Boundless #30: Gifts, Generosity & Hacking A Living
Gifts, Generosity & Hacking A Living
#1 Gifts, Generosity & Hacking A Living
As you may have seen, I e-mailed many of you last week about the Strategy Toolkit course I created. As I have continued to contemplate the relationship between work, life & money, I have also experimented with the gift economy.
When launching the course this past week, I shared with a couple close friends that I felt a pull between offering the course as a gift (free) and wanting to charge a high price (because I thought it was worth it and people might take it more seriously). While I have embraced the gift economy, I cannot expect everyone to fully embrace a mindset which took me several months, books and conversations to understand.
The decision I made was to offer the course at different tiers. A link to both a $99 option and a full-price option (if you wish) and then text saying "if you don't have the money right now, e-mail me and I'll gift it to you." Given that I didn't provide a link to the free version, I imagine many may have felt bad e-mailing me asking for a free link. I instantly regretted not including a free link as more people could have gotten access to the course.
(Side Note: A random stranger on the internet accused me of running a pyramid scheme after receiving this e-mail. I think she missed the part about the gift...)
I recently stumbled across a quote of Benjamin Franklin's:
"That, as we enjoy great advantages from the inventions of others, we should be glad of an opportunity to serve others by any invention of ours; and this we should do freely and generously."
Everything I create is built on a history of love, mentoring, kindness and gifts I have received from other people. Even being born in America is an incredible gift in itself. However, I find it mentally challenging to truly embrace a "gift economy" mindset that Charles Eisenstein has framed as giving when, " you don’t know when and what you will receive” back.
Fully releasing to that mindset is a work in progress, but I think its worth it to keep moving in that direction if not for learning's sake.
I grapple with two competing mindsets. One one side is my shift to judging otherspeople on their generosity, while on the other side is a small little voice in my head still telling me that this gift economy thing is stupid and that my self-worth (at least in some part) will always be related to how much money earn.
This is probably way too much and most of you probably will just tell me "put the course out there and charge more for it." Maybe you are right.
But experimenting with this whole "gift economy" thing has been pretty fun and rewarding.
Check out the essay for more...
👉 Giving $100 to strangers and other gift economy experiments in 2018
#2 Less Money, Mo' Clicks
I spent most of the month working on launching the Strategy Toolkit, which was an absolute delight. I ended up making two sales ($198) and also made some "internet money" from Amazon affiliate links via my Quartz article (accidentally left the link in there! - about $60) and from Medium (about $25). I also received two generous gifts from an incredible coaching client ($50).
On the cost side, I moved around a bit in Taipei and a short visa-run to Vietnam which jacked up the living costs a little as well as booking my return trip for Christmas. Lets hope for a return to a lower cost of living next month...
Here is my monthly financial report
#3 Podcast - The Real (Human) Gig Economy
Amid all the buzzwords and reports on the future of work, I find Sarah Kessler’s stories about the gig economy to be the most insightful and the most human. Her stories and her book, Gigged, give an accurate picture of some of the upsides of the gig economy, but also some of the downsides.
She shares stories of people that are sleeping in their office making five cents per task on Amazon’s Mechanical Turk to creative freelancers who can make six-figure salaries working from anywhere. She also shares the story of companies that see limits to the gig economy, like Dan Teran’s company Managed by Q who is following Zeynep Ton’s Good Jobs Strategy and looking at people as valuable and investing in them as full-time employees and partners in the businesses success.
Our conversation dives deeper into some of the stories she shares as well as some of the current challenges with platforms, the PR machine (all the firms say people want flexibility, but fail to mention they are happy to give it up for more pay!).
One of her subjects in the book puts it most powerfully, Kristy Milland, “I am a human, not an algorithm”
🎧 LISTEN 🎧
Web • YouTube • Apple Podcasts • Stitcher • Google Podcasts
Overcast • Spotify • PlayerFM
#4 Quotes
"That, as we enjoy great advantages from the inventions of others, we should be glad of an opportunity to serve others by any invention of ours; and this we should do freely and generously."
-Benjamin Franklin, His Autobiography
"the ways that people’s energies get corralled and channeled so they can be poured single-mindedly and obsessively into work; the lack of experiential awareness that there exists a “blooming, buzzing” life (to borrow some adjectives from William James) outside of the financial or tech industries; the sense of living in a bubble, with its insular rules, stratagems for career advancement, and status games; and the feeling that everything significant is happening right here"
-Andrew Taggart (WeWork and Google are a lot like company towns of the past)
#5 Reads
Five #goodreads This Week: Weekly Reads #98
Past Reads: Why we need to embrace the gift economy
Podcast: Seth Godin gives a powerful speech about our education system, asking What is it for?
Getting "Back In": Many have shared their belief that if you leave the corporate world, it will be hard to get back in. This recruiter seems to believe so anyway:
A recruiter tracked me down to discuss a potential role. When I told him I was planning to take some time off, he said, “Can I give you some unsolicited advice?” Without waiting for my response, he said, “I really wouldn’t recommend that. It will be hard to get back in.”
Mary left the corporate world for a break at 50. Is she brave or is this good branding for her return to the corporate world?