Tag: Experience

Experience = Overconfidence

Published on by Kieran Johnson - The Generosity GuyLeave a comment

Expertise is worth its weight in gold.

But overconfidence will kill you eventually.

Risky behaviour might pay off once or twice or even more, but eventually all of your chickens will come home to roost.

‘Experience is making the same mistake over and over again, only with greater confidence.’ (Michael Lewis quoting Carter Mecher)

Or as Nassim Taleb puts it, when talking about the attribution bias, ‘You attribute your success to skills but your failures to randomness’.

Statistically, someone is bound to succeed through risk taking and luck, just as someone else is bound to fail miserably through taking the exact same risks and having bad luck.

We live in a wicked world with complex problems, and we behave as if we live in a kind world, with simple problems. Generally, it seems to work for us when things are stable, but stability is never guaranteed and there are occasions when everything gets disrupted. (They seem to be happening semi-often at the moment).

If you’re environment is telling you that you are great at something, and paying you handsomely to do that thing, you will begin to believe that you are great at it and deserve to be paid well for doing it. But what if you are not actually great at it? What if it is just a matter of luck that has landed you in a place that has made things fall in such a way that it doesn’t matter what you do everything works well for you…until it doesn’t?

The answer is humility. Recognising that you could be wrong about something. About anything. Entertaining that thought, even just for a moment is an act of generosity to you and those around you.

Acceptance

Published on by Kieran Johnson - The Generosity GuyLeave a comment

“This is for you dad.”

You probably know the look very well. The large, expectant eyes of a small child, that is handing you, what can only be called a ‘picture’.

I’ve lost count of the number of times that I have been given drawings that were supposedly of me, or pieces of half-eaten food, or bits of paper with precious rubbish wrapped up in them by my kids, or other people’s kids as a precious gift. All of which I gratefully accepted, not because I wanted them, but because accepting the gift was an act of generosity. It gave my kids the chance to experience what is was like to give something away that they worked hard on, or meant a lot to them. They could learn about giving gifts that other people would actually want later, in that moment, it was more important for them to experience being generous.

Most people would agree with that. But it doesn’t just stop with kids learning how to give.

There have been other times in my life when someone has tried to be generous to me and I refused the gift. Not because I didn’t want it, but because it felt like too much. I felt insecure and inadequate, and like I would be a freeloader if I accepted it. So, I said no.

There is nothing wrong with saying no, but there are times when accepting a gift is an act of generosity because of what it gives the person who gives it. We know that there are many benefits when we give and it’s important not to rob people of that experience when they are trying to give to us.

In saying that, there are definite times to say ‘no’…(more to come on this)

The Only True “Two Types of People” Statement

Published on by Kieran Johnson - The Generosity GuyLeave a comment

“There are two types of people, those that believe there are two types of people and those that don’t.”

People are complex and cannot be sorted into two types of anything, let’s not oversimplify, except for the statement above.

Take vaccinations for example. There are those who are pro-vax and those that are anti-vax, right? Wrong.

It’s more like this:

100% Passionate Support                                                                 100% Passionate Against

Forget vaccination, let’s talk cheese. There are those people that like cheese and those people that don’t, right? Wrong.

It’s more like this:

100% Passionate Support                                                                 100% Passionate Against

And that’s just one small part of the person.

The world is a spectrum of beliefs, experiences, thoughts, and traditions. How I ended up having the same opinion as you is most likely a very different journey to how you ended up with that opinion. We think the same on that issue, we both like cheese, but we are not the same person. We don’t have an equal amount of commitment to it. We don’t have an equal amount of experience with it. We don’t have an equal amount of care for it. We are at different points on the spectrum of our love of cheese.

It is generous to see people as complex and more than a cheese lover or not.