The Thing About Handouts

…is that they tend not to do as much good as you think they do:

• They make you feel good. You feel like you’ve done your good deed for the month. But it shouldn’t be about you, it should be about the cause you contributed to.
• They may not make good use of it. A machine designed to live on hand-outs isn’t usually a machine familiar with the value of a dollar. It just extends out its hand for more.
• What makes you and your team great, might be what that cause needs in order to be greater. What if what they really need isn’t your charity, but also your ingenuity?

This is not a call to stop giving. Rather, this is a call to give what makes you great. If a fraction of us were to do that–instead of the easy thing–how could that change the landscape of your chosen cause?