Tag: Generosity

The Most Meaningful Gift

~ Sasha ~ Leave a comment

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.

Clear Yeses, Clear No’s

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Adam Grant wrote the book on giving and taking. In it, he illustrated the power of generosity to create value for everyone – the person asking for help, and the person giving it.

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:

  1. Nudge your orientation and behavior towards more willingness to help than what feels comfortable
  2. 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.

 

What Will You Announce Today?

~ Sasha ~ 1 Comment

“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.

What will you do with your microphone today?

Generosity Thresholds

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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.

Not Sales mode, Amazing Interesting Allies Mode

~ Sasha ~ 1 Comment

The biggest challenge we all face in terms of nonprofit sales isn’t how to win people over, it isn’t how to pitch, and it’s not how to close.

The biggest problem is access.

We are not selling a product with a defined market price, which is why it can take the same (or more!) time, effort, passion, and skill to raise a $1,000 donation as it does a $100,000 donation. What matters is how big that donation is for each person.

So the question arises: how do we get access?

The only real answer—which on some days feels energizing and on others relentless—is to generously, consciously, and actively be in always-on sales mode.

“Generously” because the only way to make real connections is to actively, deeply, and truly care about creating value for the people you’re connecting with, with no expectation of return.

“Actively and consciously” because this requires clear and deliberate prioritization in the midst of an already too-full agenda. That can be hard if the yield isn’t immediate: this next person simply is not going to write you a check for $100,000, so, do you meet her anyway?

It helps to remind ourselves that our most valuable connections are “weak ties”—the ones at the edges of our social network. This means that what we’re really doing in this next hour is taking another step in our multi-year project of creating a strong, connected, personal web of shared values, purpose, and mutual support. The web we are weaving creates real and lasting value for all of its members, including, hopefully and eventually, for us.

Tangibly, this means things like:

Always, every time taking the extra conversation that might lead to something that might lead to something.

Keeping your antennae up for people with the same type of passion that you have.

Remembering that your job is not to get the next lead, your job is to collect allies and advocates, the kinds of people who make things happen with verve and joy and passion, because that’s the virtual army that your life’s work deserves.

Because, when you boil it all down, people who do amazing interesting and important things know other people who do amazing interesting and important things.

And, if you find and add value to enough people doing amazing interesting important things, and if at least some of them become wildly passionate about YOUR amazing interesting important thing, eventually they will roll up their sleeves for you, eventually they will lend their best thoughts to you, eventually they will become part of your journey.

Bit by bit, over time, those relationships will lead to more relationships that will eventually get you in the room with a person who can write a 10x or 100x bigger check and who is positively disposed to the conversation they’re about to have with you, because they’ve heard about you from one or three or five other amazing interesting people doing important things. Then you need to close that sale.

It’s a long road from here to there, but you distinguish yourself on Day 1 by committing to walk this path.

And, if you’re just beginning on this journey, and especially if you think of yourself as “results oriented,” I’d encourage you to be a little less discerning, a little less linear, and a lot more energetic and generous, and see where that path leads.

Five Dollars

~ Sasha ~ 3 Comments

Yesterday I gave $5 to Wikipedia. $5.

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.

five-dollars-wikipediaI get it because I needed to see this one a bunch of times too before I clicked.

wikipedia-three-dollars

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.

The Easiest Money I’ve Ever Given Away

~ Sasha ~ 1 Comment

The easiest money I’ve ever given away was the day after my wallet was returned to me, untouched and full of cash.

Having done the mental work of literally imagining living without that money, it was easy to see the request to give money away as a simple reminder: “Ah, yes, this money isn’t mine after all.”

The practice of giving is just that, a practice. And like any practice, it is in the act of doing that the behavior becomes normal, expected, and part of our lives – not the other way around. The practice of giving is how we pound away at the mold of who we are. We exert effort and willpower until the very material of our selves begins to yield and take on a new shape.

Part of that reshaping manifests in a new story we tell ourselves, a story about how to think about our wealth and our skills and our possessions and the choices we can make about how to deploy all of them – maybe, just maybe – to reshape the world into the better image we dare to imagine.

Over time, we also discover that, in the act of starting to show up differently in the world, the world starts to show up differently in us. In the act of trying to shape the world in a new way, the world sneaks up on us and starts to reshape us too. If we are very lucky, both of those transformations will be for the better.

Today Acumen is celebrating its fifteen-year anniversary, and in a couple of months I will hit my 10-year anniversary at Acumen. Looking back, it’s easy be misled by the small, nearly imperceptible daily changes we have made in the world and that the world has made on us. But looked at from the vantage point of a decade, or a decade and half, it’s obvious that the changes are both profound and lasting.

If there’s one thing I’ve learned in this time, it’s that the only way to become the kinds of people who show up, who hammer away and who do the work is by showing up, hammering away, and doing the work. It also helps tremendously to have people who are willing to show up alongside you, people who are willing to pour their best selves into a shared vision about what is possible.

To all the people who have been willing to show up alongside me, and to all the people who have shaped me in ways that I hope you know (but I bet you don’t know fully): thank you.

A philanthropy problem

~ Sasha ~ 2 Comments

The easiest thing to forget when you are raising funds is this:

Philanthropists have a philanthropy problem

By “philanthropists” I mean people who consistently engage in philanthropy–people for whom philanthropy an important part of what they do and who they are.

Someone who has the means, the values and the practice of being active philanthropically has, by definition, a philanthropy problem. She has a set of things she is trying to make happen in the world through her philanthropy. Her problem is that it is hard to do great philanthropy, it is hard to find great people and great organizations, and it is hard to make change in the world.

Fundraisers and nonprofit professionals forget this. Maybe we find it hard to relate because we don’t feel like we have a philanthropy problem (though that’s an easy issue to address: the more we give philanthropically the more we will get in touch with this feeling.)

But mostly I think it’s a comingling two things: an overall sense of fear and intimidation (of the philanthropist—which neither she nor we want) and our lack of empathy.

The fear is connected to our misplaced sense of worth–that somehow this thing we are doing might not really be “worth it” (in every sense) and, by association, worthy of support–and, as a result, a sense that we’re intruding on the philanthropists life and time.

The lack of empathy is connected to that fear–this time our fear that we will fail in this meeting, which causes us to be centered on our selves and our worries. This chatter overwhelms our clear thinking and our open hearts. So we close our eyes to the experience of the person with whom we are trying to connect, and we lose sight of the fact that we are showing up with a solution to her problem.

Since colorful stories and images are the best way to cement memories in our brains, here’s a too-loud version of this situation from This American Life Episode 319: Cars. It’s not a perfect analogy by any stretch–there’s not a lot of heart opening and genuine connection in the car-buying business–but it shines a light on how easy it is to forget that the person in the “showroom” is there because she is has a problem she’s come there to solve.

The speaker is Sal Lanzilotta, a manager at the Chrysler Town & Country dealership in Long Island. He’s giving his salespeople a pep talk:

Sal Lanzilotta

Customer says they’re not ready to buy a car. They’re all not ready to buy a car. Let’s go over it again. They’re in a car dealership.

They got in their car, drove through hell to get here, looked for a parking spot for 10 minutes, parked, got out of the car, and walked into a car dealer, not because the coffee’s good. We went over this, because the coffee here is not good. They came here because we sell cars, and they want to buy one.

The philanthropist is sitting across from us with a philanthropy problem to solve. We are sitting across from the philanthropist with a solution that makes difference. Why do we act like we have to start with an apology?

When we boil it all down, I wonder if where we keep tripping up is in forgetting that what we have on offer is way more valuable than a car.

Anand Giridharadas – The Thriving World, the Wilting World, and You

~ Sasha ~ 2 Comments

If you’re ready to ask yourself the real, hard questions – and if you want to arm yourself with the language to speak truth to power – I strongly recommend you watch the keynote speech Anand Giridharadas gave at the The Aspen Institute last week.

If you don’t know Anand, he is a journalist and author, most recently of The True American, the amazing story of a Bangladeshi immigrant, Raisuddin Bhuiyan, who was shot in the face by a white Texan, nearly died, and then fought to keep his shooter from getting the death penalty.

Anand’s talk pushes all of us to move beyond accepting change that comes from the system and, in so doing, preserves the system. He asks us to ask ourselves, and those around us, whether generosity is enough or if what we seek is justice. And, if it is justice we seek, how much are we willing to do and how much are we willing to give up to get it?

Here’s an excerpt that gets to the heart of Anand’s talk, the full transcript of the talk, and the video is below.

…we are at risk of confusing generosity towards those victims with justice for those victims. Generosity is a win-win. Justice, often, is not.

The winners of our age don’t enjoy the idea that some of them might actually have to lose, to sacrifice, for justice to be done. In Aspen you don’t hear a lot of ideas involving the privileged and powerful actually being in the wrong, and needing to surrender their status and position for the sake of justice. We talk a lot here about giving more. We don’t talk about taking less. We talk a lot here about what we should be doing more of. We don’t talk about what we should be doing less of.

Nipun Mehta on The Radical Power of Humility

~ Sasha ~ 4 Comments

I was deeply moved by Nipun Mehta’s talk from last week, The Radical Power of Humility. Nipun has been leading a life of radical generosity for a few years now, and as I’ve watched his writing unfold over these years the wisdom he is accumulating is palpable.

Nipun begins:

Today I’d like to surface an unpopular virtue, one that’s fallen out of favor in a time of selfies and relentless status updates. The virtue of humility. We live in an era that believes it can no longer afford to be humble.

The power in Nipun’s talk comes through the stories of people he meets in his travels, and others who have walked this path before him – a nameless boy in a village in rural India who tells the story of a sparrow trying to hold up the sky; two Buddhist monks, Rev. Heng Sure and Heng Chau, who walked 900 miles up the California coast bowing their heads to the ground every three feet; the 96-year-old Suffi saint Dada Vaswani who speaks to Nipun about the power of being small, simple nobodies. And then Nipun slams you over the head with facts that put the rising tide of our collective narcissism in stark relief: according to the Google database of 5.2 million books published from 1960 to 2008, “individualistic words increasingly overshadowed communal ones. The usage of ‘kindness’ and ‘helpfulness’ dropped by 56%, even as ‘modesty’ and ‘humbleness’ dropped by 52%.” Ouch.

Nipun’s talk flips the notion of humility on its head, challenging us to recognize that in becoming small, in becoming humble, we become powerful and great. He reminds us of the words of Sikh guru Arjan Dev who offered this credo to his warriors: “Humility is my mace; becoming the dust of everybody’s feet is my sword. No evil can withstand that.”

In a world obsessed by power, in a world where even philanthropy (the act of giving!) is so often infused with perverse power dynamics – whether between the philanthropist and the receiving charity, or between the charity and the beneficiary – Nipun’s is a radical voice. And while the humble man does not need, or want, to be celebrated, the trait of humility need more advocates and more practitioners. It should not be rare hear someone extol the virtues of bearing witness, of expressing gratitude, of making ourselves smaller so we can really, truly shine a light on others.

We underestimate how what we do affects those around us.  Indeed, there’s a growing body of research showing the power our behavior has on others. As Nipun reminds us, happiness spreads virally, through personal networks, and so does obesity, cancer, and even divorce rates. We are apparently 2.5 times as likely to get divorced if we have divorced friends!

We should see these facts as a radical call to action. How do we make change? We start with ourselves. Through our attitudes, our own practice of humility, our own daily ritual of appreciation and generosity, we can see others, lift them up, and, in the process, transform them.

I hope you are as touched by Nipun’s words as I was, and that Nipun’s practice inspires you as it has inspired me.  Thank you Nipun, as always, for your words of inspiration.