Tag: increase

The World of the Generous

Published on by Kieran Johnson - The Generosity Guy1 Comment

“I’ve done four lots of isolation”. My Uber driver was chatty. She was a lovely, grandmother type, who seemed to really enjoy driving strangers to the airport. As the discussion predictably turned to the pandemic and it’s impact on our lives, she casually mentioned that she had driven a handful of people who turned out to be COVID positive, and before close contact restrictions were changed, was required to isolate for 14 days, four times, in her room.

It struck me that for many, the world has shrunk in the last few years. For some, the world has been the size of a bedroom for periods of time.

“How did you make it through?” I asked.

“You just find a way”, she stoically replied.

“Not everyone does”, I thought.

My favourite quote at the moment is “no matter where you go, there you are”. This, seemingly pointless phrase, carries with it some profound weight. Because if you find yourself in isolation, or any challenging life situation, you will not be struck by new problems. It will just magnify things that you are struggling with already. If you are feeling lonely, or are lacking purpose, or are self medicating, isolation will make that worse. You can’t escape from you.

There is a way to get out of your own head. To help stop the rumination and downward spirals which seem to make your world feel smaller and smaller.

Generosity.

Yep. Being generous. An old proverb says ‘the world of the generous gets larger and larger whilst the world of the stingy gets smaller and smaller’.

Being generous to those around you increases. Focusing only on yourself, being caught up in your own world, being self centred, leads to a small world.

Your world can grow even if you find yourself in isolation.

Compound

Published on by Kieran Johnson - The Generosity GuyLeave a comment

I love a good spreadsheet. It helps me keep my life in order by tracking the important numbers. As a number gets changed in one cell, the total is impacted by the exact amount of that change. It is neat and tidy, and precise.

Not everything in life is measured by numbers. You can’t calculate the importance of a specific relationship that you have by allocating a number to it, or a regular activity that you are involved in, or even someone’s presence. Well, I guess you could try, but it would be completely arbitrary and cold. Much of our life is not neat and tidy, and most definitely not precise. (Which is bad news for my spreadsheet.)

Generosity is one such area. We can try and calculate the cost of giving money away in light of how much less we now have, compared to the tax deduction that it has given, but that is an arbitrary and cold process. That is not how generosity works.

Generosity is when you give something away, instead of seeing it as a financial loss for you and a financial gain for someone else, it becomes a compounding transaction creating a positive impact for everyone involved, those who are close to it and not involved, and those who hear about it later. It increases exponentially.

Generosity breeds generosity. It is not possible to run out if it. It is not a finite resource. It is one of a very few things that increase every time you use it. You will never reach the end of generosity because when you think you are there, you will discover more generosity.

Try it out. No spreadsheet required.