I woke up this morning with energy running through my veins, still so excited about what we accomplished last night.

$50k. With less than 10 hours or so hours worth of work. 100% for charity.

Here’s the back story:

Back at the last Practical Profits event, another speaker, Wil Mattos, and I were sitting on a couch and talking about how much we like to do for charity. I was telling Wil of my dreams to build a school, then he mentioned how he wants to go help underprivileged children in Brazil (where he’s from).

We were feeding off each other more and more, getting more and more passionate about things that could be done to help the world. We decided we wanted to do something ASAP.

Our first idea was to get backpacks filled with school supplies to severely underprivileged children in Brazil. Wil sent me a video of the situation for some of those kids there and it was absolutely heart wrenching.

We asked the rest of the Practical Profits team if they would be interested in helping and they immediately said yes.

At first we were going to start a nonprofit. We did apply for it, but the paperwork takes a long time and we didn’t want to wait years to do something (though the paperwork is still in progress).

Wil mentioned that he knew of a charity, Spirit Of A Giving Heart, and that we could help them for our first project.

Spirit Of A Giving Heart helps children in an Indian reservation in Arizona. There are 618 kids in this school and they’re extremely poor.

• 90% of them don’t have electricity…
• They’re bussed up to 40 miles (one way) to get to school
• 90% of them are eligible for the free lunch program
• A substantial % of their families are below the poverty line
• Many children are so poor that they have to live at the school, going home only for weekends and holidays
• 50% of the children who start kindergarden are not ready for it
• The children get a package of “Tribal” clothes once a year. The packages are becoming smaller and smaller, and last year because of funding they didn’t get their coats until February – way after they needed it….
• Every year they’re allowed to ask for 2 or 3 things for their Christmas wishes. They ask for things most children take for granted – like pens, pencils, and notebooks.

Wil and I decided we would get backpacks for every single child in that school, filled with school supplies appropriate for their age level.

I had my assistant research some prices and we thought we’d have to pay $30k or so, shipped, for everything. We knew we could raise that and were happy with it. But one day Wil randomly mentioned to someone what we were doing and they mentioned told him of a nonprofit that specifically creates and fills backpacks for nonprofit charities. He followed up with that company, and they gave us a HUGE discount.

$14k for all 600+ backpacks, filled and shipped right to the school.

WOW.

Our plan to create the money was this:

1. Ask our marketing friends if they’d donate products at a discount
2. Create mini sales pages where each product would be displayed
3. Sell limited quantities of the products, discounted, on a live webinar (with the money going right to the charity’s PayPal)

It was absolutely beautiful how many people were open to donating.

Here’s everyone who ended up donating, in alphabetical order of first name:

• Brian Johnson
• Brian Koz
• Brittany Lynch
• Dan Hollings
• Dennis Becker
• Jaime Mintun
• James Jones
• Jason Fladlien
• John Rhodes
• Keith Dougherty
• Maria Gudelis
• Matt Rhodes
• Rachel Rofe
• Shane Melaugh
• Tim Castleman
• Wil Mattos

Everything came together so seamlessly and easily.

We kept getting pleasantly surprised. Marketers were donating products that were worth $1,000, $2,000… even $4,000.

I ended up creating mini descriptions of each product and then Wil plugged them into his shopping cart. He had it set up so that there was one main sales page, and people would just have to refresh it every time a product ran out to get to see the next product.

It was SO easy! He really did a knock-out job.

When we started the webinar, James Jones, Maria Gudelis, Keith Dougherty, and John Rhodes came on to support everything.

James immediately said he was going to eat all the PayPal fees for every single product bought so the charity would get 100% of the donations. (He is one of the most generous people I have ever met.)

We started selling products, and WOW. It was unbelievable. People were so excited to be there, to support the cause, and to get such great discounts.

Wil MC’ed everything (he was GREAT at it!!) while I announced the products.

At the end of the webinar sales were showing up slowly. There was so much activity on the PayPal account! The webinar ended up going 3.5 hours!

At the end of the webinar, Wil finally announced we were at $36k in sales.  Keith Dougherty spoke up and said, “I don’t like $36… I like $37. I’m going to donate another $1,000.”At that point I guess a few more sales came in, and we got to $38k. James said, “We should push for $40k!”

Wil said he would put in $1k, then James said he would match him. I said I’d put in another $1k, and then so did Maria and John, which got us $5k even more.

Then, with all the cash donations from other marketers we got even before the webinar… we were able to round up to $50k with donations.

It was UNBELIEVABLE.

So magical.

This whole experience has forever changed me. I told Wil and Otto… I’ve had a lot of achievements in life. I’ve been a cover story in a magazine, wrote a book, lost 100 lbs, and a slew of so many other things… but this is what I am the most proud of, by FAR.

It’s just amazing. I am so grateful for everyone who supported this.

It’s incredible. This went from Wil and I sitting on a couch to asking Practical Profits to help to a few hours worth of calling people, doing some tech stuff, writing a little copy, etc… to the webinar.

We worked a grand total (including the 3.5 hour webinar) of less than 10 hours.

And it didn’t feel like work.

Most people didn’t even get to mail their lists for us. At the peak of our call we had about 250 people. If we would have pushed more, who knows what would have happened?

All I know right now is that education is huge. Knowledge is power. And everyone who helped took part in possibly rewriting a child’s destiny.

Absolutely magical.

I feel so inspired and amazed at what humans are capable of. This has forever changed me.

I had a GREAT learning lesson today.

I had to go to Western Union earlier this afternoon. I just found out a friend had been robbed and I wanted to transfer some money to him.

When I got there, the lady running the counter didn’t know exactly what she was doing. She was flipping around her screen and asking ME what she should type in for different things that I had no idea about.

I gave her my best guesses, and it seemed to work…. but when I went to pay with my PayPal card, it came up declined.

I KNEW I had money in there, and even double checked my balance on my cell phone to make sure.

The lady told me my PayPal card was a “pay as you go” card, so it wouldn’t work.

I told her (in a VERY nice way) that the card works as a debit all the time, and asked if she could please try again.

She became very agitated and told me, “Ugh, fine”.

When she did it, it came up denied again.

At this point she became VERY hostile with me and rude. I told her I was concerned because I had no other debit card, reminded her that my friend was robbed, and told her I was just trying to think of something because he had no money. I was still VERY nice about it.

Maybe she wrote me off because she thought I didn’t have funds or something, but she was so rude. She basically told me I was out of luck, reiterated that PayPal will never work because it’s “pay as you go”, walked away from me, and was really unfriendly.

When I left, I was pretty mad. I don’t know if I’m explaining well enough how rude she was, but she was extremely nasty for no reason.

I left the building seething, thinking about how I would go to another store, have it work, and then have my assistant call Western Union and the Safeway she worked at to tell them how rude and unhelpful she was.

(I NEVER complain about people, especially since people have bad days and I’ve worked retail, but she was so mean!)

I went to Fred Meyer, another grocery store, and as I figured, the PayPal card worked fine. The cashier at Safeway did something wrong.

Something in me decided to call the first cashier and tell her what happened.

When I called her, I was very nice about it. I said, “Hey, this is Rachel. You were just helping me with my Western Union. I went to Fred Meyer and it worked. I think what happened was that the other cashier put in my friend’s middle name, just so you know for next time!”

She was VERY nice and sincerely thanked me for helping her.

What did I learn out of this?

1. After I called her, I felt like the situation was resolved. Any residue of anger I had just dissipated. It was magical.

2. I stood up for myself in a “confrontational” yet kind way, which felt nice. (Normally I’d probably do nothing and just “eat” the anger, which would never REALLY go away….)

3. I actually got to help that cashier! She seemed very grateful for me telling her what happened.

All in all, it was a great learning lesson. I’m really proud to have stood up for myself and to lift the situation to something where we both left much happier.

I went into my RAOK challenge super-excited, but unfortunately, I have to decommit from it now.

Because of a ton of changes with Burn Your To Do List and actively trying to make it as good as possible, there are days when I haven’t been able to think about anything but work – or even make it out of my front door.

I guess it’s in a larger picture doing something good for the providers and entrepreneurs we’re working with… but it’s not what I had in mind when I created the challenge.

I’m hoping that someday in the near future I can start this back up, as it really did make my soul sing.

I signed up for a new class that I was super-excited about learning today.

When the instructor learned about what I did, she asked if I’d be interested in bartering her lessons for my ability to get her more online exposure.

I agreed, and offered her a trade that is heavily in her favor dollar-wise. I think I’ll be able to get her a lot more clients… and I consider this not just a RAOK for her, but to all potential clients, because she is AMAZING and so are her services.

BTW: Some really awesome songs to download are:

Jason Mraz – Life Is Wonderful
Plain White Tees – What If
Michael Buble – Haven’t Met You Yet

These have been playing over and over on my iPod lately.

If you have any positive songs to share, please do!

I have been wanting to do a 30 day “Random Act Of Kindness” blog section for a while, but never wanted to commit to posting here 30 days in a row.

Joshua keeps pushing me on it though, so I’ve finally cracked.

So with that said…

What this is about: I love to do “random acts of kindness (RAOK)”. It’s partly purely selfish – it feels AMAZING to be able to give to other people. I’m also a big believer in the “ripple effect” – if I do something nice for someone, they’ll do something nice for someone, and so on and so forth, making the world a happier place.

I will be committing to doing a RAOK every day for the next 30 days. I’m still not sure about posting here every day for 30 days, but I WILL commit to posting here as frequently as possible (some days I might have a few days’ worth of updates).

In all actuality, I probably already do a RAOK once a day (or at least an average of 7 a week) – but I want to post here because:

a) It seems like whenever I mention a RAOK on Twitter or Facebook, people say, “Wow – I want to do that!” It seems like it’d be fun to share ideas.

b) Even if someone looks at this blog and doesn’t decide to go do something nice on their own, it should at the minimum, put them in a slighter better mood than when they got here.

What I consider a RAOK: A random act of kindness can be whatever you feel comfortable with. It could just be waiting for an extra minute to hold the door open for someone or giving someone a huge smile. It does NOT always have to deal with money, and it’s whatever you feel comfortable with (or NOT, which is even better, so you can push yourself out of your comfort zone!)

Just to get your imagination going, here are some things I’ve done in the past:

- Offered to babysit for a busy mom who couldn’t otherwise afford a babysitter
- Bought a gift card to randomly give someone in the parking lot
- Saw a guy trying on hats on the street in Vegas and went over to buy one for him
- Read to kids at the Salvation Army
- Paid for the person behind me’s toll on a bridge

What I would LOVE: If you started posting doing RAOK’s here, that would be AWESOME!!!

The stories that can come out of RAOK’s ROCK. Last week I went to go give someone a gift card and we ended up becoming friends and are going to hike together soon.

The week before that I ended up talking with a homeless man for a few hours. He ended up BLOWING MY MIND with how much he knew, and really challenged my thought structure. He actually wanted to be homeless, because he said he’d rather live in a box than with people that he considered had “toxic” lifestyles. It was so interesting to hear about how he stashed his stuff, things he went through, etc…

I don’t know about you, but I LOVE to hear about different people and their perspectives on life.

Okay, so with all that out of the way…

What I did for Day 1: Today the UPS man (who I’ve never met before) came to my door with a package for me. I saw the box said Oh Nuts (candy/nut store) on it, so I told him that my mom must have been sending me a Valentine’s present.

I told him that the stuff from there is very good, and he said he’d have to try it sometime. I asked him if he wanted me to open the box so he could try some. He acted surprised, but said yes. I ended up getting out the scissors, opening the box, and giving him a goodie bag of different treats.

He walked out with a HUGE smile on his face.