I was having a tough day. Lots of work requiring real emotional energy. I was feeling drained.
On my way home a guy is jamming on the jazz piano. Just jamming.
I keep on walking.
Then I stop.
I turn around.
I drop $5 in the bucket.
We exchange a few words. We both smile. Both our days get better.
There’s joy in giving. Real, actual joy.
Nothing intangible about it.
I’d love to chalk it up to bad luck – I continually have things go wildly wrong most of the times that I fly Delta.
Here’s what happened this time: for an 8:30pm flight to Accra, Ghana, we dutifully boarded the plane around 7:30pm, taxied out on time and began waiting. And waiting. And waiting. Rains came, and then lightning.
Around 11pm the pilot told us that the storm was moving quickly, that “most of the other planes have returned to their gates but we are keeping our spot.”
Sometime closer to midnight he said that “there are 66 other planes looking to take off” but he still felt we could get out.
A bit after midnight I finally dozed off, and was in and out of consciousness until 2:30am when the pilot threw in the towel, took us back to the gate, and told us to wait by the gate for an early morning departure. It was to be at 6am, then 7am, then 8:30am. After waiting in a plane on the tarmac for six hours, and then sleeping in the terminal for another six hours, Delta cancelled the flight and rebooked us all on a new flight at 8:30pm that evening, 24 hours after our original flight.
Who knows what really happened, whether we actually had a chance to get out and the pilot made the right call. Who knows if it’s true that the Accra airport has a curfew – though all of my Ghanaian colleagues adamantly say that’s not the case.
What was striking through it all was that it was no one’s job to handle the whole situation. The pilot’s job was to get us to take off, which didn’t work out. After that we were handed to a series of gate agents and other representatives, none with any sense of ownership or real responsibility. It was one massive game of pass the buck: at no point did someone stand up and say “I’m the person who is taking care of this situation, here is what’s going on, we’ll have more answers for you by 6:00am.” Divide and conquer can work when things are going smoothly, but it falls apart completely when things go off the rails. This is probably why at one point the NY Police Department had to be brought to the gate to quell a brewing uprising amongst the passengers – complete with threats of barricading security (“if we can’t fly out, then no one can!”).
The one bright spot? Upon lining up (again) the following evening to board the flight, the amazing level of openness and camaraderie amongst all the passengers. We were all in this together. Conversations amongst strangers started effortlessly. We were all smiling and laughing about our shared predicament and the absurdity of it all. One Liberian woman, beaming at counter when I checked in, struck up a conversation with me about how she’d decided to just be happy and upbeat and stop worrying and complaining – she knew it would all work out OK and that was the energy she wanted to put out from that moment forward. I smiled, laughed, and agreed with her, and the next moment I found myself getting a joyful hug from this woman I’d never met.
So there you have it: the moments of genuine human connection brought joy and laughter in the midst of this mess.
And it makes me wonder if it’s when the world around us breaks just a little that we pull together and come together, and if in our hyper-efficient, hyper-virtually-connected world where everything works smoothly, the chances of the impromptu smile, laugh, or hug simply disappear.
I had a great few days last week in cold, rainy west Wales, speaking at the DO Lectures about Acumen Fund, generosity, and how we need to reinvent fundraising (talk to be posted soon).
The DO Lectures are described by founder David Heiatt as “a cross between TED, Burning Man and Where the Wild Things Are.” 30 speakers over the course of four days giving lectures in a small, unassuming tent (hay bales and all) and just 80 total attendees creates an incredible egalitarian spirit and a shared sense of community. You don’t just have the chance to ask one of the great speakers a question; you’ll probably have dinner together at a communal table, then make your way over to the pub for a few beers, and finally listen to some Welsh poetry together over an open fire pit.
(if it was this year, you’d also spend a good deal of your time talking about how incredibly cold, wet and muddy it was…but I’m told that was an exception.)
I’m still processing most of the great, eclectic talks, but the one unifying theme I took away was “the time is now to do things in radically different ways if you want radically different outcomes.” From Joel Bukiewicz talking about how he created Cut Brooklyn, the only handmade knife store in Brooklyn, to Michael Acton Smith, who’s on the cover of Wired this month thanks to the incredible success of moshi monsters, there was a lot to take in served up in gobbing heaps of inspiration.
Probably the most energetic and fun talk was by Tim Smit, the founder and creator of the Eden Project in Cornwall. The biodome project, which cost £141m to build, has attracted more than 13 million visitors and generated more than £1.1bn in revenues for the local economy – all on a rehabilitated manufacturing site.
One would imagine that a project of this size and scope would require a massively buttoned-up approach to doing just about everything (the financing, team structure, ways of doing business, you name it). With that in mind, imagine my surprise upon jotting down Tim’s Nine Principles of Management for the 700 staff at the Eden Project:
The Samba drumming was what really got me – Tim said that it was not only unspeakably fun to have a team of Brits shaking their hips to samba, but it was impossible not to have a sense of optimism and hope (and, I bet, joy) result from this crazy undertaking.
Who knows what these feel like in practice – they’re pretty nuts to be sure. I mostly love them, and must admit that doing things differently feels comfortable to me at a startup or at Google, but I’d never seriously considered that an undertaking of this size and success could go about their business in such a different way.
The words I was left with upon hearing Tim were “trust” and “discovery” and “respect” and “pride” (also his fundraising approach is apparently is to shake people by the lapels and ask them “do you want to be the guy who turned down the Beatles?!” along with other references to their tombstones).
My big takeaway is that we really can do things differently – not a little differently, not just at the beginning, and not only at a small scale – but we don’t because we’re dogged by the notion that there’s a “right” way, a buttoned-up, grown up way to do business. The huge problem is that this “right” way has done a great job at creating mostly disengaged employees who check out the moment they show up to work.
Why have we so quickly and easily abandoned the notion that work can be joyful?
I wish the world could look at images of beauty and resilience and feel compelled to act.
I wish people would see photographs by Nuru photographers, photos that capture the spirit and challenges of the life of the poor in the developing world, and share these photos, these stories, more than 70 million times. Not out of pity, but out of joy.
I wish that, at my local Starbucks at 6:30 on Saturday morning, instead of seeing Kony2012 posters in the window I’d see one of these beautiful photographs from Lagos, Nigeria; from Nairobi, Kenya; from Chennai or from Bhopal in India.
The Nuru project curates breathtaking images from around the world, shares them with the public and uses the proceeds to help nonprofits. Their first partnership was with Acumen Fund, and together with +acumen chapters, they have helped us raise more than $150,000.
The pictures tell a different story – one of connectedness, one of shared possibility, one of dignity.
I know this blog post and the Nuru site won’t get seen hundreds of millions of times. But if you love photography, maybe you will check out the site and buy a print for a dear friend. Maybe you will email the one photography buff you know and let them know about it. Maybe you’ll spread the word on Facebook and on Twitter about this “this gr8 stuff u hve 2 see NOW!!!”
Let’s start spreading a different story.
Watching an idea grow, seeing someone else take it places you didn’t know it could go.
I’ve already shared the wonderful Jubilee Project video for Generosity Day, which magically captured how Generosity Day is fundamentally about reconnecting to love and genuine human connection – on Valentine’s Day and every other day. I watched it again last night after the dust had settled and I like it more each time I watch it.
But I never would have imagined anyone passing out croissants in the streets of London. I never would have imagined someone sharing, so openly and honestly, the actual struggle of giving away 10 Starbucks gift cards. I never would have imagined someone telling a woman in her 80s how beautiful she is, and making that woman cry.
I’m thankful for all the stories I’ve heard, and I know they are just a fraction of the stories there are to tell thanks to the work we did together to spread this idea and to challenge ourselves and our own perceived boundaries and limitations.
Let’s keep pushing (and pass the croissants!).
If you had one non-negotiable trait that you’d want everyone representing your organization to hold, share and transmit, what would it be?
Of course you’ve got bright, engaged people. They are confident and interesting, energetic and well-versed in what you do and how it fits into the larger whole. They are humble and they listen well. They build relationships naturally, care genuinely about people, look to make others successful as much as they look out for the interest of the organization.
But that one thing, the oomph, the special something that sets them apart?
It’s joy.
Joy is infectious. Joy is rare. Joy is something we grab on to and won’t let go of. It transcends.
(proof point: Zappos)
There’s just one catch: there’s no faking it.
Which means that the starting point is that what you do matters and inspires. And HOW you do it matters just as much, because that is how your team experiences the work, their colleagues, your values and how you and they walk through the world. These all add up to something much greater than the sum of the parts.
But once you’ve got it? Magic.
Katya Andresen, who writes the awesome Nonprofit Marketing Blog and is also one of my co-conspirators for Generosity Day, made a great point on last week’s generosity economy post:
I have been thinking a lot lately about the latest research on the mind – and our mirror neurons – which shows the extent to which we’re hard wired for empathy and, by extension, generosity…Yet giving to charity isn’t growing at the pace of other elements in our generosity economy. I think one aspect is that many of the people in charge of unleashing generosity (fundraiser, namely) have failed to fully understand and embrace this landscape. We as a sector must engage with supporters in a more meaningful, connected and GENEROUS way ourselves if we hope to inspire the generous actions that come to people naturally…rather than treating them like walking wallets.
In many ways, this observation was the nagging worry that led me, two years ago, to my generosity experiment: I was spending my days talking to people about connecting with their passion, about being bountiful in their thinking, about being generous, yet I hadn’t moved my own relationship with generosity forward much in the three years I’d been doing my job as a fundraiser. And without that connection, I didn’t feel like I could do my job in an authentic way.
Sounds good, you may say, but let’s get real for a second.
OK let’s. For example, I just talked to a colleague who is getting on an international flight on Monday for a fundraising trip. If she doesn’t raise $400,000 next week, a branch of her nonprofit is going to be shuttered. With that looming, how hard is it going to be for her to see those potential funders as anything but walking wallets?
The answer is that it’s hard. Really hard. But it’s the only way to be really successful.
The first thing we need to do is reframe what we’re doing here. Last week I talked to the new class of Acumen Fund Fellows about how to mobilize resources behind their ideas. I started the session with a a free association around the word “fundraising.” They were wonderful and honest, throwing out words like “storytelling” and “connection” but also a healthy dose of “hitting up your friends,” “draining,” and “begging.”
But here’s the big secret: great fundraising is a fair deal for everyone involved. You (the fundraiser) are connecting people to their passions and giving them an opportunity to do something great in the world. You are helping them express their dreams and maybe, just maybe, connecting them with an organization that will be transformational in their lives. You are giving them the chance to change the world.
Of course what you have on offer won’t be for everybody. But that’s OK. For the people who you do fundraise from, you are offering something of (at least) equal value to the donation they are giving. In fact, by definition that’s what they’re saying by giving to you!
Approaching fundraising with generosity, to me, is about approaching each conversation with the attitude: “let’s figure out what great things we can do together.” It’s not about your need, not about separating a well-meaning person from their money, and it’s definitely not a zero-sum game.
Best of all, it is incredibly empowering to wake up and realize that, as a fundraiser, you have something of great value to offer. If you can couple that feeling of empowerment with a spirit of generosity, I promise it will transform your fundraising, transform how your donors experience you, transform your ability to connect great, meaningful, powerful ideas to the resources they need to come to life.
Thanks, Katya, for the inspiration.
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P.S. This post is about fundraising but there’s nothing special there – most of these conclusions apply to more traditional sales and business development when done the right way. The greatest salespeople bring joy to their work, and the knowledge that they are making their customers’ lives better. The thing they’re selling – and their attitude – is a gift to the customer.
My wife reminded me of this powerful quote from Goethe, via Gretchen Rubin’s Happiness Project blog. It’s worth returning to daily.
I have come to the frightening conclusion that I am the decisive element. It is my personal approach that creates the climate. It is my daily mood that makes the weather. I possess tremendous power to make life miserable or joyous. I can be a tool of torture or an instrument of inspiration, I can humiliate or humor, hurt or heal. In all situations, it is my response that decides…
Happy Friday.
A few months ago I started running again after a decade-long hiatus. Vibram’s five-finger shoes have made my knee pain a thing of the past. But I’m still working my way back towards running, and it’s slow going (maybe I’m just going slow).
In my first 15 years of running (I started when I was 12), running was all about suffering. I occasionally had easy, effortless runs, but the general rule was to push harder and go faster to “get the most” out of the run. I’d say 80% of the time I spent running I was hoping it would end, and that was kind of the point.
Back then I would have loved all the technology that’s available now. I have iMapMyRun on my iPhone, and it’s pretty incredible: free software that runs off of my music player (imagine if my Walkman had this!) that uses GPS to track where I am, places it on a map, and tells me how far I’ve run, how long I’ve run, the elevation I’ve covered. It’s kind of magical.
It’s so cool, but I’ve had to force myself to stop using it.
iMapMyRun is perfect for the kind of runner I used to want to be: wanting to know my pace, know how today’s run compared with yesterday’s, know how far I ran this week down to a tenth of a mile. But I stopped using it.
Why? Because you get what you measure. And knowing that all that information was being recorded was making me care more about the numbers at the end of the run than the run itself.
My goal on yesterday’s run was to have as much of the run as possible be enjoyable, and I don’t get that when my per-mile time is being tracked. I don’t get joy by knowing my pace. In fact it detracts from what I’m trying to do.
Measuring is fine, just make sure the things you’re tracking are the things you want the most of. If iMapMyRun could tell me how much of my run I spent relaxed, smiling, dropping my shoulders, taking easy strides, and not worrying about the next hill, then it would be the software for me.
(Oh, and this post isn’t just about running).
When you meet someone for the first time – in a job interview, a sales meeting, wherever – it’s amazing how easily you can differentiate yourself by communicating that you are an actual, living human being.
Actual human beings aren’t just smart and articulate – they also have hopes and fears and joy and aspirations. Yet so often we keep all of this under wraps.
How you share glimpses of what really makes you tick will depend on your personality, your openness, to whom you are speaking. But giving even a glimpse of your own humanity is the dry tinder to spark genuine, personal connection.
The challenge is that you can’t go halfway. You can’t say “I’m really excited about / passionate about / committed to…” if you don’t express (in your voice, your eyes, your face, your body language) the emotions you are describing. Describing enthusiasm in a monotone; saying “I’m passionate” while you lean back, with arms crossed; claiming “my whole life I’ve dreamed of” as if you’re ordering a side of fries…this is worse than nothing.
Put another way, there’s no shortcut to being open, genuine, excited, and inspired. You have to FEEL real emotion and be comfortable sharing it (in a professional way).
It is precisely because there are no shortcuts that doing this right will set you apart.
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