Itzhak Stern:
There will be generations because of what you did.
Oskar Schindler:
I didn't do enough!
Itzhak Stern:
You did so much.
Oskar Schindler:
This car. Göth would have bought this car. Why did I keep the car? Ten people right there. Ten people. Ten more people.
Oskar Schindler:
This pin. Two people. This is gold. Two more people. He would have given me two for it, at least one. One more person. A person, Stern. For this.
Oskar Schindler:
I could have gotten one more person…and I didn't! And I… I didn't!
As courageous as he was, as skilled and cunning as he was, and as much as he sacrificed to save the lives of more than one thousand people, Schindler did not look back on his work with a feeling of pride and contentment. Instead, he looked back with regret. Schindler – who certainly did so much – realized only too late that he had had the opportunity to save even more lives and failed to act on it. He realized too late that, had he thought more methodically, had he worked more smartly, had he been willing to sacrifice more of his personal comfort, many individuals condemned to death would have been able to live. As great a man as he was, this regret likely haunted him for the rest of his life.
You and I will probably never find ourselves in Oskar Schindler's shoes. We will probably never encounter the surreal, horrifying situation that Schindler faced in wartime Europe. But there is a profoundly important lesson that we can take from Schindler's experience, a lesson that should shape our own attempts to do what good we can in this world.
The majority of us are involved one way or another with charity work. Many of us donate to charity. Many of us volunteer our free time to support charitable causes. A few of us even work directly for non-profit organizations.
While Hollywood may never make a movie about you or me, the sobering reality is that the world we inhabit is much like the world Schindler inhabited. While we don't live in the midst of a genocide, and while we don't work alongside individuals who could be executed en masse at any time, we do live on a planet with a monumental amount of suffering, cruelty, and needless death.
We live in a world where tens of millions of people are imprisoned in slave-like conditions, the victims of human trafficking and labor bondage. We live in a world where tens if not hundreds of millions of people suffer acutely from easily preventable and easily treatable injuries and diseases. We live in a world where tens of billions of animals are confined and tortured in deplorable conditions on intensive factory farms. We live in a world where millions of elderly people live shut-in lives of piercing loneliness. We live in a world where human activity is poisoning or devouring huge swaths of the earth's ecosystems. We live in a world where hundreds of millions of women endure physical abuse, mutilation, or a denial of their most basic freedoms simply because of their sex.
But, as was the case for Schindler, we also live in a world where our money, our time, and our cleverness can spare dozens, hundreds, thousands of these individuals from misery – if we choose to use our money, time, and cleverness toward that end. That means that just as much hangs in the balance when we make our charity decisions as hung in the balance for Schindler when he took his wartime actions. Just as much hangs in the balance with whether we donate, how much we donate, and who and what we donate toward. Just as much hangs in the balance with how calculating we are in the charitable work we carry out, and with what programs our non-profit organizations choose to carry out. Just as much hangs in the balance with how hard we are willing to work, how smart we are able to be, and how focused we are on our goals. The suffering, well-being, and lives of so many individuals hang in the balance of our decisions, just as they did for Schindler's.
Because that is the world that we live in, Schindler's (dramatized) words should weigh as heavily on our minds as they weighed on his: “I could have got more out. I could have got more.” Schindler looked back on his work not with pride but with regret. Regret for those whose lives he could have saved had he only been more calculating, more rigorous in his work.
If a man as courageous, smart, and committed as Oscar Schindler overlooked obvious opportunities to “get more out,” then the question we must ask ourselves of our own charity work is this: What is it that we are missing? How can we “get more out” by being more calculating, more rigorous in our own work?
None of us wants to look back later in life with Schindler's regret, realizing only too late that, however much good we did, we could have done so much more. None of us wants to look back and realize that we could have helped more individuals but failed to do so.
This is a book about taking a calculated approach to doing good. It is a book about how to get more out of our donations, our volunteering, and the work that some of us put in as non-profit staffers. It is a book about how you and I can get more individuals out of a lifetime of misery.
This is also a book about why, like Schindler, we often fall short of our potential in the charity work we do. We'll explore the blind spots we have, the mistakes we make, and the self-defeating ideas we hold that prevent us from “getting more out.” We'll learn how to identify these barriers so we can overcome them and succeed at truly changing the world for the better.
All of us have the potential to be great at doing good. All of us have the ability to achieve the sort of heroic results that Schindler achieved. All that's required is that we act with the intelligence and rigor that those who need our help most certainly deserve.
1
Why Charity?
Asking Why
When I was eight, my brother, sister, and I had a little game we liked to play. The goal of this game was simple: to drive my mom crazy.
We had each received as a Christmas present a white magnetic board with a set of brown tiles. By arranging the tiles on the board you could write words or draw blocky, pixelated pictures. By today's standards this sounds like a pretty boring toy, but for us it was a lot of fun. On my brother's whiteboard he would use the tiles to spell out the letter “W.” On mine I spelled out the letter “H.” My sister spelled out “Y.” Then we'd ask my mom a question – something innocent enough, like “What's for dinner?” After she'd reply, we'd each hold up our letters and chant, “Why?” The exchange went a little something like this:
“What's for dinner?”
“Pasta and green beans.”
“Why?”
“Because that's what I'm making.”
“Why?”
“Because that's what I bought at the store.”
“Why?”
“Because that's what was on sale.”
“Why?”
“Because that's what the manager made on sale.”
“Why?”
“I don't know – now get out of my kitchen!”
“Why?”
“Because I said so!”
“Why?”
I think you get the point.
Obviously, we were just asking “why, why, why” to be annoying; there's always great fun in aggravating your parents. As adults though, the habit of continually asking ourselves “Why?” is one of the most important habits we can cultivate. As we dig deeper and deeper into things – into ourselves, into our beliefs, into how society operates – we come to greater understanding and a greater