Follow Your Passions

“The taste for worst-case scenarios reflects the need to master fear of what is felt to be uncontrollable. It also expresses an imaginative complicity with disaster.”
- Susan Sontag

So far this week, I have given many examples of all the great stuff that could potentially happen if you give of yourself, whether it is via time, money, or some other resource. But life is not all happiness and goodness, and without negatives how would we identify positives? With that, I thought I’d spend today talking about the potential worst case scenarios of giving. (Then I will switch my optimism on again and suggest ways to minimize the impact of the worst case scenarios.)

Giving your money to an organization doesn’t necessarily mean it’s going to magically go into the pockets of those you’re trying to help. In fact, a lot of people are concerned about giving their money because they’re not sure it isn’t going to just get taken by a corrupt administrator, or some other way that is very much not as you intended. And frankly, I can’t make any guarantees – I’ve worried about things like that myself.

So here’s what I do to get past those concerns. First, I research the organization before I donate anything to them. It’s amazing what a quick Google search can show, and it should give you a bit of a sense of how well that organization operates, how many people they are helping (and how significantly), and what well known organizations you already have built trust with that support the group you’re researching. Second, you can actually get involved in the organization, get to know its leaders, and get a real sense from the inside as to whether the people involved believe everything is “on the up and up”.

In terms of giving your time, well, what’s the downside of that? You don’t end up helping people as much as you’d have liked, maybe? It’s so hard to not help people when it’s in your heart to help, and it’s hard not to be appreciated by others for your efforts. And what would you do with your time instead? Would it have helped people more than what you chose to give your time to instead? If so, heck, go do that instead! The point is to get outside of yourself and enhance the lives of others, and be conscious of it.

“If we have the opportunity to be generous with our hearts, ourselves, we have no idea of the depth and breadth of love’s reach.”
- Margaret Cho

By giving, you’ll make the world better. Maybe not always “the” world every time, but certainly “your” world. And since we’re all connected, that starts becoming one and the same, see?

Leadership is said to be about serving others, so it stands to reason that by giving to others, you are in fact becoming a leader in your community.  The more you give, the more you begin to understand inherently what it means to be a great leader.  The world needs leadership, perhaps today more than ever.

In the book Good to Great, one of the absolute keys to a “Great” leader is that he or she possesses, somehow, near limitless amounts of both confidence and humility, simultaneously.  By learning to go outside of your self and learn ways in which we are all connected, finding what your strengths and interests are and how they can be applied to charitable acts, and activily going out and giving in the ways you are passionate about, chances are you will encounter situations and people who will encourage and hone your confidence and show you reasons to be humble.  Chances are if you are reading this blog post, you’re far better off in life than most of your fellow mankind, and it is hard to truly understand how fortunate you are, how much you have to be thankful for, and not be humbled as a result.

I don’t have unrealistic goals for this blog.  I hope it reaches someone else, but even if it does just reach one someone else and cause a shift inside of them, changing something in them that makes them want to do something nice for some fellow human being, the possibility of that snowballing into a community-changing event is… well, it’s big enough that I’ll keep trying, keep giving.  To you.

How you perceive reality creates your reality.  If you perceive a reality in which you can make positive changes, you’re well on your way to changing the world you live in.

“The excellence of a gift lies in its appropriateness rather than in its value.”
- Charles Dudley Warner

By actively giving, you’ll figure out where your “giving strengths” lie.

As Mark Sanford puts it, “Giving is an art.  That requires practice.” If you don’t feel you have money to give, you can give of your experience, your skills, your time, or other resources you may have.  Experiment with getting involved in different kinds of giving, with different kinds of organization involved in your efforts.  Maybe you’ll go volunteer on a Habitat for Humanity project and find out you excel at bashing your thumb with a hammer but not much else when it comes to home construction.  That’s okay, the next day you can go teach high school kids how to manage their money when they get older.  The day after that, you can read to children at your local public library.  Eventually, you’ll find something that matches your skills and interests with a place you can do the most good with them.

I don’t like to think of people as “tools” or “resources”, but consider the old adage about chopping down a tree with a sledge hammer.  You might get it done, but you’d have a much easier time of it and be able to chop a lot more trees down if you used an axe or a saw.  By finding something you’re a great fit for, where you can thrive and be passionate and use your strengths to accomplish big feats, you’re maximizing your giving potential.

If you have a chance some day, I encourage you to take the StrengthsFinder exam from Gallup. It is an exam that enables you to identify your strengths, then work on action items to utilize and keep growing those strengths.

I bring it up, because I took the exam, and my number one strength was “Connectedness”. There is a lot of explanation and discussion about what that means, but I think this quote sums up perfectly how someone with this strengths filters the world.

“Sometimes I just look at my bowl of cereal in the morning and think about those hundreds of people who were involved in bringing me my bowl of cereal: the farmers in the field; the biochemists who made the pesticides; the warehouse workers at the food preparation plants; even the marketers who somehow persuaded me to buy this box of cereal and not a different one sitting next to it on a shelf. I know it sounds strange, but I give thanks to these people, and just doing that makes me feel more involved with life, more connected to things, less alone.”
- Rose T., psychologist

Through giving, you can learn to look beyond your own self and begin to see more ways in which we’re all connected. I come back frequently to the idea that giving can be a very small act, or a very large one (or, ideally, some combination of all sizes of giving, intertwined into your daily life). You’re likely giving throughout your day and not realizing it.

Some examples of how I have given today – watch for a few you recognize in yourself:

• placed my empty cardboard cereal box into the recycling bin instead of the garbage
• smiled at the clerk at Target, thanking her and telling her what a great job she did
• turned the lights off in the house before leaving to use less energy resources (thus reducing pollution and my electric bill simultaneously!)
• bought a calendar for a friend because she likes cows
• said hi to my neighbor and asked what he had planned that day

All of these actions helped me to connect with my environment and/or community, all of them took minimal effort relative to the potential benefit, and all of them are examples of giving.

Look around in the world around you as you go about your day. Think about your interactions with people you come in contact with, and how you can improve someone’s day with just a few extra words and/or smiles. When you walk into a store, think about everyone that was involved in making your shopping experience there possible – clerks, managers, shippers, suppliers, manufacturers, and far more. When I was returning an item the other day to a store, I watched as the clerk took care of the transaction with ease, and thought about the people who were involved with creating a system of technology, ideas, and policies that enabled the clerk to so quickly and efficiently take care of me. I thanked her, but as I walked away thinking about some different sorts of experiences I’ve had at return desks, I also said a silent thanks to the establishment that made both my experience and the job of the clerk so easy and painless.

We’re all connected, to our environment and everything that exists in it, in ways we’ll never realize. By giving your time, money, and resources to something you believe in that is bigger than yourself, you extend your awareness of what is beyond your self, and increase your opportunities to learn more about the ways in which you are connected to others.

“Strength does not come from physical capacity. It comes from an indomitable will.”
- Mahatma Gandhi

Most giving opportunities involve working your physical muscles, your mental muscles, or both. One way or another, you’ll become stronger.

Giving can be a very small thing.  When you smile at someone who opens the door for you, chances are you put them in a better mood.  You’ve used your muscles in your face and arms in the process.

I recently spent a morning opening about a thousand cans of fruit cocktail for individuals and families that need a charitable source of good meals. I don’t know that there were muscles in my body I didn’t use by the time I was through!

Being a part of a charity walk some weekend doesn’t just provide a good opportunity for physical exercise, it also provides an educational event for you to learn more about whatever cause you are walking for, what research is being done towards a cure or solution, and how you can get more involved if you are interested.

There are museums, libraries, theaters, zoos, schools, and other institutions striving to provide positive learning experiences to the public, and are yearning for people to support their efforts through donations of money, resources, or your time.  Think about the potential knowledge you could take out of working one day a week or month at a museum.  Think of the positive change you could make in a child’s life by talking to them about the animals they’re looking at, or the play they just watched.

My examples focus on helping humans, but there are certainly other causes out there!  Giving to a local animal shelter, working to preserve a historic building or landmark, or somehow improving the environment – the opportunies are out there, and plentiful enough that there is surely something that you could get involved with tied to your particular interests, and make a positive contribution to.

“How wonderful it is that nobody need wait a single moment before starting to improve the world.”
- Anne Frank

There was a Friends episode in which Joey was determined to show Phoebe that there was no such thing as a truly selfless deed, because when you do good things for others it makes you feel too good to be counted as totally selfless. As you know if you watched the show, Joey was a wise man.

Giving your time, energy, money, and other resources to someone who could benefit from them just about can’t help but make you feel great inside, even if you don’t actually see the eventual outcome of your generosity.  Like the butterfly effect concept, you never know what monumental effect a simple act of kindness can have on an individual, a family, or even a community.

Interestingly, the more you give, the better you’ll get at it.  Giving of your time or money forces you to become a better steward of those resources, increasing your time management skills and your awareness of your finances.  In fact, most leading financial magazines I read have endorsed giving ten percent of your income to a cause you are passionate about, because the increased awareness of your savings and spending habits usually reaps enough personal benefit to offset the ten percent donation in the long run.

Yep. Giving of yourself, however you choose to do it, can be a downright selfish act. So go treat yourself by sending a check to your favorite charity, or indulge yourself by spending the day serving food to the homeless.

“We make a living by what we get, but we make a life by what we give.”
- Winston Churchill

Giving your time, energy, and resources to others is a rather magical act, in that you personally will reap huge benefits as well. You might think that working for a day on, for example, a Habitat for Humanity house is just going to help those who will someday live in it. I’d like to suggest that there is a myriad of things you’ll get out of the experience of giving.

• You’ll feel good doing it.
• Most giving opportunities involve working your physical muscles, your mental muscles, or both. One way or another, you’ll become stronger.
• You will learn to look beyond your own self and begin to see more ways in which we’re all connected.
• You’ll figure out where your “giving strengths” lie.
• You’ll make the world better.

I’ll talk about each of these things individually over the next week. In the meantime, I encourage you to spend a little time today thinking about what your strengths are, where your passions lie, and what sort of opportunities might exist in your community to use your strengths and passions in a way that will help others.