MacKenzie Scott’s approach to her $26 billion giving spree was inspired by a book she read in college about writing

Before MacKenzie Scott signed the Giving Pledge and started on her path to give away her $36 billion net worth, she went looking for a paragraph in a book she’d marked up during her college years.

Scott signed the Giving Pledge on May 25, 2019, just months after her divorce from Amazon founder Jeff Bezos left her with a roughly 4% stake in the company. But the billionaire philanthropist and author didn’t open her letter with talk of foundations or tax strategy. Instead, she leaned into her roots as a writer drawing a connection between literature and philanthropy.

She opened her Giving Pledge letter with a memory of pulling Annie Dillard’s The Writing Life off a shelf of her old college books, where she found a passage that she had “underlined and starred.” Dillard’s advice to writers was to not hoard your best material for some later chapter. 

“The impulse to save something good for a better place later is the signal to spend it now,” Dillard wrote, warning that otherwise, “you open your safe and find........

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