Page 171 - Free the Idea Monkey

Every episode was different. Sometimes Oprah would give the
teams money, sometimes not. Sometimes she would point them to a
particular need, e.g., a school, a family, a hospital. In other episodes
she would have them find their own causes. Winning contestants
were selected by how creatively they brought joy into people’s lives
and who did more with less. Despite my crying episodes, I absolutely
loved the show.

The show reminded me of the biblical parable of the talents. As
the story goes, a master gives three servants money (talents) before

he leaves on a trip. The servant given five talents
invests aggressively and doubles his master’s
money. The servant given two talents does the
same. But the third servant, given only one talent,
buries his for fear he will blow the opportunity. The
master calls both of the aggressive investors “my good
and faithful servants” and rewards them with more
responsibility. In what seems to be a bit of biblical irony,
he gets extremely angry at the guy who took no risks with
his and calls him “a wicked and slothful servant.” Ouch.
This parable and Oprah’s show really spoke to me as a business
owner. Even though I was usually too busy drawing caricatures of
nuns to pay much attention in religious ed class, I am pretty certain
that this parable supports the idea of entrepreneurial investing and
conscious capitalism; i.e., to whom much is given, much is required.
(I also think that if you follow the parallel, in her show, Oprah was
playing God. But I digress.)
The runner-up winner on The Big Give was Cameron Johnson.
I’ve had the pleasure of spending time with Cameron and he is the
classic entrepreneur. He went from selling a few of his sister’s old
toys online—at nine years old—to being one of the top online Beanie
Babies distributors, someone with a net worth of a million dollars
before he was old enough to have a checking account. On the show,
Cameron had no problem picking up the phone and letting his net-
work in on the fun of helping people out. He aggressively sold the
idea of doing good and his methods were creative and unconven-
tional. In one episode, he randomly stopped by an auto repair shop

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