16、Give your change to charity
If we all put our change in charity tins the world would be a lot better off.
So the next time you buy something priced between 95p and 99p stick the difference in the tin. Simple. If everyone in the UK did that with just 1p a week it adds up to £300m a year. Wow. That’s a lot of money.
Someone worked out that in the UK alone there is currently about £15m of loose change which needs to be removed from circulation (most of it in sock drawers and old whisky bottles presumably).
If you have your own stash at home now is the time to hand it over. So instead of just a drawer of smelly pennies doing nothing you can actually give them a role in life. Foreign money works well too, as proven by the BA sponsored Change for Good campaign for Unicef. They’ve raised over £16m.
Maybe you could start a ‘Make a change’ event at work. Maybe you could check down the side of your own sofa first.
17、Try watching less TV
Just try it. How long can you last without television? A week? A whole day? The benefits of giving up something you love and that causes you no harm whatsoever seem hard to fathom at first. But do you really need to watch quite so much TV?
Try these simple tests:
Only turn on the set when you KNOW what it is that you want to watch.
Never leave the TV on in the background just filling the room with noise.
Turn it off when your programme has finished.
Do something else like:
Rearrange your pictures.
Make a cocktail.
File.
Write a song.
Apply make up.
Swim in a pond.
Wear gold.
Revert to childhood.
Stay up all night.
Use candles.
Change your hair colour.
Dust.
Shave something off.
18、Learn to be friendly in another language
We’re rubbish, we Brits.
How many of us make an effort to speak a foreign language?
Not even the basics like hello and thank you.
Is it really that difficult?
Just by learning a few words of a foreign language it’s amazing to see how much genuine warmth you can create.
Given that our schools are home to over 300 languages it could come in handy especially when you realise the Arabic for “hello” is the same as the word for “goodbye”. (‘Salaamu Alaikum’ in case you were wondering). It’s a lovely sentiment, but it could make telephone calls rather confusing.
So, where to start? Well learning to say hello in the seven most spoken languages in the world aint a bad place.
Chinese: Ni Haro
Arabic: Salaamu Alaikum
Hindi: Namaste
Spaniash: Hola
Bengali: Ei Je
Portuguese: Bôm dia
Russian: Zdravstvuite
Once you’ve mastered these you could be ready for a whole sentence or a rude joke.