Yesterday I attended a lecture organized by the Shaping the Future Summit organization where Ed Hinz spoke. Ed Hinz was a Business Management major at Penn State and went on to receive his MBA at Harvard, and continued to become one of Penn State’s most successful alumni. Obviously a man of his wealth has a lot to offer for various charities, but this discussion changed my views to make my believe that donating any amount of money to a charity is beneficial whether it is more for the church or more for you.
He said that, “how you spend your money equals how you live,” so basically you can control how you live by the choices you make when it comes to money.
The lecture was actually quite inspiring especially when he told a story of how he had started out by donating three dollars to a church and is now able to provide endowments for larger organizations. Hintz actually started out his life in the lower middle class. He advocates sacrificing going out to a movie one night and give back to the place that you started at. He started at the church, and provided them with a large endowment later.
In case you didn’t know an endowment is when you set up a large amount of money in an account for the charity and that money collects interest. That interest is what the organization spends.
The charities that you choose are within your control. The choice is extremely important because it represents what your values. There is a difference between donating to the arts and donating to charities. Encouraging the arts is trying to further something that already well exists. However, there are people out there who would use the money to get a leg up and get them onto a track where they can live comfortably. To those people, art doesn’t really mean anything. Hintz’s wife actually mentioned that Hintz’s greatest strength was in choosing the right charities to donate their money to.
My favorite point in the lecture was actually something that his wife had said: “If you can do it, do it while you are alive.” She wanted to emphasize that if you have the ability to sacrifice a little bit of your money, it is better to do it earlier so you can appreciate the effects of it later on. It feels good knowing that you did something that was not for yourself, very fulfilling and satisfying.
When Ed Hintz was asked whether he supporting increasing taxes on the wealthy his response was, “If you earned it, you earned it,” meaning that people should have the choice of how to spend the money that they worked for instead of allowing government to have control. With the extra money, people can make decisions themselves and feel even better about giving the money away to a charity rather than allowing the government to collect it in taxes and allocate it themselves. It’s the “feel good” vibes that convince people to donate and make better people in general.
The discussion was actually very interesting and mind-opening and mind-clarifying. I think I will plan to attend more of these lectures in the future.
My English class has been assigned the to present an analytical, educational yet inspiring TED Talk. The speeches are supposed to be related to our paradigm shift papers. My paradigm shift paper is primarily about the shift from fast-food towards the fast casual restaurants aka McDonald’s, Wendy’s and Burger King to Chipotle, Panera and Qdoba. I wanted it to reflect how in American culture, it has suddenly become trendy to be healthy and eat better quality food. I have tons of statistics and research to support my paper, but now my next challenge is deciding my topic for the TED Talk.
Since we are allowed to take a small part of our papers to help us decide our topics I think that I would like to focus on health trends in America today.
My TED Talk would begin with statistics how on how much more focused the country has become on health including examples like the locavore movement and decreasing sales of fast-food restaurants. This would establish that a trend does exist in the improvement and in the effort to becoming healthier. Then I would get into the purpose of the TED talk: discussing the causes of this health trend. Are we attempting to be more healthy just because it is trendy nowadays to shop at Trader Joe’s and eat frozen yogurt, or are we putting in that effort for our own well-being?
The farmer’s markets are the heart of the locavore movement.
Although a shift towards a healthier America may have begun with a reaction to record-high obesity rates (that are still as high as ever today) it has maintained its strength because it has become so commonplace that people don’t even notice that it has affected their decisions anymore. Even choosing Chipotle over McDonald’s is one of those unconscious decisions (but I wouldn’t say it is healthier, it is just better quality food).
One possible reason obesity rates have not actually gone down is because there is an assumption made in society today that bigger women are healthier hence why obesity has not gone down because that perception has made some people believe that they are not overweight even though, in terms of numbers, they are. This has a parallel effect on the other part of the population: a stigma on the cookie-cutter models, most popularly, the Victoria’s Secret models. Some are convinced that these girls are way too skinny and are therefore unhealthy and should not be looked upon as role models. However, I can honestly say that for most of them being healthy is their entire job. When modeling is a person’s career, they have the time to make sure they get the fitness training they need and the greens and healthy food they need to keep their skin clear. But this does not necessarily make people bigger than Victoria’s Secret models unhealthy.
One little fact that a lot of people ignore is that for each and every one of us, healthy does not have the same definition. (More research will be done on this) For example, a lot of people think that some girls of the same height look fatter than other. Wrong. Genetically, some will be born with wider hips which will therefore need more weight to be supported. So their butt isn’t actually too big, their body shape is actually a healthy size for them. As compared to a girl with very thin hips, she will not need as much volume to support her body. Everybody has a different definition of being healthy.
So what my point is that we shouldn’t be trying to be healthier and more fit because other people are doing it and that’s what people perceive to be better. We should already be making this attempt because we are concerned with living longer, avoiding disease, building a stronger heart, improving our well-beings, and in general feeling good about ourselves.
Let me know your thoughts!