One of the biggest (and in retrospect most forehead smackingly obvious) things I’ve seen lately is that when it comes to money and business, it feels soooo much better to me to focus on what I can give than what I might be able to get. When things seem to be going well, my excitement about how well they’re going can quickly seque into a kind of greed and bloodlust for what I might wind up getting that makes me feel like an ancient viking preparing to plunder a village.  When things seem to be going poorly, a focus on what I can get quickly slides into neediness which then turns into discouragement, frustration, and anger at myself for not being able to provide and the world for not, in the words of George Bernard Shaw, “devoting itself to making me happy”.

So I’ve been experimenting over the past few months with deliberately keeping my attention on the giving side of the money equation to see if the receiving side will actually take care of itself or if that’s all just new-age metaphysical happy-clappy positive thinking.

Here’s some of what I’ve noticed so far, framed in terms of four kinds of giving I’ve distinguished thus far in my experiments…

1. Giving Out
Our business model has changed multiple times over the decades I’ve been doing this work, but given my renewed focus on giving, this year we’ve gone with “to share the feeling (of quiet presence, infinite possibility, unconditional love, and expansive aliveness) with as many people as possible and see what happens”. There are no inherent limits in this model, because what we’re giving out is an infinite and in fact self-renewing resource. The more we give, the more we have to give – what the American mystic Walter Russel described as “the inherent balance of the universe – giving and re-giving”.

What surprised me early on in this experiment was that I spotted areas where I was holding back from giving out as much as I knew I could because it seemed like it might be “too much too soon”.

For example, I have always had a vision for how much good stuff we could offer to people in our Inner Circle Platinum and Impact Academy memberships once we reached our goal of a thousand members. “When we get to a thousand members, we’ll be able to offer them…” was the beginning of many a well-intended sentence.

But with this renewed attention on truly giving, I realized that I had inadvertently become a character in one of Earl Nightingale’s business parables, negotiating with an empty fireplace, promising that “when you give me more heat, I’ll give you more wood.” Fire doesn’t work that way, and it turns out neither does money.

So within the bounds of common sense, we’ve upgraded all of our offerings to “the way we’d do them once we’re really successful”. Is it working? Financially it’s too soon to say. But on every other level (physically, emotionally, mentally, and spiritually), everything has become so much more peaceful, joyous and freewheeling that the money doesn’t matter.

If you want to experiment with the balance of giving and re-giving for yourself, consider this:

Look at everything you have in your life, from your home to your stuff and from your body to your friends, your family, and the earth you inhabit.  What if everything you see IS the re-giving of life for everything you’ve given of yourself from the moment you were born to this very moment in time?

2. Giving Up
I sometimes think of “giving up” as “the crossword puzzle effect”. As any puzzle fan will tell you, when you get stuck on a clue the best thing you can do is give up, walk away, and come back to it later. Somehow things that seemed obscure and unknown when we leave have magically become obvious on our return.

In Creating the Impossible, I share the true story about a far more dramatic benefit of giving up in a corporate setting:

One of my colleagues, Don Donovan, ran a large division of an international aerospace company that was given the impossible project of cutting production time on one of their military projects in half – from 18 months to nine months.

Alongside engineers from Cal Tech, MIT, Stanford, and the best schools in the country, they brainstormed ideas for weeks in the traditional way. They came up with one idea that would ultimately allow them to make the parts needed in the time allotted; unfortunately, it would take them at least a year to retool their factories to make the new process viable.

After about six weeks of intense exploration, Don called the team together and let them know he appreciated their efforts, but he was going to call the representatives from the military in the morning and let them know they wouldn’t be able to complete the project on time, even though it would quite likely cost the company one of their largest contracts and very possibly cost him his job.

Early the next morning when he came into work, he was surprised to see other cars in the parking lot. When he got to his office, he found a few of the engineers already hard at work.

When he asked one of them what was going on, they told him, ‘You know, it was the funniest thing. In all honesty I was kind of relieved when you told us we were giving up on this. I went home, saw my wife, had fun with my kids, and went to bed relaxed for the first time in a couple of months. Then I woke up around 3 a.m. with an idea completely different from what we’ve been exploring over the last six weeks. I thought I owed it to you to come in and run some numbers to test its viability, and to my surprise, a couple of other engineers were already in here having had a similar “3 a.m.” idea. I think this could actually work!’

Not only did it work, but the project came in on time and in budget. Don told me that he was proud of the team for pulling it off, but even prouder of the fact that they did it without the kind of ‘hair on fire’ stress that many companies use to try and boost productivity and results.

Years later, he went back to the company as a consultant and spoke with some of the engineers who had worked on that project. They said that ‘giving up’ had so become part of the company culture that whenever someone got really stuck, their colleagues would ask, ‘Have you given up yet?’

Giving up always worked – and they were always surprised when it did.

While part of what “works” about giving up can be explained in terms of the brain (read Thinking Fast and Slow by Daniel Kahneman if you want to go down that delightful rabbit hole :-), I like to think of it more in terms of giving things “up to a higher power”, even if that higher power turns out to be no more or less than our deeper mind.

Here are a couple of experiments you can play with in terms of both kinds of “giving up”:

1. Take the day off from your problems and goals today. (If that feels like too long a time to chance it, you can just take the afternoon off :-). If you really do this, you’ll be surprised at how different they look when you come back to them.

2. What would you be willing to give up to the deeper mind/intelligence of life/God, etc.) today? Money? Your business? Your relationships? Your sex life? None (or all) of the above?

Let your feelings be the barometer of your thoughts – if the idea of giving out and giving up feels good to you, do more of it; if it doesn’t, play around with it until you find a way of thinking about it that inspires you.

Next week, I’ll be sharing two more types of giving that seem to make a real difference to our relationship to work and money – giving back and giving in.

Until then, have fun, learn heaps, and happy exploring!