Is not on a birthday or anniversary or Hallmark holiday.
It’s not the one that comes with a big milestone attached, and it’s probably not the same gold watch that everyone else got.
It’s the one that comes on an otherwise unremarkable day at an unexpected moment.
The one that says, “I’ve been paying attention. I see you and I see what’s important to you and what you’re working towards. And I support it with this gift, and in so doing I support you.”
Most of us don’t need more trinkets.
But all of us carry a little fear, doubt and worry about the thing we’re striving for and may not reach.
Supporting that moment of courage and vulnerability is the most meaningful gift we can give.
Adam’s book showed that the most successful people in nearly every field are “givers:” their orientation is to create value for others, and they know how to strategically leverage their time and relationships to help those in their network.
The key word in that last sentence is “strategically.” You don’t need to be a radical giver to cultivate this skill.
Rather, you can easily distinguish yourself by doing two things:
Nudge your orientation and behavior towards more willingness to help than what feels comfortable
Be relentless about saying what you’re going to do and doing it
The first point is the easy one, since it’s mostly about attitude and orientation. Because we often feel strapped for time and attention, we hold a zero-sum attitude towards responding to requests for help. Time spent on these requests, we think, detracts from time spent on “our real work.” Our best approach, we decide, is to be frugal with the amount of time and effort we devote to others. This analysis is flawed: generously supporting others is value adding, not zero sum, as long as we learn to do it strategically.
This gets to the second point. As I’ve progressed in my career, my day-to-day orientation is increasingly outward: I spend the majority of my time either with customers, potential customers or investors, often forging new relationships (and often, in the last year, remotely). What continues to strike me is how easy is it is for people to distinguish themselves by clearly saying what they will, and won’t, do and then consistently doing what they said.
I suspect that folks are challenged by a combination of:
Not wanting to share that they don’t have decision-making authority
Wanting to please the person they’re talking to by saying “yes” to more than they can commit to
Getting caught up in the moment and over-committing
The end result of these largely well-intentioned missteps is a waterfall of unfilled promises. This, in turn, leads to time wasted on both sides sifting through a lot of chaff to get to a small bit of wheat.
Conversely, the person who clearly says, “Yes, I can do these two things, but I can’t do these other three,” and who then does those two things…? She distinguishes herself by her upfront clarity and the simple act of consistent follow through.
It turns out that saying what you will and won’t do, and then doing exactly what you said you’d do, is one of the easiest ways to stand out from the crowd.
“If you brought umbrellas, don’t forget them on the train.”
On a rainy Monday morning, my train conductor—after all his obligatory announcements about arriving at Grand Central and what track we’re on—adds this helpful reminder. This five second addition helps 500 people have a better, drier, more efficient day.
We have the microphone more than we realize: most obviously in what we say and what we don’t say, and whether we choose to follow the script that’s given to us.
But we also hold it as we walk down the street, or into a shop, or walking past our co-workers: the eye contact we do or don’t make, the people with whom we do or do not share a smile, the decision to stop for a moment and really, truly listen to another human being.
It’s understood in manufacturing that to be sure you hit a certain standard, your production quality needs to exceed that standard by the amount of the variability of your process.
This means that for processes with high degrees of variability, you need to be way above the standard, so that even when things get messy you’re still staying above the standard. For illustrative purposes, a typical control chart.
In assembly-line manufacturing, the goal is to exceed the standard and to decrease variability, since quality delivered beyond the spec is wasted resource.
I’ve been thinking about how this thinking applies to us as human beings, given how variable we are by nature. It’s true that part of our own deep work – in terms of groundedness, mindfulness, good habits for sleep, food, relationships and health – is to become less variable despite all the vagaries of day to day life.
At the same time, we are (and I certainly am) still, by our very nature, more variable than any manufacturing process. Variability—in our mood, attitude, hopefulness, tolerance, optimism, to name a few—is what makes us human.
And yet there are standards we must hit in terms of how we show up in the world: a minimum threshold for treating everyone with respect, staying fully present, always seeing the best in those around us, being patient, raising others up, being generous of spirit….
And all of this not just because it’s the right thing to do, but also because, for any of these core behaviors, that one time we fail to meet the mark on something so fundamental can, like one bad meal at a restaurant, destroy trust that’s taken years to build.
The only solution I see is to show up with an over-abundance of all the behaviors that matter. We show up with, and practice, excessive respect, presence, patience, raising others up, being generous of spirit and seeing the best of those around us. So that we are sure that, each and every moment of every day, we are above the emotional line.
This extra generosity, kindness, respect, patience, and care are the opposite of the “wasted” resource when we over-deliver on manufacturing quality—indeed they replicate and ripple out in positive ways that are impossible to imagine or quantify.
Plus, living above and beyond in how we show up to others is self-reinforcing. Over time, we continually and effortlessly keep raising the bar.
Kind of embarrassing, right? I literally spent $4.50 yesterday on a cheese Danish from Arcade Bakery.
So what’s the point?
The point is that I’ve been looking at participation numbers for online giving, amazed and outraged that that 0.5% of Wikipedia users donate. That means that 199 out of 200 people use this incredible free resource and never bother to give a penny.
And I get it. It took me seeing this popup 10 times before I clicked.
I get it because I needed to see this one a bunch of times too before I clicked.
I get it because even after seeing that message 10 times and clicking, I ended up giving up last week (on a bigger donation) because of a hitch at Amazon checkout.
And, let’s be honest, giving just $5 is a bit embarrassing – it feels like it’s too little to be worth it. So I had rounded down to 0.
That’s the real problem.
I’m not saying don’t give more. I’m saying that deciding that giving $5 is too little is sort of like deciding not to vote: voting is about exercising a right and making our voice heard. And so is giving.
To make the point: if each and every person who reads this blog gave $5, that would be more than $50,000 generated, today, to organizations you care about. To make that happen is as easy as each and every one of you deciding that today won’t end without you giving to something. (yes, even you who’s reading on your phone on Facebook.)
Our problem, you see, isn’t lack of resources. Our problem is bystanding. Our problem is that even the best of us default to “nothing” most of the time.
The giving season is coming.
What a great time to participate more.
Because everything (yes everything) is so much more than nothing.
And if we simply decided now that we’d give something to every organization, club, course, group that has touched us a little this year, we will save ourselves the mental burden of deciding each time, we will feel a whole lot better in the process, and we will ultimately transform ourselves from passive takers to active members of our communities.
Yesterday night at bedtime, my son handed me this envelope.
Earlier this year I visited with his Fifth Grade class and had a 90 minute discussion about Acumen. If you ever want to figure out how to explain what you do simply and clearly, I strongly recommend talking to a group of 5th graders. You’ll have to boil everything down to its essence in a great way.
I was blown away by how sophisticated and prepared the kids were: having 5th graders in a nice suburb of New York City ask me how things are going with the rice gassifiers that Husk Power Systems runs in Bihar gave me a lot of hope for the world.
What I didn’t know, until last night, was that a few of my son’s classmates took it upon themselves to raise money for Acumen as a thank you. They self-organized and went around to other classes in the school, talking about Acumen and asking kids to bring in bottles they would return for the 5 cent deposits.
So the $22.05 represents 441 bottles that 5th graders collected and returned because they wanted to help people they’ve never met who have less than they do.
The feeling I had upon receiving this envelope reminded of one of the most powerful impacts that fundraising can have on you. When someone you trust and respect shakes your hand, looks you in the eye, and agrees to give you their hard-earned money to support the work you do…well, I find that moment always motivates me to do the work harder and better, to do right by them and to earn the trust that they are placing in me and in my team.
To know the work that these kids went through – learning about Acumen, courageously going up to their friends and asking them to bring bottles from home, having those kids then go home and explain the same story to their parents – makes me want to work twice as hard and twice as smart.
I hope this story inspires you as much as it’s inspired me.
What would be fabulous is if more kids choose to do a similar project – to collect and turn in 441 bottles to support Acumen or another cause of their choice.
I’ll admit it, I’m terrible at checking the weather. It’s just not part of my morning routine. So, even though I spend 30 minutes a day walking to and from the train and to my office, more often than is reasonable I end up trudging through a downpour as everyone around me pops open their umbrellas.
So the starting point here is that it’s on me.
That said, the other day, while I walked home from the train in the leafy suburb I call home, the rain turned from steady to torrential. I was apparently one of few people who was surprised by this turn of events, since, as I got out of the train, the line of cars waiting to pick up passengers was 30 deep rather than the usual 5 to 10.
As I slowly made my way up the hill, my light blue shirt having turned a deep shade of violet from the downpour, I scanned the lineup of cars, looking for a familiar face. And, when it became clear that I didn’t know any of the drivers, I couldn’t help but wonder: is anyone going to give me a wave and a nod and offer me a warm dry seat?
Apparently not.
Why does no one roll down the window to help? To boil it down, how we act in these situations is the result of our assessment of four things:
How dire is the need of the person?
What is the perceived social cost and benefit of action?
How much do I perceive that I, and I alone, am responsible for taking an action?
In the story I tell myself about myself, how do I act in these sorts of situations?
Put this way, it’s pretty clear why I got drenched on my walk home: my need was far from dire (it’s just a bit of rain); it is mildly socially awkward to invite someone in to your car; lots of people could help so we have a Kitty Genovese situation (bystander effect) going on; and….well, what about #4?
This last one – the story we tell ourselves about “how do I act in situations where I have the opportunity to help?” – this strikes me as the wildly unaddressed leverage point for anyone in the social change business.
Since launching my Generosity Experiment in 2008 I’ve been trying to understand what it takes to unlock the sense, in myself and in others, that in situations where help can be given, more of us will be the kind of people who chose to act.
While this is lifelong work, as I trudged through the rain I reflected on some of the things I think I’ve learned so far:
That everyone starts in a different place, and that these starting points come first and foremost from the values we were taught at a young age.
That there are real, powerful social norms that hold us back from acting.
That pushing against these norms creates real discomfort. And that pushing through this discomfort creates a giddy sense joy that can be addicting.
That one of the most important jobs that social groups perform is to tilt these norms in favor of care of others….and that, as these social norms become weaker as societies modernize, and as we hide behind our screens, car windows, and devices more and more, it is the job of new actors to set a new set of norms.
That, for those folks who routinely do more than the least that’s expected of them, their work began with a decision it’s not enough just to believe we all have the same potential. What’s required is living that belief through actions.
That part of the story we need to tell ourselves is that it (whatever “it” is) is up to us, not to someone else.
That, like everything else in life, the first step towards living more generously is the belief in and commitment to making a change in ourselves. It is in that moment of decision, and in the actions that reaffirm that decision, that we open up a new conversation about who we are and what we can become.
That there’s a profound sense of alone-ness in the world, and that finding moments to break through by creating a personal connection is one of the most powerful things we can do.
And, like everything else in life, we must find the balance of pushing ourselves to be better and forgiving ourselves for our limitations today.
In the end, I didn’t mind so much getting wet – my kids certainly didn’t seem to care when they ran to greet me as I got home.
Plus, if I am honest with myself, I wasn’t sure I’d have opened my door for me walking by. Not yet. But I’m working on it.
And yes, I’m also working on remembering to bring an umbrella.
I still remember the feeling I had watching Amanda Palmer’s mezmorizing TED talk, as she described the gentle, intimate moment of handing a flower to a stranger while dressed as a silent, 8-foot bride, busking in Harvard Square.
If that talk was the distilled essence of her experience of love, crowdfunding, trust and connection, her book, The Art of Asking, feels like an exposed, magically cluttered, painful but beautifully honest version of everything that led up to that 13-minute essence of the story.
While Amanda and I are, in the most obvious ways, very different people, I felt a profound sense of connection in her exploration of generosity. In fairness, Amanda’s life is an extreme sports version of trust, generosity and connection, one that makes me wonder if I’m still wading in the shallow end, but the essence of the exploration is the same.
This essence is conveyed beautifully in a passage Amanda quotes from the Velveteen Rabbit:
“What is REAL?” asked the Rabbit one day, when they were lying side by side near the nursery fender, before Nana came to tidy the room. “Does it mean having things that buzz inside you and a stick-out handle?”
“Real isn’t how you are made,” said the Skin Horse. “It’s a thing that happens to you. When a child loves you for a long, long time, not just to play with, but REALLY loves you, then you become Real.”
“Does it hurt?” asked the Rabbit.
“Sometimes,” said the Skin Horse, for he was always truthful. “When you are Real you don’t mind being hurt.”
“Does it happen all at once, like being wound up,” he asked, “or bit by bit?”
“It doesn’t happen all at once,” said the Skin Horse. “You become. It takes a long time. That’s why it doesn’t often happen to people who break easily, or have sharp edges, or who have to be carefully kept. Generally, by the time you are Real, most of your hair has been loved off, and your eyes drop out and you get loose in the joints and very shabby. But these things don’t matter at all, because once you are Real you can’t be ugly, except to people who don’t understand.”
So much of what we are all searching for is real-ness, a sense of seeing and being seen by others. We become real through others, though being willing to break ourselves open and be seen in all of our humanity.
True generosity, then, is not about helping someone else. It is about seeing someone, about meeting them eye to eye, about letting them see us too, and maybe, as Amanda does, handing them a flower. This is why true generosity makes us feel so exposed and vulnerable: because in that act of generosity, we are our most unadorned and our most human.
If we are going to be in the changing the world business – I don’t care if it’s as a fundraiser, a rock star, a philanthropist, or an eight-foot bride – the first prerequisite is our willingness to show up, as Amanda does, with our whole humanity. Social change work begins with a decision to really see the world, and to do this properly we must be willing to be fully present, to connect, to see today’s limitations and tomorrow’s possibilities and, finally and most importantly, to embrace the emotional labor of trying to make a change happen.
The Art of Askingis a portrait of an artist with a deep commitment to showing up as her true self, and her fierce determination to stay open to making real connections – often with total strangers.
The moment she, you or I stand with this kind of real-ness, this kind of grounded passion, this kind of openness, people have no choice but to connect with us in a different way. Not all of them. Not even most of them (that’s where the hurt comes in). But some of them will see us, just as we truly see them, and in that moment, we both will be transformed.
“When you connect with them,” Amanda Palmer says, “people want to help you.”
The pavement on the cross-streets between 9th and 7th avenues between 14th and 23rd streets have been stripped for the past month. The first step here is milling, which takes off the top layer of asphalt in preparation for repaving, and, maybe because the city is in the midst of filling nearly 300,000 potholes, these streets have remained exposed and bumpy for weeks.
Here’s what it’s looked like.
In these few weeks, we’ve gotten to see what lies underneath: layers of patching, the old covering of potholes, extra asphalt around manholes. Sometimes even the cobblestone, which must be nearly 100 years old, is exposed, making me wonder if any more paving lies between that and the sewer system.
It’s a hodgepodge that’s been built up, layer by layer, over decades, one that we rarely see.
It is easy to be fooled by the thin veneer, the smooth top layer that is so easy to glide across. This layer fools us into thinking that it came into being fully formed. But of course everything builds on what came before it, on what lies below.
In seeing all this I’m reminded of the grimy past of New York City, of a time of dirt and struggle and disease, a time when this neighborhood was the home to slaughterhouses and slop in the streets, not fashion boutiques and 16 Handles. Today’s glossy world sits adopt that messy history, one we are quick to forget at our peril.
I can’t help wondering how it’s come to pass that today’s reality feels so normal. How, in a world where glamor and wealth and radical inequality has become the norm, we manage see only that top layer while ignoring the deeper moral questions that lie beneath: When did we go from building a system that rewards winners to one where the winners, quite literally, take all? And why does it seem so easy to drown out the quiet sound of people throwing up their hands and turning their backs on a system that doesn’t work for them?
Some of this stems, I think, from being fooled by that thin veneer, one that shields us from the fact that our success is not just the product of our own efforts. We literally stand upon decades, even centuries, of groundwork that came before us – times of toil and trouble and near misses that somehow all added up to this life, here and now. The foundation of our comfort, our accomplishment, and our success is our dumb luck of being born into lives in which deploying effort, brains and resources yields results. That’s a winning lottery ticket held by precious few.
Sure, we deserve credit for our own effort, guts, and ingenuity. But let’s not forget that we are nothing more than the top layer.
I was having a light-hearted disagreement with a colleague about the loyalty card programs of the lunch places across the street from Acumen – the cards where you get 10 punches / stamps and get a free lunch. Some of them, like Chelsea Thai, allow you to combine different cards, so if you don’t always have your card with you, you can still get a stamp and combine cards. Others, like Hale & Hearty Soup, have a strict policy: no combining of cards.
The disagreement was whether there’s a meaningful difference between the two.
I discovered the intricacies of the Hale & Hearty stamp card policy a few years back when I showed up with two soup cards, one with 6 stamps and one with 4. Those two cards represented a good deal of concerted soup-eating effort on my part. Proudly, at the front of the line, I presented my two cards only to be told that the policy was “No combining cards.”
No (free) soup for me.
To be clear, I could get a free soup when I presented ONE business-card-sized piece of card stock with 10 little ink stamps on it, but not two separate cards adding up to 10.
From that moment, I stopped collecting Hale & Hearty Soup stamps.
Now, one could easily (and convincingly) argue that it’s not too much to ask that I keep track of that one card. That’s probably true. But I wonder about the culture of an organization that enforces that kind of rule, one where employees cannot make a call to say “yes” to a customer who is showing up and vouching for their own loyalty to your store.
Dov Seidman, author of How: Why HOW We Do Anything Means Everything…in Business (and in Life), conducted a survey of 5,000 managers and executives in the US, to understand their values and behaviors. From that survey, he grouped companies into three categories:
Companies in the first group, called “blind obedience,” rely on coercion, formal authority, policing, and top-down command-and-control leadership. The second group, “informed acquiescence” organizations, have clear-cut rules and policies, well-established procedures, and performance-based rewards and punishments — the standards of high-quality 20th-century management. The third group, organizations with “self-governance,” are the most farsighted organizations, best positioned to thrive in an interdependent world. People at all levels of the company are trusted to act on their own initiative and to collaboratively innovate; a shared purpose and common values guide employee and company behavior.
I’d pretty much forgotten about my Hale & Hearty frustrations until last month when, on my way to India, I had a short, groggy layover in London’s Heathrow airport. I found my way to a Pret a Manger, my new favorite London destination, and began searching in vain, amongst the throng of coffee-starved travelers, for oatmeal (“porridge”). I waved and gesticulated a few times to the cashier, asking her where to find it, and she kept on pointing me to the same spot. Then, finally, she stepped out from behind the register, looked for herself, and realized that they were fresh out of porridge.
Immediately upon returning to the counter, she not only apologized to me, she offered me a latte on the house! Her decision was so quick and made with so little hesitation that I couldn’t help but wonder if she was bending the rules or whether, even in such a big chain the front-line employee is given the freedom to delight a customer.
Maybe, just maybe, the follow-all-the-rules-or-you’ll-get-fired approach to management is starting to show its colors as the un-enlightened, underperforming approach it seems to be. Because while there’s no doubt that most people would rather work somewhere where their job is to make other people happy, we’re starting to see more and more (and more) examples of how the by-the-numbers approaches are revealed for what they truly are: races to the bottom.
