As the proud father of four awesome children, my ultimate goal in life is to ensure that my kids understand the importance of giving. I think most people do not understand the impact that a small act of kindness can make on the world. Our family learned this first hand and we are forever grateful to everyone that helped us through a rough patch in our lives.

Three years ago during Christmas (2016), our family went through an incredibly difficult experience that changed the dynamic of our household forever. My wife (and mother to our four beautiful children) was tragically killed in a car accident. The outpouring of love that was shown to our family, during this difficult time made an impact on our lives and we were inspired to give back.

For our household, giving has become somewhat therapeutic and a way to honor the memory of my wife. My children and I decided to build a free mobile app (called the Awesome App) that has kindness challenges to inspire others and hopefully make the world a more pleasurable place to live.

One of our favorite things to do as a family is to complete these kindness challenges. My daughter will dress up as a fairy and we will go around looking for cars that are parked in front of an expired parking meter. We'll put quarters into the meter as she waves her "magic wand". We laughingly call this the "parking meter fairy". It is quite likely that we will never know if we saved that person from getting a ticket or if they will ever even know what we did for them, but that doesn't matter so much to us. The most important thing in my book, is that we had a good time doing it together as a family.

One random act of kindness can inspire others to reciprocate and "pay it forward", I refer to this phenomenon as the ripple effect. I believe that gratitude and giving are two of the most important life skills that we can teach our children. If we can teach our children the importance of giving back and they can inspire others to follow their example, I believe we can make world a better place.