Skip to main content

Give your best stuff away


Image result for Your Best Stuff 
 
This is an interesting and sometimes polarizing topic.

One group of people believe that the more content (ideas, conversations, posts, videos, etc) that you put out into the world, the better your return is as you are connecting with more people and getting greater exposure.

Another group feels that by investing all of this energy into giving away "free stuff", takes away from what you could be doing to grow your business, give to your clients or to your employer. That giving your stuff away doesn't pay the bills, so what's really the point other than feeling good.

For me personally, I'm all about giving my best stuff away for free, and what follows are really my "whys".

First and foremost, I don't really prescribe to the idea that anyone really has "best stuff". That's finite and fixed and I truly don't believe this applies to people the way it can be associated to things.

If you are a miner, and you mine some ultra rare, extremely unlikely gem from the Earth that probably really does qualify as the best stuff you've ever mined, and giving that away will definitely be a loss to you (whether financial or intrinsic) for sure.

But is this really the same for ideas?
Is this really the same for perspectives and how you would solution something?

For me, that's a clear no.

Here's why I feel that more people need to "give away their best stuff" whenever the opportunity arises.

  1. Your best stuff ... is really just your best stuff right now, and even then it's not stuff. You real best stuff is you. Your uniqueness, your experience and your paradigms. These colour your ideas, and your ideas about a particular may be amazing, but they are solutions in time and context and should always be evolving.
  2. Attraction. The more authentic you are with what you are sharing, the more you are genuinely giving your thoughts on a situation or a problem, you are more likely to get someone to re-engage with you.
  3. You will learn more. Exposing our ideas to outside perspective and challenge only force us to continue to evaluate and grow our own thoughts, it keeps the creative tap turned on to keep generating more "best stuff"
  4. Ideas or solutions that fall into this "best stuff" category are usually more aligned with your personal brand (cliche), but they are far more likely to represent the truest you. The conversations and opportunities that come when you are you, are often the most rewarding we have.
  5. And yes, you probably will feel good

I have never been a person to shy away from sharing my perspective. I have always benefited from saying what I think and having my ideas challenged, and I love it.

As I currently find myself in a transitional phase in my career, allowing this free flow of ideas and creativity, of unfiltered problem solving has been very eye opening and rewarding.

I wonder how much more interesting the world would if everyone felt as comfortable giving away "their best stuff" on a regular basis?
Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

This 1 Thing Increases Your Career Capital More Than Anything Else

The Art of Better Decision Making Have you felt scared to make a decision? Maybe you get preoccupied with making the 'wrong' decision?  Did you know that 68% of people have admitted to not doing because they thought it would be harder than it actually is. Getting comfortable with making decisions is one of the biggest challenges new leaders face. You will be placed in situations where there isn't enough time to get all of the information. Or even harder, you will be placed in situations where you'll never get more information than what you have. The good news? Making better decisions is something that you can improve by being deliberate with your learning and how you choose to approach it. This is the approach I take to decision making. These have been test and is what I have used over my 15 year career to teach and develop teams. - Accept that you will make mistakes. There is rarely a perfect answer. Getting comfortable with ambiguity is a leadership muscle you need to
2 comments
Read more

Your Next Five Moves

 There are two streams of thought when you start reading a book and you don't feel like you are connecting with it. Some people will say to stop reading it and move onto something else, the theory is that there are so many things in the world that you will enjoy reading, that you shouldn't be wasting your time on things that you don't. Camp B will tell you to stick with it, get through it and see what happens. If I had to "pick a side" I probably fall more into team B than team A, even though I do feel that there will always be some books / material that you should just put down. What has me more B than A? Some of the books that have had the most impact on me were a STRUGGLE to get through. I challenge that this may because they are pushing your boundaries and putting something up against your current worldview / paradigms. True growth and learning comes from when you can challenge and dismantle your own ideas, and rebuilt them anew. My first real experience with
Post a Comment
Read more

Decisions, Positions and Frames

  Making decisions and getting consensus is the most common activity that every person goes through. Whether in your personal or professional life, we are all selling, all the time. Selling? I'm not selling anything! Actually, that's not really true. At the most fundamental level, selling is about the transfer of belief. You are trying to get a person or a group to see things the way you do. If they accept that, you make the "sale" (i.e. you have transferred your idea/belief) as another has chosen to accept it. Where things get hard is when people hold onto certain ideas, frames or positions around a circumstance. It's interesting how little people realize what they share related to their position without even knowing it. The information is there, as long as you are listening. Always be listening. When someone repeats a variable or constraint that is a difference, that has major impact. They themselves they may not realize that they are essentially confirming what
Post a Comment
Read more