Why Giving Matters - Arthur C. Brooks

Why Giving Matters - Arthur C. Brooks

Take the time to read this whole BYU Speech, you'll be glad you did...

Let me tell you a quick story about a briefcase. I know it’s a weird subject for a story, but it’s actually a magic briefcase. It’s my magic Brigham Young University briefcase. I visited here in the fall of 2007 for the first time—I’d never been here before. My friend Gary Cornia, who is the dean of the business school, gave me a beautiful briefcase that said “Brigham Young University” on it. I took it home and put it away because I already had a briefcase, and I didn’t think about it.
About a month later my briefcase broke, and I was complaining to my wife, and I said, “The handle’s broken. It’s very inconvenient.”
And she said, “What about that BYU briefcase you brought home? Why don’t you carry that?”
And I said, “Oh. Okay. That’s a good idea.”
So I took all my stuff and put it in the BYU briefcase, and I started carrying it around.
At the time, my research assistant at Syracuse University, Nick Bailey (he’s here—he actually works at BYU now), noticed, and he said, “You’re carrying a BYU briefcase.”
I said, “Yeah, it’s great. It’s an Italian briefcase. It’s very nice.”
I travel a lot, and one of the funny things I noticed is that when you are out in public carrying a briefcase that says something on it, the first thing people you don’t know do is read the briefcase and then look at you. It occurred to me that people were thinking, “He’s a Mormon guy.” And that’s actually sort of false religious advertising because I’m a Roman Catholic. I take my faith seriously, but no matter how seriously I take my faith, technically that still doesn’t make me a Mormon.
So I was walking around saying, basically, “I’m a Mormon,” and the funny thing is that it was changing my personality. And the reason it was changing my personality was because I was mortified by the idea that somebody would say, “You know, I was in the airport, and I saw this Mormon guy, and he was being a real jerk.” I wanted to live up to someone else’s reputation, and it was making me into a better person. It was a magic briefcase.
So what’s the implication of this story? Well, obviously it might just be that I’m trying to get a new briefcase right now. (Maybe the greatest kind of evangelization that the LDS Church could undertake would be to buy 300 million briefcases and give them out to all Americans.) But the bigger point here is that carrying the briefcase was actually making my life better. I was happier; things were going really well for me as I was carrying that briefcase. And the reason is that the service for which Mormons have become justifiably famous was infecting my life. It was making me better as a person. It was helping me. And I thank you for that.