bucket
1 Mooring tree donated
providing nutrition and medicine with lifespan of around 20 years
grows over 2 meters in 3 months
filters 20 kg CO2 per year
400 Kg CO2 emission averted (over lifetime of 20 years)
Ripple Africa in February
2 cookstoves
saving 2 households 67% on firewood
preventing severe burns for the families
improving health of around 10 people
SolarAid in March
7 solar lights
44 people accessing these lights
£900+ saved for families*
8,000+ extra hours of child study time*
3.8 tonnes of CO₂ emissions averted*
25 People experiencing better health
(*over the lifetime of the solar lights)
Pur Projet in April
6 trees planted
500 kg CO2 filtered over the lifespan
Practical Action in May
Renewable energy project in Peru
Picaflor House in June
Art material for 40 kids for a month
Graph
Summary of the impact
7 trees donated and planted
CO2 offset = 2.8 tonnes over lifetime of trees
CO2 averted = 3.8 tonnes over lifetime of solar lights
Renewable energy generated (unknown)
Families life improved 10
Kids supported 40
Summary of my findings
The field of charitable organisations is quite segregated. There are only a few standards, they can differ greatly between countries and not all organisations follow them
It can be difficult to do research on a charity. Sometimes the information they provide is limited or has gaps, making a background very hard.
Charities measure their success differently and it’s not easy to compare the impact they have when it comes to quantity or quality.
The payment experience varies greatly.
There are some great charities out there with people doing great jobs. Very inspiring.
Why my year of charity failed
After only six months I stopped my year of charity. It was not a decision I made one day. It was something that slowly happened over time. Normally I would have a reminder popping up every couple of weeks to get working on the next blog post: research, find a charity, do background checks, decide, donate and blog about it. Not complicated.
It went well for a while. I’ve found exciting projects to support; researched, donated and wrote about them. But then life got in the way. Some other things took priority. Every now and then the research or writing the blog post was postponed. At some point I was over a month behind. It was so much to do just to catch up and then to prepare the next months. It felt so overwhelming that I did not get anything done and stopped.
I never talked about it. I only posted the monthly blog posts but never this review.Here it is now, over two years later. Oops.
What did not work for me
In hindsight it’s easier to say why I failed at my own project. I think these are the reasons why I failed at it:
I am not naturally a writer so it felt hard to write something, even a simple blog post.
I dit not have a good routine or workflow in place. Today I know how useful a good routine or habit is.
I could have chunked down the big tasks into smaller, more actionable ones to make it less overwhelming.
You can help me now
I am thinking of a way to fix this. I am working on a new project called “Futual”. Join me in saving the planet. If we fail this we are all doomed.
When I had my first PC in the 90iesI was into making music for a while. I had a software where I could arrange samples (little snippets of audio) into tracks. Over a short time I gathered hundreds of samples from tracks I came across and liked. Out of these I composed over a dozen songs – it was supposed to be my first album. Then the disaster happened: my hard drive failed. The data on it was not readable anymore.
Back then hard drives were very expensive. You would have had only one in your computer most likely. Everything is stored on that one drive. Same for backup-solutions: they were very expensive. You might have had a ZIP drive or even more primitive forms of storing large amount of data. But this was almost exclusively used in companies who could not afford to lose it’s data. Even today having a backup data outside a company is rare. The problem slowly disappears today with everything moving to the cloud. But remember, we talk about the 90ies.
Let’s rewind back to 1996
I did not have a backup back then. Hours and hours of my labour of love was just gone! Friends tried to help me; they hooked up my disk to their computer to see what’s still readable. They even ran some tools trying to recover bits that got lost. But there wasn’t a lot that could be done. I lost most my files and almost all my samples. All that was left was maybe a hundred samples and a handful of songs.
Lessons learned
Duplicate what’s valuable and store it somewhere else. That’s how it works everywhere nowadays, not only in IT: everything of importance is duplicated or has a failover.
Backup for humanity
We need a backup plan for humanity. We need a failover if something goes wrong with our current population. What could go wrong? How to create a backup of mankind?
When I open the fridge in our home I can count the items on two hands, sometimes on one hand. It’s rather minimal and only often contains only the bare essentials. But it was different less than a year ago when we lived in another country. Back then the refrigerator was much fuller. That means more meals were cooked at home.
We trace it back to different lifestyles and how affordable food is, or rather, how affordable dining out is:
In some places eating out is very affordable.
For some it’s a cultural thing.
Or you can get ready-made food delivered to your door (we even found very health options).
In other places going out is a luxury.
And in some places it was affordable once it is less affordable nowadays.
There are obviously big differences between these places. But also differences in how far your money goes — depending on where you live or when you live.
