With Purpose Success, part 14

Countless studies have shown that as we mature, our fascination with the superficial naturally ebbs. Many of us are now discovering deeper feelings and seeking information and advice on how we can contribute something important in the time we have left. Slowly, the media is latching on to this shift in the public consciousness, breathing life into the giving-back phenomenon. The search for purpose is becoming part of pop culture- not just high society. Clinton's Giving was an instant best seller. Rick
Warren's The Purpose Driven Life has sold thirty million copies worldwide.
The Wall Street Journal began a weekly giving-back feature. Time magazine started a column called "Power of One," which reports on ordinary individuals making a difference.
Meanwhile, reality TV is morphing into charity TV. Call it "philanthrotainment."
In Extreme Makeover: Home Edition, good people who are struggling get their house remodeled for free. In NASCAR Angels, professional racers soup up the jalopies of financially strapped good Samaritans.
Such shows are even more popular in England, where they offer the likes of Fortune: Million Pound Giveaway, where a panel of rich folks decides who to give money to after a series of sixty-second pitches, and
The Secret Millionaire, where wealthy benefactors go undercover in poor neighborhoods for ten days to find worthy recipients. When the most highly rated TV program in America, American Idol, in 2007 decided to give something back through a telethonlike two-hour program, it raised $76 million and a similar amount in an encore telethon a year later.
In the past few years, financial firms have begun trying to hook new clients with an appeal to higher purpose. None have been more focused on this than mutual fund company American Century, which in its commercials asks: "What exactly is success? Is there a difference between making it big and making a big difference? Maybe wealth can be measured two ways-financially, and how we live our lives as human beings."
In another ad the firm states: "a successful life can be measured in two ways: by what you've gained and what you give back."
Luminaries like Bill Gates, who at a relatively young age turned his attention away from the business of Microsoft to become a full-on philanthropist and focus on his foundation's work, Warren Buffett, who is not only giving away his fortune but also setting an aggressive timetable for when it must be spent, and Bono, the rock star-turned-statesman, have made giving extremely cool and are helping to set a new moral tone for thinking people around the world. "Philanthropy is one of the great est pleasures I have," Gates says. Adds Bono: "When the powerful go to work for the powerless, amazing things happen." He's called putting every child in the world in a classroom "the moon shot of our generation" and has said, "I'm not asking you to put another man on the moon; I'm asking you to put humanity back on this Earth."
Bono works so tirelessly for his causes that it's strained relations with his U2 band mates. But his commitment has paid huge dividends and testifies to the power of a single individual. "He's a kind of one-man state who fills his treasury with the global currency of fame," the New