A podcast episode in which Dr. Ed (Dr. Ed Torrey/Tori) reflects on the ripple effects of small acts of kindness after finding a 1995 newspaper article about his college-era charitable fundraising. Using the story of a 7-year-old named Nate Jones—who donated $100 to a homeless shelter—and Dr. Ed’s decision to make a larger donation in Nate’s name, the episode introduces the informal concept “the Nate Jones Effect”: the idea that a single good deed can reverberate across people and generations in ways that are hard to measure. The episode closes with a call to share the message and to act for good.
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This is Dr. Torrey. Welcome to the Influence Every Day show, where we make every day better, and we influence for good.
With my mom's passing, I had to go through all of her belongings and naturally, sifting through photos and old newspaper clippings and documents and all those things, and I came across an article that she saved that was about me, and it was a full spread in the regional newspaper outside of Philadelphia from December 26, 1995. At that time, I was in medical school, and. But this article was about some of the stuff that I did in college. I had created T shirts and sold them for various charities and donated the funds in other people's names. First in my mom's name as part of a gift for her, then in a couple of her sisters, in their names, because of their support for us when we were struggling. And then there was another time where I donated on behalf of my mentor in college, Dr. James Turner. He was my faculty advisor in Africana studies, which was my undergrad degree. Now, one of the things that this article mentioned was something I completely forgot about. Apparently. There was a young boy named Nate Jones who was 7 years old and lived in Philadelphia. And I had seen an article about him and what he did. He raised money and gave a hundred dollars to a homeless shelter. Now, I don't know Nate Jones. I never met him. But what I did was, at that time, I chose to honor him and donate to the same shelter, benefiting from the same shirts that I was making for that cause. And so I donated a couple thousand dollars, I believe, at the time, but it was in the name of Nate Jones. Which brings me to the point of today's podcast, which is we don't know what kind of ripple effects any one action will have throughout as it reverberates throughout society or through our friends or family or the community or the world or even generations. We have no idea what kind of ripple effect it will have. Now, I was talking about this with one of my mentors now, Dr. Mark Smith, and we were talking about how it's amazing, I don't know who Nate Jones is. Not only that his name is so common that it could be anyone, right? It's kind of like it's. It's like a good metaphor for this anonymity in a way, that I donated in his name. But what we started reflecting on was what Dr. Smith called the Nate Jones Effect. He called it, obviously, based on Nate Jones, is that I have no idea what kind of impact that had on him. I know that the shelter I Gave to reached out to him. So I know he learned of it, but he was a seven year old child. What did that do? Did it shape his identity in any kind of way? Did it become something where he's like, I'm the type of person who does this type of thing. Did it affect how his parents or neighbors or other relatives or friends treated him? Did it affect how his teachers or his school treated him? Did it have an impact on the person he became and the other lives he touched throughout his growing up years? I don't know. I don't know. But isn't that beautiful? Isn't it beautiful to consider that I'm going through a bunch of boxes and I find a newspaper article that's about me. Naturally I read it, but now I'm reflecting on Nate Jones. Did I have an impact on him? I don't know. I hope so. I certainly hope so. But this is what it's like when we have conversations with other people, when we do something in the service of other people. It has ripple effects. Now what's interesting also is that finding a newspaper article after my mom passes, I'm naturally sitting around with my family. So my kids are there now. My kids read this article. I was a first year medical student when the article was written and it was about my time in college. My kids happen to be in this current age range. They're in the high school, college, early professional school age. And so they're reading about their father doing something in this newspaper article and then me retelling the story. They're reading about it and it's having an impact on them. So Nate Jones, who was 7 years old at the time when I was starting medical school, is having an impact on my kids now from something he did in the 1990s, or as my kids would say, the 1900s. This is unfathomable if you think about it. The math. If you could try to calculate the spiritual math of doing good in the world and how it spreads from person to person or generation to generation or group to group and how it impacts the world, you cannot fathom it. Just imagine for a second. Imagine if you do one good act and somewhere there's an accounting of it. Someone is writing it down. It's written down. This good act that you've done is written down. But so are its ripple effects that one good act don't see. Sometimes we look at donations, right? Take a donation for example. If I look at the couple thousand dollars that I gave to the homeless shelter and healthcare for the homeless Back then in the 1990s, in the name of Nate Jones. If I look at that, I could just look at it like it's almost like transactional. What was my impact? My impact was I gave that amount of money to that charity. What did they do with it? They did they buy chairs for the boardroom? Did they buy supplies that could help the homeless in the winter? Did they patch the hole in the wall in the homeless shelter? Did they fix the heater? What did they do with that thousand dollars or two thousand dollars? I want to know, what did they do? Let me give me an accounting of that. Well, if I asked for that, that's very, very, very short sighted. In fact, if you were to look at it instead in this sort of spiritual math kind of sense, what if the good that you did of giving is written down and then the impact of that is written down and then the spreading of the idea, the words that people wrote about it, people talked about it, people talked about its impact. People used it to inspire themselves or their kids or their team to do something bigger and better. And then that had a ripple effect. And then that had a ripple effect. What if all of that is on your ledger? What if all of that is taken into account? That's the Nate Jones effect. The Nate Jones effect is a 7 year old boy giving $100 to a homeless shelter in Philadelphia and it having a ripple effect through generations. Generations. So what small act can you do that will have a not so small ripple effect through the universe? I'll see you in the next episode.
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