On December 18, 1933, a man calling himself B. Virdot placed an advertisement in the Canton Repository in Ohio. He offered money to families struggling through the Depression. All they had to do was write and describe their circumstances. He promised to keep their identities private, along with his own.
He had set aside $750, intending to give $10 each to 75 families. The letters kept coming. He changed the plan and sent $5 checks to 150 families.
Seventy-five years later, the writer Ted Gup received a suitcase containing those letters. B. Virdot had been his grandfather, Sam Stone. Gup recounts the stories in his book, “A Secret Gift: How One Man’s Kindness – and Trove of Letters – Revealed the Hidden History of the Great Depression.”
I’ve written before about the little things that spread joy. An unexpected compliment, a genuine thank-you, or even a gracious smile can make someone’s day. These acts often cost us nothing, yet they can make both the recipient and the giver feel better. But we underestimate their power.
Amit Kumar and Nicholas Epley tested the gap between giving and receiving in research first published in 2022. At a Chicago skating rink, 75 people agreed to give a stranger a cup of hot chocolate. The researchers asked the givers how big a kindness it seemed, then asked the recipients the same question.
On a scale of zero to ten, the givers didn’t think their gesture was a big deal; they gave it an average rating of 3.76. The recipients, on the other hand, were quite happy, rating the gesture an average of 7 out of 10. Those who received the drink also felt better than the givers had predicted.
Small kindnesses matter more than we think, yet they’re easy to overlook in our daily interactions. We’re often conditioned to take them for granted, as though they don’t warrant our attention.
Research suggests that people are quicker to speak up when something goes wrong than when everything goes right. Dissatisfaction can prompt us to vent, but we rarely share positive experiences unless someone specifically invites us to.
For example, we often tend to be very vocal (all those negative 1-star reviews) when we’ve been wronged or even perceive being wronged. On the contrary, it takes an extraordinary level of service for most of us to bother leaving good reviews.
I’m not suggesting we answer every survey that comes our way, but letting someone know they did their job well costs us nothing but can mean a lot to them.
Of course, kindness still requires paying attention to the person receiving it. Many of us (myself included) are raised to value modesty and can feel uncomfortable when appreciated. Or we often get caught up worrying or stressing about how our gestures or gifts might be misunderstood. I even published a series of essays Take My Money, Please, about how challenging it was for me to give, for fear of how I’d be perceived and whether the recipient would feel obligated to reciprocate.
Selfishly, giving can be good for us, too. In a 2008 experiment, Elizabeth Dunn, Lara Aknin, and Michael Norton gave 46 people either $5 or $20 to spend that day. Some were told to spend it on themselves; others, on someone else. By evening, the second group reported greater happiness.
Larry Stewart, a Missouri businessman who eventually came to be known as Kansas City’s “Secret Santa,” is an example of how giving increases happiness. In 1979, after being fired from his job for the second year in a row, Stewart stopped at a drive-in restaurant. He noticed the carhop serving him shivering in the cold and gave her a $20 tip. Her eyes filled with tears. Moved by her reaction, Stewart withdrew another $200 from the bank and drove around looking for others to help. He called it his “Christmas present to himself.”
Eventually, he turned the giving into a 26-year tradition, anonymously handing out money to strangers during the holidays. It’s said that Stewart ultimately gave away more than $1.3 million. Asked about it, he said that the joy of helping that first carhop was what inspired him to keep giving.
I keep reminding myself to get better at following through on the small kindnesses I already think of, offering the help and leaving the other person free to decide whether they want it. There are plenty of occasions when I can’t help much. I can try to stop dismissing the occasions when I can.
Charity: A thing that begins at home, and usually stays there. Elbert Hubbard, The Roycroft Dictionary (1914)