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Welcome to Mini-Sowed Monday.
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Happy to be here with you, kicking off the week with something quick and actionable that you can implement right away that ll make you more magnetic and effective.
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Today, Raj Raghunathan.
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We re talking about how kindness and giving is good for us.
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Let s cut to it.
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Raj, thanks for coming back.
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I definitely appreciate even more of your time here.
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One of the concepts in the book that I thought was fascinating was that kindness and giving is good for us.
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And for most of us, there s no surprise.
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Being nice to other people is good for us.
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Giving, on the other hand, I wasn t sure how that would be good for us.
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But as you ve shown in your studies, spending money on other people
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makes us happy, yay science.
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That s not all, of course, what giving means and what it is, but I d love to hear how giving is actually healthy for us, kindness and giving is good for us and makes us more happy, and I wanna know what the limitation on that is, because it seems like a lot of people are thinking, hey, my problem s not being nice, my problem is I m too nice, where do I draw the line?
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Yeah, no, those are good points.
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So first off, why does giving, why does being kind and compassionate make you a happier person?
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It turns out that there are at least three reasons for it.
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One is that we seem to be hardwired for generosity.
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Most of us are aware that we are kind of hardwired for selfishness or greed, and that s something that s emphasized particularly in business schools, I would say.
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But many of us are unaware that we are also maybe equally, if not even more, hardwired for being kind and generous.
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So there were studies done with toddlers.
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I mean, these are two-year-olds who have not been socialized yet.
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they were given some goldfish crackers, which, you know, if you have toddlers or if you remember back to your childhood, you know that, you know, toddlers love goldfish crackers.
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I love goldfish crackers.
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Yeah.
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I m a big fan.
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And so they gave these toddlers some goldfish crackers and they told them that, look, I mean, you can feed these goldfish crackers to a monkey, right?
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A monkey puppet, which is not really a live monkey.
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And these monkey puppets acted as if they actually kind of ate these goldfish crackers.
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And they had these three different kind of conditions.
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In one condition, the toddlers were asked to share some of their own stash of goldfish crackers with these monkey puppets.
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And in another condition, they asked the toddlers to share the experimental stash, right?
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And what turned out to be the case is that when the toddlers shared their own stash, right, I mean, this is their personal stuff that they could consume themselves.
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and they re obviously very attached to those goldfish crackers, they ended up exhibiting the highest levels of happiness.
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So what it shows is that we seem to be hardwired for generosity.
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When the giving is effortful or costly, that s when we derive the greatest pleasure, even as toddlers.
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And there s other studies that show this.
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So that s one big reason.
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The second big reason is that when you re nice to other people, what happens naturally is that
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they have this tendency to reciprocate that niceness, right?
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I mean, all of us are relatively fair human beings, and so we notice when we owe somebody something.
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When somebody s done us a good turn, we kind of feel obligated to kind of return the favor.
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And so you re setting yourself these deep wells of goodwill all around you in your community when you re nice, kind, and giving that is to other people.
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And that s another reason.
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The third reason is that it has to do with the sense of competence.
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We talked a little bit about mastery in the earlier interview.
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So we all want to feel that we re good at doing something.
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In particular, we want to feel that we re good at being an agent of positive change in this world.
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And when we do good things to other people and we can actually see that we re making other people happy, we feel that, you know what, I m powerful.
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I can actually make other people happier.
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I can actually be an agent of positive change.
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And that self-perception or feeling that you can contribute to society,
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can actually increase your happiness as well.
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So many reasons why it seems that being kind, being loving, being giving is very good for happiness, all these three reasons.
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But here s where it becomes a little more interesting and subtle.
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There is such a thing as being overly giving or giving to a fault, as you mentioned.
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So some people think, rightly so, that my problem is not giving, I m just overly giving.
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And so here I would like to kind of put in a little bit of a shout out to Adam Grant and his work on
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on this topic.
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And what he finds, you know, this is a big topic and we can talk about it for hours, but in a nutshell, what he finds is that there is such a thing as selfless giving, which is not good, which is indiscriminate giving, giving it to people at all times.
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We all know characters like this, right?
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I mean, our grandmoms or even mothers, aunts, et cetera, who just, you know, anytime anybody asks them anything, they ll do it, right?
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They could actually be happy for a while, but what happens in the long run is that they burn out.
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They don t have the emotional resources to keep going, and so they end up becoming sometimes even depressed.
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So that s not a good situation to be in.
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What Adam Grant recommends is not to be a selfless giver, but what he calls to be an otherish giver.
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And what otherish giving is, is recognizing that you have to take care of yourself in the act of giving.
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And so he points to a couple of rules that are very, very important to use.
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One of those is called value-enhancing strategies.
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So basically, you identify a set of people with similar needs, and you become a little more efficient in your giving.
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So let s say that somebody has approached you for a class on calculus.
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You re very good at calculus, and so you agree to it, which is good.
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You re giving.
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But then what you do then if you re a value-expanding kind of a guy is you identify other people who have a similar need.
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And rather than helping them each out independently, you say email them all and then you tell them, look, I mean, Friday afternoon from 2 to 5, does it work for you guys?
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I ll hold this little workshop on calculus.
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And so you kind of do it in a way that includes a lot more people.
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You re more efficient in your giving.
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The other thing that s very, very important is to have fun in the act of giving yourself.
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So don t choose those activities that are going to burn you out.
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If you re not an early morning person, for example, don t take on the task of waking up at 4 a.m.
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and going to the soup kitchen and making soup for people.
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So identify those things that you yourself have fun in the act of giving.
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So you cut out the emotional cost, so to speak.
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So that s the second thing that he points to.
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To that, I would add a third thing that other researchers pointed to, which is,
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seeing the impact of your giving.
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Many of us would like to believe that we are so altruistic, that there s no ego involved, and I just want to do good to the world, and I don t care if they recognize it or not.
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But the reality is that until such point that we reach that aspirational state of not being egotistical or not having the ego involved, we have to admit that realistically, we do like to be appreciated.
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And so just recognizing that means that you re given a way that you re there to receive the thanks.
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So, you know, leave a box of chocolates outside your favorite neighbor s house, but then, you know, kind of observe how they feel when they get that box of surprising gift, like a surprise gift.
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Hide in the bushes while they get it.
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That s not creepy at all.
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Yeah, exactly.
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So that s that s the idea.
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So you want to not be a selfless giver.
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You want to be an otherish giver.
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But overall, you have to recognize that all of us are hardwired for generosity just as much, if not more.
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than we are hardwired for greed and self-centeredness.
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Thanks, Jordan.
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On Tuesday, we re talking to Jason McCarthy, founder of Go Ruck Bags and the Go Ruck Challenge.
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We talk about the Special Forces concept of Charming the Snake, which is all about building rapport both on the battlefield and in civilian life.
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On Thursday, we talk to Angela Duckworth, author of the book Grit.
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We discuss why we shouldn t label others as talented, why our potential is one thing and what we do with it is quite another, how to focus on high-level goals, and how to grow our grit and perseverance.
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And as always, we ll be answering your questions on Fan Mail Friday.
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So make sure you re subscribed to get all of the latest episodes as soon as they re available.
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For more information on subscribing, just head over to theartofcharm.com slash subscribe.