On a generosity scale from one to ten—one equating to “painfully cheap” and ten meaning “delightfully generous”—my kids think I’m a one. For years I thought all the “You’re Number One” cards, trophies, and plaques my children gave me on Father’s Day celebrated my best-ness. It turns out it was code. They were mocking my cheapness. In fact, they think my entire generation is cheap.

In January 1965, after living their entire lives in soggy Western Washington, my mom and dad packed up their belongings and moved to sunny Arizona. After enjoying the dry climate for several months, Mom wrote a letter to her father inviting him to close up the "mom and pop" store that he operated thirteen-hours-a-day, seven-days-a-week and come live with them in Tempe.

It didn't take long for a heated argument to break out. Dozens of us had just arrived in Yorktown, Virginia to undergo officer training for the Coast Guard—each of us with his own story of the ghastly treatment that was rumored to lie ahead. According to scuttlebutt, we were soon to be marched until we dropped, cursed at, threatened, and mentally taxed to the point where many of us would wash out.

Thirty years ago, after landing my first consulting job, I could hardly wait to get started. For years, I had studied how to change the world and now it was my turn to roll up my sleeves and actually do something.

When I was a young boy, I lived with my parents and older brother in a one-bedroom house at the end of a long dirt road in the middle of the forest. Couple this isolation with the facts that we didn't own a TV and our car wasn't roadworthy enough to go very far, and it would be correct to conclude that I lived a rather cloistered childhood. By the time I was six, I doubt that I had ventured more than three miles from our home.

As a boy, I loved to watch Father Knows Best, a TV program showcasing your typical sitcom family of the 50s. One of the more memorable episodes involves a short-wave radio that teenager Bud is refurbishing. When he finally gets the contraption working, he finds himself listening to a conversation between two boats located over a thousand miles away. The signal is bouncing off the ionosphere—making him privy to a conversation between the “Betty Anne,” a 34-foot cabin cruiser and other vessels nearby.

Imagine that it's your first day at Fairhaven Junior High School and you learn that every single student in your homeroom (except for you) had been registered at the elite, private, and very expensive grade school across town when they were still embryos. Then, starting at age five, for the next six years of their lives they attended that elite, private, and very expensive school where they were showered with tutors, special programs, and brilliant classroom instruction. . . .

The TV shows I watched as a boy frequently offered up scenes of a father, dressed in suit and tie, coming home from work, carrying an expensive briefcase, and whistling a happy tune. But that would be the end of any work references. Once the briefcase was stowed, no sitcom writer dared bring down the mood with sordid details about the nature of work itself. Consequently, the message of the 50s was as vague as it was odd.. . .

“Captain Newton wants to speak to you,” said the voice on the other end of the phone. “The captain?” I thought to myself. I’d only been out of training for a couple of months and already I’d done something wrong! Why else would the boss of the entire base be calling me, a lowly ensign? I was soon to find out.. . .

Most Christmas stories don’t start the day after Christmas. This one does. On December 26, 2006, after opening presents with her husband and baby boy and then hurriedly packing her bags, my daughter Becca climbed onto a jet and started the first leg of a journey to Stavropol, Russia. Becca traveled to this former communist stronghold in response to what she described as an aching in her heart. After she and her husband Bruce had adopted a newborn baby boy a year earlier, Becca was left with the impression that there was more to be done. There was something missing. There was someone who needed her.. . .