The Tale Of Two Homeless Men Faced with one of the most difficult decisions of his life, this homeless man made the right choice and turned his whole life around…

Imagine there are two homeless men begging for change on a street corner. A young man stops and makes them an incredible offer.
The young man offers them each two choices: You can have $100 in cash right now or no money and two months of coding lessons. (Coding is a term computer programmers use in regards to writing software programs.)
Now, imagine one homeless man takes the $100 and the other decides to learn to code. What happened to both men? The hypothetical homeless man with a $100 bill would likely spend it and still be on the streets. As for the other man, the one who took the coding lessons, we don’t have to speculate his future because we actually know it.
You see, a 23-year old computer programmer by the name of Patrick McConlogue made this exact offer to a 37-year old homeless man named Leo Grand. Leo chose the programming lessons.
So, McConlogue started by spending one hour a day with Grand before work. After their morning session, McConlogue would go to work and Grand would practice what he learned on a Google Chromebook McConlogue gave him.
Grand would practice his daily lesson until the battery in his Chromebook died. (He found places to charge it overnight while he slept on public benches.)
At the end of the two months, Grand had learned a lot, but both men decided they wanted to do more. That’s when McConlogue’s boss, John Katzman, stepped in.
Katzman allowed McConlogue to teach Grand full-time at the New York office of his company “Noodle.” After five more weeks of full-time work, Grand had completed and released his first app. An App… or application… is a type of software program that allows you to perform specific tasks. Applications for desktop or laptop computers are sometimes called desktop applications, and those for mobile devices are called mobile apps.
Grand is currently researching for his next app and is looking for a full-time job as a computer programmer.
Even better, McConlogue has started a mentorship program for programmers. So far, 150 programmers have signed up to teach someone to code for one hour a day for two months. McConlogue is still figuring out how to run his new mentorship, but the impact he could have on so many lives is incredible.
It’s amazing what a little delayed gratification can do. Grand decided to pass up on the quick and easy $100 now for the possibility to create a wonderful life in the future.
Not only that, you just never know how far one small act of kindness can reach. It would have been much easier for McConlogue to just walk right by Grand or to throw him some spare change. Instead, he took a chance. He opened his heart and gave Grand the opportunity of a lifetime, an opportunity that meant a lot of dedication and work for both men.
Altruism is rare, but it is clearly not dead.