The billionaire who gave it all away

There’s this story in The Irish Times about Chuck Feeney, Founder of Duty Free Shoppers: Chuck Feeney: the billionaire who gave it all away, with the subtitle “philanthropist lives in modest apartment after giving away $8Bn fortune”. (Connor O’Clary, March 3, 2018)

In this article, you get an introduction to Mr. Feeney’s life and inflection points and how he set up his charitable foundation, Atlantic Philanthropies, back in 1984, “even as he continued to manage his businesses and buy and sell properties around the world”.

O’Clary believes the reasons CF did what he did “included an innately generous personality, discomfort with the trappings of wealth as a product of an Irish-American neighbourhood in New Jersey where “nobody blows their horn”, and the example set by his mother, a nurse who was always helping others.
He was also influenced by Andrew Carnegie’s essay The Gospel of Wealth, with its famous declaration that ‘the millionaire will be but a trustee for the poor’.”

So, what do we learn from this story ?

1. First of, exactly what I wrote in the first paragraph,

“All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy,
 All play and no work makes Jack a mere toy.” -quote attributed to Irish novelist Maria Edgeworth

Do not be that person. Don’t be Jack, or Homer Simpson here. Have interests outside of work, do not let work absorb 100% of your life.

2. If you wanna give away your wealth, you have to make it first. I’m pretty sure that’s the first thing Chuck Feeney would tell you.

3. Here’s what Chuck Feeney probably wouldn’t tell you: It’s way harder to build a fortune today than it was 30, 40, or 50 years ago. On the surface it appears there’s a growing market for __[fill in the blanks with whatever products and services you are offering]. Yet, the barriers of entry are way higher. The competition is X1000s what it was for Feeney’s generation.

4. The fact that we live in an interconnected world with social media makes it ever harder to filter out useful information. In the information age (or digital age, whatever), 90% of information is just noise. Pollution. Imagine living next to an airport. With planes taking of by the hour, it’s madness out there. I would never build my house close to an airport. Beware: noise pollution causes hearing loss.

5. If we interpolate conclusion 4. into 5 here, it is: Pay no to attention to 90% of the things you hear, to 90% of the news you read, and say no to 90% of people. [Note: by all accounts, 90% is a conservative figure]. Furthermore, this rule allows you to completely ignore the Chuck Feeney story. I did not ignore it because that was the way to get to my conclusion. I had to get around my advice to get to it.

Ok, now here’s a rehash for you:

It is not “the billionaire who gave it all away: or “who donated his net worth to the poor”;
it is the billionaire “who invested his wealth in education” (because that’s what he did !)
Somebody can choose to invest any amount in an endeavor outside his main line of business: it can be:    1%,
         2%,
         32%,
or     100% in this case

What a big difference the choice of words makes and how often we are misled in presentations.