Tag: generosity

How’s your finish?

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“It doesn’t matter how you start, it’s how you finish that’s important”. Common idiom.

How early does the day get ruined for you? When lunch isn’t what you’d hoped for? When your mid-morning coffee is bad? Before you get out of bed?

It’s easy to chuck in the towel on a day when something doesn’t go right. But that doesn’t mean that day can’t be revitalised or another attempt isn’t worth it.

My most effective work time, I have discovered, is between 3pm and 5pm. Maybe it’s my specific rhythm, or maybe it’s my innate desire to not leave the office too late, but I find myself working through large amounts of tasks during that time every day.

What that means is that I don’t ‘win the morning’, or wake up and hustle before the rest of the world.

It has taught me is that even if I don’t start the day like a bull at a gate, I can still finish strongly, getting through a lot of work in the final stretch before the day is done.

My best days are when I do both – start strong and finish strong, but I can take any day which hasn’t started well and make it a good one. It’s the same for a week, or a month, or a year, or a decade, or a lifetime. It’s a very helpful principal.

It doesn’t matter how you have started 2025, it’s how you finish that’s important.

C’mon Kieran

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I say it audibly multiple times a day.

When I get distracted from something important. “C’mon Kieran”.

When I forget a word that I am trying to think of. “C’mon Kieran”.

When I remember something stupid I did or said 20 years ago. “C’mon Kieran”.

It’s not a nice, encouraging “C’mon Kieran” either. It’s more of a scold, to small child, sometimes followed up with a “Get it together mate” and a disapproving shake of my head.

On my best days I slip in a “You can do this”.

Thank goodness I work in an office by myself.

I can’t be the only one whose most unfriendly, judgemental voice, is their own.

It’s a hard habit to break because it requires rewiring years of behaviour that is so ingrained that I don’t realise it’s happening until I hear myself say the words out loud.

As frustrating as that part is, the most devastating part shows up when I hear that same voice coming from me, speaking to my kids because that is absolutely not how I want to communicate to them.

I want to be encouraging and uplifting with quality boundaries so they can thrive in life. But instead, I just hear “Get it together mate” aimed at little people who don’t deserve that, which makes me feel guilty and the next thing I hear from me is “C’mon Kieran, get it together mate”, followed by a disapproving shake of my head. It’s a vicious cycle.

I’ve always said that self-generosity is hard. It’s a complicated part of the generosity family which, like any part, takes intentional effort. It may be that it is also one of the most important parts of, not only generosity, but also being a person. To be able to give yourself grace for the times you get distracted, or forget a word, or for when you did or said something stupid in the past, will make you a more generous person to those around you.

The key is intentionality. Even after the fact. Recognising that you were doing the best you could with what you had at that time, that it wasn’t perfect, and that you can grow and get better.

For me, I am aiming for more days when my “C’mon Kieran” sounds a little more encouraging in tone and has “you’ve got this” added to the end.

Experience = Overconfidence

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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.

The Banquet

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“Sooner or later we all sit down to a banquet of consequences.” Robert Louis Stevenson

Another way to put it is, ‘you reap what you sow’, or ‘all of your chickens will come home to roost’.

If you act selfishly, keeping others at a distance, living in a zero-sum style, you will damage relationships, people and places. Over time, at some stage you will be faced with the fruit of that sort of lifestyle.

But it’s not just a negative situation. If you spend time acting generously, loving others, giving time and space for those in your life, then you will sit down to a banquet of generous, loving, timely and spacious consequences.

It can be hard to be generous. I should know, I have been talking about it for years and still have moments of utter selfishness, but even in the striving for generous acts there is a reward that comes to others and, yes, to you too. The reward is relational for sure, but also financial. (See Adam Grant’s book, Give and Take).

This reward is not the reason that we strive for generosity, but it is the fruit that comes as a result of the actions. Being generous brings good things.

You don’t know what you want

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If you had no financial restrictions and could have anything you wanted in the world, what would you do?

Buy a massive house, maybe a mansion? Cars. Cars for sure. Expensive ones, fast ones, colourful ones, ones that make other people look. Clothes as well. The nicest suits, or dresses, or whatever people wear.

How great would that be, living the dream?

But would it be great?

If you have ever moved from a small home into a larger home, you will know that, whilst it is probably nice to have more space, sometimes you will miss the smaller, more intimate life you left behind.

There are always unintended consequences for the decisions we make.

I have talked about lottery winners before, and Adrian Bayford is another example. After winning almost £150m in 2012 he bought a seven-bedroom luxury mansion with his wife. Now, with his new fiancé, he is moving back to live with his mum in the 4-bedroom house he bought for her. He longs for the simple life, how things were before he was mega rich.

We think we want more and bigger. But what we really want is family and love. You can’t buy those things. When faced with unlimited options, we don’t know what we want, but I can guarantee you that money doesn’t change you, it only makes you more of what you already are.

Or as Notorious B.I.G put it, “Mo money mo problems”.

What on earth can we do?

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Poet and novelist Hermann Hesse said,

“To hold our tongues when everyone is gossiping,

to smile without hostility at people and institutions,

to compensate for the shortage of love in the world with more love in small, private matters;

to be more faithful in our work,

to show greater patience,

to forgo the cheap revenge obtainable from mockery and criticism:

all these are things we can do.”

If you are struggling with what to do, if you are unsure about what action to take next, if you don’t know where to from here, read through the quote again and pick one. All of them are acts of generosity.

There is always a problem

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I’ve been trying to find a way to explain this concept which doesn’t result in depression.

Life is struggle, challenges, unexpected problems, obstacles, sickness, tiredness, and yes, depression.

Not all the time, but often and frequently.

At the same time, life is also joy, happiness, peace, completion, overcoming, laughter, fun and yes, exhilaration. We don’t experience these things in spite of the first list, but because of them.

We can experience joy in overcoming the struggle and challenges. We can experience peace in the turmoil of unexpected problems. We can experience fun and laughter in the shadow of the obstacles. We can experience a sense of completion amongst the tiredness.

But, it never ends. There is always another struggle and challenge to replace the one you have just overcome, and sometimes there are struggles and challenges that are with us always. (Cue the depression again).

So, we learn to find joy and rest in the struggle. Because when we look back, our greatest accomplishments were completed against the wind. The things we are most proud of usually are the things we achieved when the odds were against us, it was hard and we waded through some deep, tumultuous times to get there.

Don’t let it get you down. Find a way to be grateful for the challenges which are a creating a pathway for you to overcome them and achieve more than you thought possible.

If Carbs can be complex, why can’t I?

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Simple carbohydrates can be broken down quickly by the body and used as energy, leading to a spike in energy levels.

Complex carbohydrates take longer for the body to break down and used as energy and are released gradually. Both can be useful.

Simple Carbs can be found in processed and refined sugars.

Complex carbs can be found in fruit and milk products.

That’s the layman’s definition of complex carbs, you know, the explanation that I can understand.

So, if carbohydrates can be complex, why can’t I?

People are more complex than carbohydrates, dramatically so. So why do we continue to fit people into categories, or groups, or profiles?

I can be both shallow and deep, both serious and funny, both charming and offensive, both loving and a jerk, and everything else in between. Certainly I try to spend most of my time in the more positive areas of character but I’m not great all the time. Sometimes I make mistakes, I say the wrong thing, I am thoughtless in my actions, I am selfish. If you have any remnants of self awareness as you are reading this you will know that you are the same, which makes it more important that we provide grace to those around us and recognise that people, like carbohydrates, can be complex.

Let’s not write someone off because they said or did the wrong thing once – give them grace and boundaries, and invite them to try again.

The Generosity of Confidence

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“Confidence is your ability to see yourself as flawed, as imperfect, but still hold yourself in high regard.” – Esther Perel, quoting a friend.

For some, confidence is all about bravado. About ‘faking it til you make it’. About focusing only on the good things and covering over anything that is bad so that no one sees it, and so it doesn’t exist. It is strength. It is power. It is arrogance.

They also would consider humility a weakness, and something to be avoided at all costs because you ‘cannot be strong and humble’.

I strongly disagree.

There is a strength that comes with being self-aware enough to know that you are flawed, and you are imperfect, but at the same time you can be confident in who you are and what you bring.

Failing to recognise your flaws and imperfections is not strength, or confidence. That is weakness. Everyone else can see it. Even if you think you are excellent at hiding it, it seeps out. Everyone knows you are flawed and imperfect. Don’t kid yourself, because you would be the only person you are kidding.

This humble strength is innately generous. It gives you space to recognise that you aren’t what you want to be yet, but even so, who you are right now is awesome. You can be confident in that.

We All Lose

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If you line up ten people and ask them to tell a story about the worst thing that has ever happened to them, you will notice two things…

  1. Some people go through some incredibly heavy stuff
  2. Everyone has lost something or someone, or had something or someone taken from them

If you have gone through something traumatic, firstly, I’m really sorry that has happened to you, but also you are not unique. We all have some level of trauma in life eventually and it’s a waste of time trying to compare who has had the most trauma or the hardest life, because whilst someone else may have technically had a harder time, it does not diminish the challenges you have faced. Life is hard.

The real key is what you do with those challenges. Do you let them overwhelm you and break you down, or do you use them as fuel to grow in spite of the obstacles? Sounds simple, but certainly not easy.

There is the phenomenon of Post Traumatic Growth which can occur. Unfortunately, for it to happen there needs to be trauma, and then a heck of a lot of work to turn it into something beautiful. But loss and tragedy don’t automatically mean things will stay negative and bad in life. Sometimes they can be the catalyst for the greatest things.

We all lose something, and/or have something taken away from us. It is how we live in and through that tragedy that creates what type of life we have.