For me, the biggest change in my life happened when I stopped trying to accomplish everything at once. I realized that I’m actually incredibly lazy—most of what I do has to do with habits and trivial stimuli, rather than deep thoughts. Instead of trying to change every behavior at once, I would pick something incredibly small and simple and focus on it for an entire month. Even that can be difficult, but it meant I could make a change almost habitual before I tried something else.

Joseph Kony is evil and should be stopped. He has allegedly abducted 30,000 children in his long military campaign. Malaria kills hundreds of thousands of children every year. Joseph Kony has committed atrocities that make me furious. But malaria makes me angrier. Why? Because malaria deaths really do happen just because Americans don’t care enough.

‘I think the Big East is the most overrated conference,’ said a man whose overwhelming disappointment with what basically amounts to 19-year-old boys playing basketball makes one wonder what his priorities are, if he understands that there are millions of things much more interesting to talk about, or whether or not he’s aware that such passion could be focused on saying something that actually matters.

-[T]he people and government of Japan are extraordinarily well-prepared, as well as competent and well-resourced, and do not need significant external assistance in order to mount a maximally effective relief and recovery effort.
-Therefore, you as a donor do not have the power to improve the relief and recovery effort in Japan. …
-Aid being offered far exceeds aid being requested. …
-Charities are aggressively soliciting donations, often in ways we feel are misleading. …

Overall, though, a gift to Doctors Without Borders seems to us like the best way to effectively “respond to this disaster”. We feel they are a leader in transparency, honesty and integrity in relief organizations, and the fact that they’re not soliciting funds for Japan is a testament to this. Rewarding Doctors Without Borders is a move toward improving incentives and improving disaster relief in general.