Alternatively, "People give their hard-earned cash away and you won't believe it", or "5 charities you should donate to before you die".

Source: Flickr (CC BY-NC-ND 2.0)

I was looking for another book to read just when the ALS ice bucket challenge videos started showing up everywhere. Some of the videos were amusing, and who didn't want to see billionaires and celebrities get soaking wet? I didn't know what ALS was and had no idea why people would rather dump ice cold water on themselves instead of giving $100 (the people who were doing the challenge initially certainly wouldn't even blink for that amount). Some quick thoughts about the California drought and popularity contest came to mind, but it wasn't something worth killing my brain cells over.

The videos were fun to watch but I needed more entertainments on MTR rides than 10-second videos. The book I had just finished, The (Honest) Truth About Dishonesty, referenced a few other books: Get Rich Cheating, Nudge, and The Halo Effect. Reading the reviews on those and browsing through related books eventually led me to Poor Economics: A Radical Rethinking of the Way to Fight Global Poverty, the book that got me interested in behavioral economics and one that I've been meaning to re-read.

The premise of Poor Economics is although poor people have very little money, it doesn't mean that they don't make many economics decisions or that their decisions are uninteresting. Quite the contrary, they have to make numerous choices in their daily lives precisely because they have so little to spare. Furthermore, their choices often surprise us, and we cannot help them get out of poverty unless we understand how and why they make those choices.

As I was re-reading the book, popularity of the ice bucket challenge exploded. More and more of my friends were getting themselves wet and the threat that this modern day chain letter would get from Mark Zuckerberg and the like to me was imminent. I decided to do some research so I could make an informed decision in case someone challenged me.

With popularity came criticisms. I didn't have to look far for opinions. "It's a waste of water! California is in a drought!" "ALSA only spends a few percent of their budget on research and who knows how they spend the other 90+%!" "People are just doing this for fun/fame and not for charity."

Cat asleep in a bucket, because every successful internet article needs a cat photo Source: Flickr (CC BY-SA 2.0)

Thankfully, it didn't take long to find out that a bucket of water isn't much compared to how much water we use everyday for other purposes (we use about 20 buckets of water everyday, on average). It also wasn't hard to find a breakdown of ALSA's annual spending, and while they are not terribly efficient, they do largely seem to spend their money on the ALS community. And while not everyone maybe sincere in their efforts, it's undeniable that it helped raise enough money for ALSA for the next 5 years, at current spending level. An amount most other charitable organizations could only dream of.

The ice bucket challenge was clearly a very effective way to get people to open up their wallets (so effective that ALSA tried, and then backtracked, to trademark "ice bucket challenge"). A little too effective, maybe. Regardless of what you think about ALS, (no doubt it's a horrible disease but it only affects about 0.0039% of the population) it's questionable whether any organization can effectively make use of such a large and sudden infusion of money. It would have been better if some of that money were donated to other charities instead. But which ones?

Back to the book. Much of the book is devoted to analyzing the lives of people in extreme poverty: those who survive with less than 1 USD a day, after adjusting for purchasing power. Through various randomized controlled trials, researchers attempted to find concrete and provably effective ways to improve the lives of the poor. Because "[t]alking about the problems of the world without talking about some accessible solutions is the way to paralysis rather than progress." The same paragraph points to Peter Singer's The Life You Can Save. In the promotional video (and his book), Singer points out that the annual budget needed to cut global poverty in half is not much more than the amount Americans spend on alcohol every year.

That reminded me of a short lived personal initiative. For a while I was trying to note down how much I spend on alcohol and donate half of that amount to charity. Bookkeeping while intoxicated was clearly not a trivial problem, so I gave up soon after I started. That said, I still think there's merit in tying charitable givings to spending on guilty pleasures, although I'd need to come up with a better execution strategy first.

Source: Flickr (CC BY-NC-ND 2.0)

On the website, Singer asks visitors to pledge giving at least 1% of their income to help others. The pledge doesn't require you to donate to specific charities, although there is a list if you wanted suggestions.

Near the top of the list is an organization called GiveDirectly. This American Life talked about them last year. Their basic idea is instead of prescribing what we think poor people need to them, just give them money directly (hence the name) and let them figure out what to do with it. Turns out if you give people who live under leaky roofs a lot of money (the amount they give per family is usually a couple times their annual incomes), the vast majority of them use it wisely.

For the record I have not made the pledge. Given that I am not currently working, pledging to give 1% of my $0 income doesn't make a lot of sense. That said, using my past salary as reference, I haven't been too far off, at least not orders of magnitudes off. Of course, I never dumped ice water on my head every time I made a donation. I didn't need to, I thought, because the decision to help others is a very personal thing.

The ice bucket challenge showcased the power of social media to charities around the world. Replicating that success maybe difficult though, eventually we get unsensitized by all the wet celebrities. Amazon is (in?)famous for their one click patent, and Buzzfeed showed us how to give any article an enticing headline. We have learned a lot in studying human behaviors and making tons of money from it. Applying that knowledge to eradicate extreme poverty from the remaining billion of people? That could just be the Next Big Thing.

My last night in Seoul I decided that I haven't checked out Gangnam enough and so I should pay another visit. Since I've been here with my friends during their last night I thought I would orient myself base on where we've been together and then go from there. That turned out to be a bad idea, because I couldn't find where we've been (Gangnam station has many exits) and I felt a huge sense of lost.

Here's a piece of advice: if you want to feel sentimental, go visit the exact same place your friends and you had been before they left you. For added pleasure, let that place be Gangnam. Why Gangnam? Well supposedly it represents the new money off Seoul, and as I was walking down the street feeling lost, I suddenly realized that I too, am part of the new money. I don't remember how many times I've told my non software friends how strange it is and how lucky I am to live in a bubble, or even if it's not a bubble, it certainly is an ascend of new money and I just so happen to be in it.

Then a deeper question hit me: if I were part of Gangnam, part of new money, what more could I want? I remember awhile ago me and another friend were discussing what to get for a mutual friend who was getting married. "What do you get a man who has everything?" was the actual question. While I don't actually have everything, I'd like to think that I have most things that I ever wanted.

Of course there are a lot more things that I could have but don't. Growing up I've always thought that I had everything that I wanted. Recently I wondered why that was the case, considering that I grew up in a very modest family. Then I realized: I've never wanted anything that was totally out of reach. Having everything you want is easy when you only ever want things that you can have.

But I digress. I've been telling my friends that I want to be a better person than I am now, which hopefully I will accomplish as part of the trip. Let's ignore for a moment the fact that I did not initially want to travel for a few months because I envisioned I'd come back as a better me. Let's also assume that I will be somewhat better, somehow. It's still a high price to pay. I pretty much gave up (temporarily) my family, friends, a home, a car, and a career, or in other words, most things that defined me. All that for some abstract character building. It's like burning down the forest for a tree (that may or may not be there). While feeling lost on Gangnam-dearo, I kept asking myself, "is this worth it?"

Unfortunately for me, I have not developed some superhuman power where I can just will things into happening. It's like one of the drunken nights in Korea, when I said in front of my fellow alcoholics, "if I want something I need to work on it." (the corollary maybe: if I can't work on it, then I better not want it, or at least not expect it) So if I do want a better me, whatever that means, I need to work on that too.

So be it.

I don't always give speeches, but when I do, I tell people to give up their money. I went to a toastmaster group recently and below is my first speech, which is supposed to be a 2 minutes pitch. In case you are wondering, no I don't think I was very convincing.

Remember the Think Different ad? Here’s to the crazy ones. The misfits. The rebels. The troublemakers. The round pegs in the square holes. I don't know if there are any crazy ones here this evening, so I am going to change that up a bit. Here's to the lucky ones. The engineers. The consultants. The self employed. The self unemployed. The people who have nothing better to do on a Wednesday night than listen to a guy trying to convince them that they have too much money in their hands. Yes I am here tonight to convince you to give some of that away.

You may think I know nothing about you and this crazy guy has no idea what kind of tight budget you are trying to survive under. I am going to tell you, it doesn't matter. The fact that you are sitting here in San Francisco means that you are certainly more well off than most people in the world. You may think "Who cares about other random people? They have done nothing to deserve my help." To which I have to say, ya you are probably right.

Remember the random person in the morning who opened the door for you, or that lady who pointed you to the right direction when you were lost while traveling. Or maybe it was you who gave the homeless person your leftover or a piece of candy to a kid who looked sad. The fact is, we all derive pleasure from helping other people, even if you have never encountered them before, and will never see them again. Deep down inside, we all want to help, if only we could afford to. Let me tell you this, in many parts of the world there are people who have to survive with less than a dollar a day, and there's no contribution from you that's too tiny to be a big help for them. Thank you.

When LinkedIn was going IPO, a few of us at work decided to buy a few shares just for fun. The idea is to use that as a proxy for betting the eventual stock price after the IPO hype settles down. Unfortunately the price shot through all of our price target, so none of us ended up owning any LinkedIn shares at the end of that day. Over the years, we would find out that LinkedIn's share price went higher still. And by that I mean, it's now several times over the price that we could have bought at.

A few months later Pandora also went IPO. The same few of us decided to try the same bet again. I made sure I woke up early on the day of IPO, and bought 10 shares at whatever price I could get. The wiser coworkers decided to bail out at the last minute, which means at the end of that day I was the only one who ended up with shares of Pandora. It seemed silly to be the only person who entered into the bet, but since it was only 10 shares I didn't care much about it. For the next two years, its share price would fluctuate, going as low as less than half of my purchase price.

Last week I was delighted to see that it finally has climbed above my purchase price, so I immediately got to my computer and sold my 10 shares. At least now I can claim to have won the bet, even if the only opponent was myself.

Not bad for a profit of $14.62.

One thing that I have a lot more of after quitting my job is time. With the abundance of time comes the question of what to do with it. Like nations with newly discovered natural resources, resource curse is something I need to avoid. Already I am seeing negative effects with my new found time, for example it's amazing how staying in bed for 12+ hours everyday can make you feel dull and tired for the rest of the day.

Unfortunately time is unlike money, and I cannot set aside some of the time in a saving account somewhere and withdraw it later[1]. Another way to avoid the resource curse is by investing the gain into areas with future sustainable growth, which I am sort of doing with my side projects. Another area I wanted to invest in is my relationships, not in terms of dating[2], but more about growing existing relationships, or at least not let them go stale.

Let it be known that I am horribly bad at keeping in touch. I barely keep tap on anyone from high school and college. While newer technologies like Facebook is supposed to keep us "connected", I didn't think so highly of substituting actually "connecting" with "mutual stalking". So for a while, I actively unfriended people on Facebook if I didn't think I will run into them again.

But I digress -- this isn't about Facebook.

While I am happily trading loss income for time, I am well aware that most people are making the logical choice of trading time for income. As such, their available time is more limited. Which means most of the time when I am available to do things, or just chat, other people probably aren't.

I've always had a distaste of annoying people, and last thing I want is becoming one myself. Every time before I contact someone, I consciously think about if the other person is busy[3], when was the last time I messaged them, and more importantly, am I going to be annoying. Or if I suggest meeting up and doing things, are they going to think they've seen me too much.

Fortunately there's a small group of friends who are usually up to do things, and I find myself seeing them a lot more often than I did. Outside of that group though, I definitely find myself connecting to other people less and less, which seems contrary to what should have happened as my free time increased.

[1]: Well, in a sense I could, by getting a job now and taking a break later, but that defeats the purpose of having a break now.

[2]: In "Predictably Irrational", Dan Ariely wrote, "for many people the workplace is not just a source of money but also a source of motivation and self-definition... And employees who take pride in their work feel a sense of happiness and purpose." Regardless of what other people may think, not having a job certainly cuts into my self-esteem and my self reflected desirability.

[3]: Which is one of the reasons why I hate the new Android Hangout app.