Author: Kieran Johnson - The Generosity Guy

Hi there! My names is Kieran and I am your Generosity Guy-de, to assist you to find your purpose. In a charity saturated world, I am the one that will walk beside you to help you navigate through the overwhelming noise and create the kind of change that you want to see. I started out my working life in banking. I found myself in Melbourne selling financial products to financial planners. After countless meetings in which I was told how many millions of dollars they each had in funds under management, I realised I didn’t care about that. Creating more wealth for the wealthy did not motivate me. So, I decided to find what did. Through a journey of community radio and some time with World Vision promoting 40 Hour Famine and partnering with philanthropists whilst working with Opportunity International Australia, I realised that what motivates me is to inspire individuals and businesses in Australia to discover their purpose in generosity. And that through their generosity they can ending poverty, one family and one community at a time, through the power of a small loan. Providing small loans and other financial services allows families in India and Indonesia to build their own small businesses and earn reliable incomes, giving them the tools they need to break free from the poverty cycle. I am married to Ash and father to Molly, Jethro, Harvey & Willow. Life is good.

Numbers are just numbers, very few mean anything.

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Bigger does not necessarily mean better. More does not always mean more. Especially if you are measuring something that is not worthwhile keeping track of. How many eye-balls you get on something is a pointless measurement if the right people aren’t seeing it.

How many people consume content is useless if the content is unhelpful or no positive outcome occurs or no action is taken.

Content does not exist for content’s sake, there should be a purpose behind the creation. And, in my mind, that purpose is on a sliding scale:

  • Lowest quality purpose: People need to see this so that I am well known
  • Middle quality purpose: People need to see this so that my organisation/company is well known
  • High quality purpose: People need to see this so that they can get the benefit of what we are offering
  • Best quality purpose: People need to see this because it will make the world a better place

All of the above are quality purposes, and whilst I have a specific partiality for the best quality purpose, it is possible to achieve them all at the same time.

Measuring outreach and connection with people en masse creates a false economy if there is no quality purpose that comes of it. Don’t measure the number of people that see your content, measure the number of people that are impacted by it. It is harder to gauge, but worth more than just the total number.

Character Matters

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“How you do anything is how you do everything.” Unknown

I have been struggling with the rise and fall of leaders in our world, and trying to identify which leaders I think are worth emulating. There are those that seem to have a large following, who talk a big game and appear to move heaven and earth to get what they want. But I dislike them greatly – which got me thinking, “Am I crazy? Am I missing something? Maybe what I think is a great leader is wrong?”

Then it hit me, in two words what I had trouble articulating for such a long time.

Character matters.

How you do things matters. How you treat people in your day to day interactions matters.

Character is who you are when no one is looking. Character shows up in how you behave when things are not going your way, or according to your plan.

If character matters, then that would mean the Machiavellian way, geting things done using whatever means possible, even if that requires destroying other people in the process, is not okay.

There is a way to lead without trampling others under foot. There is a form or leadership that genuinely would want to let go of power if it was for the benefit of those it is leading. That is the kind of leader I would follow and seek to emulate. There are only of handful of examples of this sort of leadership that come to mind…

People & Things – Advice for people

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People are multidimensional. Some have suggested that there are many ‘selves’ which live in our brains, so who we are in any given moment is dependent on which ‘self’ is at the wheel. Try talking to a toddler when they are hungry, or tired or in desperate need of the toilet. You will get three different responses, probably three different types of anger. Same person though, but very different to the person they are when they are having a great time jumping on the trampoline.

Adults are just more complex, larger versions of toddlers.

Therefore, you can’t take a single action that someone performs and generalise who they are as a person. You might have caught them at a bad moment, a rough day, a moment of weakness, or a difficult season. Also, people can be capable of extraordinary acts of kindness and love in one moment, and then be a jerk to someone else the next. Some of the most vile people that have ever lived could still have moments when they were a loving parent.

“Stuff can be two things” Jake Peralta

We can be both loving and a jerk.

The person that you live with, or know very well, or are having a disagreement at work/on the internet with, is more than just the things that they say and do.

In saying that, Aristotle is credited with this quote, ‘You are what you repeatedly do. Excellence is not an act but a habit.’

Who we are as a person is deeper than the things that we do, but what we consistently do, shapes our person.

Excellence and love and kindness and generosity are a habit. So is being a jerk. So create the habits which will allow you to become the type of person that you want to be.

People and Things – Advice for Kids

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When my older children were little and I would leave them in someone else’s care, be that a grandparent, an uncle or aunty, or some other trusted person, I would give them these instructions:

Treat people nicely.

Treat things nicely.

I was really worried about how they would behave, and how that would reflect badly on me. It turns out that I needn’t have worried because they are pretty awesome human beings, and also, parenting out of fear that your kids may make you look bad is a pretty toxic place to parent from.

Regardless, the two principals remain solid instructions that I now share with my younger kids.

Treat people nicely.

Treat things nicely.

I think it encapsulates the whole realm of instructions for how to behave in the presence of other people.

I understand the complexities of it all, though. Because if someone is hurting them, or putting them in danger, I really don’t want their response to be nice. I want their response to be more like running away. That is part of a deeper lesson of protecting yourself.

But generally, the message I have for my kids is to be kind to other people and to things. It shows respect, generosity and a sense of self-worth, and it shows other people that this is how they would like to be treated in return.

3 years from now…

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“3 Years from now you will be 3 years older.” James Clear


Time will always do what it does. It rolls on regardless of how you think about it, or how you feel, or how you spend it. You can’t stop it but you can choose what you do with it.

So, in 3 years would you like to be more generous? Start now. Start small. Create a daily , weekly or monthly generosity action.

Maybe give $5 a month to a charity. In three years that will be $180 and then you will be the type of person that gives regularly to charity.

Maybe $5 isn’t enough, maybe $50 is more your style, that would take it $1,800.

Maybe it’s $500 a month making it $18,000.

The amount doesn’t really matter.

It’s the flywheel effect. Small things begin to build momentum and over time it creates so much that things seem to be moving all by themselves. But you can track it back to a single choice and a small action that was repeated again and again.

From little things, big things grow.

What can you do in the next week to create a more generous ‘you’ in 3 years?

Too many books?

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My kids sleep with, what seems to be, hundreds of toys in their bed. There are stuffed toys, toy cars, small animals, lego men and piles of books. I’m not even sure that any part of their body touches the mattress there is so much junk.

I honestly don’t know how it came to this – I am reasonably ordered in life. The bed is for sleeping. The toys and books go in the playroom. But, apparently, my children have a more fluid understanding of how things work in our home.

The books, whilst super annoying when they fall under the bed and cause a frantic search when it’s library day at school, I am more okay with because books are important. It is important to read to your child. I think every parent knows that, and there are studies that have found that young children whose parents read to them daily have better school experiences. There are other studies that have shown that homes which have books in them are more likely to have better educational outcomes, even if they aren’t read.

So, my kids, by sleeping on books, should end up being geniuses. That’s my working theory.

Education is important, and we all want the best for our kids.

Whenever I meet the women that Opportunity International Australia work with, their motivation for using a small loan to build a business and work their way out of poverty is so that they can give their children a better life. They, first and foremost, want their children to go to school and get an education, because they know that this will be a huge benefit for the kids in the future. Even if they haven’t been able to go to school themselves.

For women like Bhikhiben in India, who desperately wanted to go to school when she was younger, but had to make an impossible and devastating choice after her mother died. As the oldest of five siblings, she quit school to help raise them.

No child should have to choose between going to school or looking after their family. But that was the reality for Bhikhiben.

Even though she only has a few years of education, she has taken a small loan to build her own business to create an income which has allowed her kids can go to school, get enough food to eat, to pay the loan back as they work their way out of poverty.

Once the loan is repaid, it gets recycled on to the next mother, so she can do the same thing. With 98% off all loans repaid and recycled, that is a lot of families that are putting their kids in school.

Bhikhiben was robbed of her chance to get an education, but that has fuelled her desire to make sure her children get one. This is how generational change is created.

You can donate here to help women like Bhikhiben lift their families out of poverty.

To those who are still giving…

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Again, we find ourselves in a crisis (there’s always a crisis). Sure, inflation seems to be slowing down, but talk of the cost-of-living crisis is strong in the community and there is no doubt that some are really struggling to make ends meet each week.

Here’s what I know, more people are giving less, and less people are giving more. Some are giving to charities at their normal levels, and more on top of that because they are able to, and some are giving less than they normally would as they juggle financial priorities. But those who are still giving have made it a habit, one which they don’t say goodbye to when finances get tight. They still give but give less because it’s easier to increase and continue than it is to start something that you have stopped.

So, no matter how tough things are for you right now, make sure you find a way to maintain your generosity to those around you. It will make you feel better about yourself and it will make a huge difference to the organisation that you are giving to.

To those who are still giving, we thank you.

The day when nobody reads

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“There will be a day when nobody listens, when nobody reads, when nobody calls, when nobody responds and who will I be then?” – Carey Nieuwhof

Watching numbers can be intoxicating. Seeing that more people are reading, responding, attending, subscribing to things that I do is a nice dopamine hit. At one level it gives me a sense of value in this world. It’s nice.

Don’t get me wrong, my ‘numbers’ are not large, I am grateful for the days when I can put the ‘s’ on the end of ‘number’. But I often find myself drawn to the metrics page of whatever I am currently working on. Most days, at least one person reads something that I have written.

There has been the occasional day when no one does. There is a big fat zero in the metrics for that day. There is nothing unusual about that day from my perspective. I’m still producing the same amount of content, I am still as active as always, but for whatever reason, nobody reads, watches, calls or comments.

It’s quiet.

It can be lonely.

I think I’ve come to a place where that is okay. Great even. Because who I am that day, when no one is watching or consuming, is who I truly am. That’s the real me.

I find myself thinking on those days, “If this is how it will be forever, if no one ever reads what I have written, would I still write?”

“Yes” is the answer.

I write because it is the overflow of what is happening within me. Sure, some of it is a little weird, hard to understand and sometimes without a point, but that’s okay. That’s what is going on in my head.

Who am I when nobody reads? I hope that I am someone who is generous to himself.

What are the chances?

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Out of every person that was born when I was born, what are the chances that I was born in Australia?

In the year I was born (which you can guess at), there were 124,287,658 other babies born in the world. In Australia there were 223,034 other babies born in that same year.

That means that I had a 1 in 557 chance of being born in Australia.

At the same time there were approximately 65,000,000 children born in Asia, most of which, at that time, were born into poverty. So, going on the numbers, in the year that I was born, there was approximately a 1 in 2 chance of being born in Asia, most likely into poverty. That doesn’t take into account the African continent at all. The numbers get pretty intense at that point.

Suffice to say, the chances of me being born into a country that wasn’t experiencing debilitating poverty were slim at best. But here I am, lucky I guess.

So, what’s the point?

The concept of the ‘self-made man’ or ‘self-made woman’ start to lose meaning for me at this juncture. I find it a little amusing when people start talking about how they pulled themselves up by their own bootstraps to get to where they are, or that it was only through their hard work and skill that they have succeeded in life.

More and more I strongly doubt those assertions. Hard work is definitely necessary in life, but looking at the odds laid out above (and this is just location of birth), I think it is more to do with luck than anything else. Where you were born, your gender, your race, your family of origin, all of these have a huge effect on your life before you even get the chance to start working hard.

“I don’t care what anyone thinks” …well that’s not true.

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I knew even as the words were still on my lips that it wasn’t true. Who was I kidding? Even as a teenager I knew that I was frightfully afraid of what other people thought of me. They call it FOPO, Fear of Other People’s Opinions.

I think now I am a little less afraid , but it depends on the day and the weather and the amount of coffee I have had. I do want to get to the point where I legitimately don’t care what other people think, but I’m not sure that’s possible, or entirely healthy.

Regardless of that, I want to get to a place where I care more about what I think of me. I want my opinion of me to be solid and fair and generous. If I can get there, then it matters not what others say and think, or at least it matters less.

In reality I’m not sure that my opinion of me will be solid and fair and generous, at least not all the time.

But, along this journey, I think I will limit the people’s opinions that I care about to those closest to me and those that know me the best. They have earned the right to have an opinion.