Spending money without expecting any direct return
Y-san wrote in their daily report yesterday:
I received a thank you e-mail from the crowdfunding company for the small donation I had made the other day. The funding was aimed to increase the number of sterile rooms at the National Center for Child Health and Development. I found this crowdfunding project on the net by chance and donated some money without thinking much about it, and had completely forgotten about it. So receiving a thank-you email this way was an unexpected and pleasant surprise, and I felt that whatever the process was, I had done something good. I've always felt willing to make this kind of contribution because I am living a happy and comfortable life myself.
https://readyfor.jp/projects/ncchd-clean-room
Reading this, I thought of a Japanese proverb: "Kane wa tenka no mawari mochi", meaning "Money comes and goes".
There's another version of this proverb: "Kane ha tenka no mawari mono" (mono means "a thing"), the two have similar meanings. But I prefer the first one with the word, "mochi" ("mochi" means "to share"), which seems to better describe the idea of "The more you spend the more you earn". It also seems to better explain the concept of "asset turnover".
Thinking about how to spend your money is also important.
About 10 years ago, I met a person who was spending 1% of his annual income on donations, and I remember being really impressed with that. To tell you the truth, up until that time, I had been quite skeptical about making donations. Unlike in the U.S., most donations are non-tax deductible in Japan and companies do not have donating scheme such as "Matching Donation" (A "matching donation" is a charitable donation by a corporation that matches an employee's donation to an eligible nonprofit organization, most often dollar for dollar). I felt that it was not fair to donate money from my already tax deducted salary. Because of this skepticism about donation, I hadn't been donating money.After I heard about his 1 % contribution, feeling somewhat ashamed of my narrow-mindedness, I decided to donate 5,000 yen every month to support a particular NPO activity which I approved of.
Then, to my surprise, I felt a deep sense of contentment and with it came "luck" in my direction. I know that it's easy to attribute everything to "luck" because it is an invisible thing, but I sometimes feel that our drastically improved business performance may be evidence of this "luck" which came with my act of donation.
I have been constantly making donations since then online and in other ways, and the amount has grown to be more than 1% of the salary after tax in the past 5 years. I'm not good at saving money and I've never been, but believing in "Money comes and goes", I will keep spending "vigorously" in order to stimulate economic activity. lol
Spending does not bring us any obvious return, but it probably returns to us in other ways. Or, the important objective of it is, rather, in doing it without expecting any direct return.