Hi, welcome. You and I are going to be together for some time on learning how to do good and feel good, and I look forward to that. If we're going to spend time together, you should know a little bit about me, don't you think? Well, here's something about me that you will not find on Google or the Internet if you look for me, but please do. I really want you to see the variety of the work I do. What you won't know are what my goals are. What are my goals in life? What is my mission? Why am I telling you this? Well, I took a page from my friend and colleague, Pamela Whipking, who you'll meet later in the MOOC, who taught me to think about it and then share it with my listeners. Here goes. My vision is big; to create a better world. Now that's a big goal. I know you're thinking big problems. How are you going to do that? Well, all big goals start with a small step. My mission in life is more practical. It's to empower others in all the ways that I can, from being kind, sharing, and helpful with my time, money, and networks. It's one person at a time. Be it my family, my colleagues, my students, my friends, and even strangers. I hope that when they're empowered by me, they will pay it forward, and thus creating a better world of empowered people who feel good about themselves. As the title exhorts you to do, do good, feel good. Now, wait a minute. That does not imply that to feel good you need to do good. You need to do good for its own sake and then you will feel good. I promise you that. It's based on a lot of evidence which I want to share with you in this time we have together, and I also want to share with you some of the small practices we can do. Practicing to be good in small steps, whatever you can manage. Even if you don't have resources. A friendly, genuine smile, and uplifting, good morning, and a sincere compliment. There are many costless ways of doing good, of empowering others. Just recognizing our shared humanity is powerful. I did an experiment in my class. I have to talk to you about this. I asked my students to go down where we have a main walk in our campus called Locust Walk, where people walk, there are no bicycles, no cars, and I asked them to smile and say good morning to people they encounter. Since I asked them to do it, I also did it myself. It's hard because many people walk either with ear plugs, or listening to their iPhones, or looking at their iPhone, so you have to get some kind of contact. Well, the experiment was amazing. There were some people who looked at us with amazement because this is not the expected norm of behavior, and then some people just got it and smiled back. That was so engaging. It was a great experiment and one that hasn't left me, in fact, when I came up with elevator this morning, I just decided to say good morning to the person in the elevator, and he said to me, "Have a nice day," and I plan to have a nice day. There you go. It's a small experiment, try it. What are the goals for this course? I will try and address generosity in a very holistic and reflective manner. Not only what billionaires do, but what you and I can do with our limited means. I want to make the content personal. I want to make it personally relevant to you and to myself. I hope to give you new ideas that will make you reflect on your own attitudes towards what you consider generosity to be, and give you some practices of generosity, and introduce you to new ways of thinking. I will be asking you to do some very simple experiential exercises in the practice of doing good. You have a chance to also interact amongst yourselves. You are from probably many countries, different ages, different backgrounds, and a lot of learning will happen in these interactions. You will have your own ideas and experiences, and then we can co-produce knowledge together about what generosity is. This is about our live lives. I hope your interaction with other learners will inform you about different ways of seeing what generosity is, practicing generosity, and hope that you will engage in meaningful conversations about your experiences. At the end of the course, I would like to see an increase in your self-awareness of your own practices and attitudes in generosity, being open-minded to different practices across different cultures, and understand how being generous benefits the giver and the recipient. Yes, at the end of the course you will feel good. That is my goal, go with me. Many of my Penn students have taken a similar course with me, said it open their eyes, hearts, and minds about the small changes that matter. That the quiz changed their attitude towards generosity, its practices, and the science behind it. Come along with me and we will find out together what this means and how we can go forward. More concretely, I will try and provide you both with knowledges and practices. What does doing good mean for example? Why should we be good? Why should we be generous? How do we recognize generosity within yourselves and around you? I want us to explore the basis for generosity and the different religious underpinnings for generosity. Does it differ in different cultures? Does it vary across different countries? Are some people really more generous than others? Well, what makes them more generous? What are the motivations for generosity? A question I may not have an answer to, is it a learned behavior or is it in your DNA? What is the scientific evidence behind the connection of do good and feel good? That is what you will end up with. I want you to see the signs of generosity using the evidence from a broad range of disciplines. From economics, which is my discipline, just all the other social sciences and neurology and neurosciences, and medical evidence that we have about the connections between the do good and the feel good. Along the way, I will give you some concrete steps on what to do and share some personal stories of my experiences, interview some folks who have done research in many of these areas, and I hope we'll all have a good time doing this. I want to make this course personal. All about you and about me. I want us to identify our values, perceptions, and meanings of generosity. I would like you to compare and contrast your values, your perceptions and meanings of generosity with what I'm saying and what others in your community are saying. Maybe the other learners in this course will share with you what generosity means for them. I want to give you one example, how I learned to compare and contrast my own ideas of generosity. I was in a small village in India and I saw in one of the homes an open bowl of rice and a little child running in and putting a fist full of rice into that bowl. I wondered what that was. So I took a moment to ask if they would share with me what they were doing, and they said that every time they cook a meal, if they could spare a handful of rice, they take it and put it in this bowl. The idea is that there will be somebody in the village who may not have enough to eat at a certain period of time and this bowl of rice is available to them. That was their idea and their practice of generosity was a handful of rice at a time. Think about your own experiences of generosity. Did you feel good doing them? Did you feel good doing good? Well, let's explore this some more.
