How Generosity Improves Your Well-Being

Brett: It's a documented phenomenon that generosity can be one of the first steps you can take to improve your own mental health, and even if you would want to consider that a selfish way or a self-oriented way, and yet it's also one of the last tools that people talk about or want to bring out. Welcome to the art of accomplishment where we explore living the life we want with enjoyment and ease. I'm Brett Kistler and I'm here with Joe Hudson.

Joe: Hi

Brett: We're at the beautiful flower farm, Zannah Farms, using this as our studio today and we've been really enjoying the in-person format of this podcast and we've been hearing great things about it in the feedback from all of you guys too. So we're going to keep trying to do this as much as we can.

Let's talk generosity.

Years ago, I visited Iran. I was invited there for a base jumping trip. I've lived and traveled in more than 40 countries and one of the things that I've noticed is that the cultures that are the happiest also tend to be the cultures where generosity is really high. And in Iran, that turned out to be more true than almost anywhere I'd ever been. I was blown away and in one instance, which I wrote about recently, we can drop that in the show notes, but I found myself in a homestay in Tehran. 

Joe: Yeah 

Brett: And this family took me in. They made me dinner. I found myself at one point lying on the floor playing Jenga with the daughters of the family while the father of the family was sitting on my back giving me a back massage like a cat just like purr and I'm like apparently this is just what happened, you know, and from the day that I got there, from the moment I got off the plane, I had people whispering to the back of my ear as I walked by, welcome to Iran. We are not our government. We welcome you here. We love you here. Thank you. Thank you for coming. I'm so happy you're here. 

Joe: Wow. 

Brett: And people would come up off the street and give me a hug or shake my hand and welcome me. This welcome to Iran was a thing that I heard all the time.

Joe: Yeah, it's interesting. A lot of the cultures in the Middle East that I've experienced are incredibly generous. I remember when I was in Saudi Arabia, I went over to a house of a wealthy man and I admired something. And he wanted to send me home with it and it was like some very expensive thing. And I was like, Oh, that's cool. I was 10 years old. It's okay, then you get it. If you like it, you get it. And just such a part of their culture. I think oftentimes the people who are deeply generous, especially in their home lives, especially in their interpersonal lives, there's a lot of happiness. There's a lot of joy there, even when they have very little, right? 

Brett: Perhaps, especially when they have very little. 

Joe: Perhaps, yeah. 

Brett: The less you have the bigger the proportion of the generosity you can feel when you give the little that you have. 

Joe: Yeah. 

Brett: So many parables are shaped in that way. 

Joe: Yeah. 

Brett: Like the gift of the Magi.

Joe: Yeah, it's true. If you're a billionaire giving away a hundred thousand dollars isn't as substantial as if you're a beggar giving away a meal. 

Brett: Yeah, that's not only about the amount it's also the context and it's also what it means for you and what it means for them and the impact that it has and ways that it breaks down your identity and your ego to do so. There's a lot of different ways that like the first moment of generosity can completely crack you open. It's a documented phenomenon that generosity can be one of the first steps you can take to improve your own mental health. And even if you would want to consider that a selfish way or a self-oriented way, and yet it's also one of the last tools that people talk about or want to bring out or it's talked about, but it's considered yeah, you can do that, but also you could do something practical.

Joe: Yeah. The first thing is what is generosity because there's plenty of people who give and it's not out of generosity. You can give out of obligation and you don't get the benefit of generosity by giving. You get the benefit of generosity by being generous. I remember that there is, I think it might be in the Jewish tradition, there is the levels of generosity and there's the level in which everybody knows that you gave something. There's the level in which the people who you gave it to don't know. And then there's the level in which nobody knows what you said earlier is, seems to be really true, which is how much the generosity isn't about you, how much the generosity disintegrates your ego.

Brett: Yeah. 

Joe: Nobody knows about it and I'm still giving. 

Brett: Yeah. 

Joe: Sometimes I think giving with people knowing about it is more important because there's a generosity of the story that gets told, there's the generosity in the giving itself, but either way, something that cracks your heart open when you're giving, something that's not because you're supposed to, because you have to. And the other thing that I notice is generosity comes on many levels. I think in our society we see generosity as money. 

Brett: We value money, so we see generosity through the lens of what we value. For others, it would be different. 

Joe: Yeah. There's a, so there's a guy Tiago Forte, he runs building a second brain and he is one of the most generous people, as far as admiration goes, he's so generous in his admiration. He looks at somebody, finds something to admire about them. The people around him, when he admires them they light up. It's like they've been given a gift way better than a couple hundred bucks, right?

They're just, and they have this sensation of, Oh, like I've been given to and they step into their best. So there's, that's one you can have the generosity of admiration. My friend Fred, he has this ability to be really generous in the way that he sees people. So he's an amazing individual and he's restored all these rivers and he's worked with all these Indian tribes before him, just an amazing human being. Godfather of Esme and as a matter of fact, he's taking her into Hopi Canyon to help restore this canyon this summer. And that's part of his generosity right there. His generosity is to allow people to be seen. So when he walks into a city or an Indian tribe, the way he listens is generous. The way he shows up with pictures of the land circa 150 years ago that, he'll find that print and he'll bring that. So this is what's, this is what we're after. There's a generosity to the way that he sees people, which is unbelievably amazing. And if you get to hang around with him, and when he gives financially, which he does do quite a bit, he gives in a way that people feel seen in it. He doesn't give oh, here's some money. If he's working with, say, an Indian family that doesn't have a lot of money. He'll see that the craft that they do and he'll buy the craft. This thing that you made is special to me and he sees them in that. He's not generous in such a way where he's putting himself above, which is another way that people are generous. I'll help those people out because I'm better than them. Poor them, I'll help them out. 

Brett: Which typically ends up creating dynamics that aren't actually helpful for everybody in the end in a lot of cases. 

Joe: Yeah. 

Brett: Not all cases, it can still work out 

Joe: Yeah I guess like the Jewish tradition says there's just seems to be levels of generosities and you can tell which level you're on by how much it breaks your heart open. You're just like oh that's a whole different level of generosity if it's breaking your heart open. I have a friend his name is Birju. He always shows up with a gift, but he for years didn't collect a paycheck he lived completely on what he called the gift economy. So he would do something and then people would pay him or not for the stuff that he did. 

Brett: Donation-based career. 

Joe: Yeah, but it's you think that's hippie, but the thing he would do is he'd be the CFO of a company. 

Brett: Whoa.

Joe: Yeah, he was a CFO of two different companies. And they're like, what do you want to get paid? And he was like, it's a gift economy. 

Brett: Wow. 

Joe: Pay me what you think it's worth. 

Brett: Wow. 

Joe: Yeah. 

Brett: Yeah, that breaks my brain.

Joe: It does, doesn't it? You think this guys like making jewelry and selling that at Burning Man or something, but no, he was the CFO of a real estate organization.

Brett: That's the Burning Man ethos in the wild. 

Joe: In the wild. 

Brett: My wife, Alexa has this way of telling the parable of like Jesus with a sermon on the mountain with the fishes and the bread. 

Joe: Yeah. 

Brett: The way that I was taught that parable is that there was like two fishes and a loaf of bread, and then Jesus waved a magic wand, and then suddenly there was a bunch of food for everybody. And the way that Alexa's pastor once told that story is that actually everybody had already brought enough food just for them, and they were keeping it close to their chests because they're out in the desert, and this guy, Jesus, talks for hours and hours you never know what's going to happen. And so there was already enough food. 

Joe: Yeah. 

Brett: But it seemed scarce because people were holding it close. And so what Jesus did is simply pass out the food that he and his disciples and people close to him had, which was seemed like little and then others did it and others did it. And then before you knew it, there actually was plenty because once you open the tab of gifting, turns out there was enough.

Joe: Yeah. 

Brett: And I really love that, that framing of it. 

Joe: So there's lots of forms of being generous, but the depth of the generosity is in how much you are self-defining on it, or how much your ego is cracking. I remember I was in Nicaragua, and I'm with this Navy SEAL from the 1970s, and he's just chain smoking and drinking beer, and he was such a great guy, and he had basically dedicated his life to saving turtles. Nobody in this part of Nicaragua was saving turtles but him and so I'm there I'm hanging out with him and I run across a whole bunch of Canadians who are partying on the beach and I said, oh, what are you all doing here? It was clearly not very many non-Caraguans in this area and they're like, oh we took a whole bunch of clothing from Canada and we're bringing it here so that we could give it to the poor people here And I was like, oh cool. So what are you doing for trade? They're like, no, nothing. Like, we have everything. We're just giving it away to them. And I was like, oh, so it seems to me that you're just teaching them that they can't do stuff for themselves. You're saying to them that you're not capable of taking care of yourself. We need to take care of you. And they're like what could we ask in return? And I was like, I know this guy down the street. He's saving turtles. You could ask for them to help save the turtles in exchange for the clothing. 

Brett: And then they get to give something.

Joe: Yeah, they get to give. Exactly. The idea is that the person who's receiving somehow, like that's the gift as if, It's not the giving that's the gift. My experience is giving feels just as good, if not sometimes better than receiving because it's a deeply empowering act. 

Brett: Yeah. 

Joe: That's what I think people miss about giving. If you take that sermon, it's empowering to go, oh, I'm going to share this because there's going to be plenty. It's very disempowering to go, I have to hold on to this because if I don't, I'm going to die or I'm going to be hungry. And then to be given something, Sometimes it's quite lovely, and sometimes it's very disempowering.

Brett: So what do most people want a paycheck for if not to feel and be able to give their time and love and attention to their family and the things that they care about and the people that they want to give to? That which we want to receive, we want to receive in such a way that gives us the opportunity to feel giving. Not that opportunity is required by money, but there's I think even that logic is in it the opportunity to help with the turtles and receive clothing.

Joe: Yeah, 

Brett: It's like I'm connected now in something bigger than myself and something that you said about Fred you were like this is one kind of generosity is a generosity in seeing. I'm curious if that's one kind of generosity or if maybe that's like at the core of generosity. 

Joe: Yeah, my story about generosity in Iran was so my dad stayed there after they shut down the airports. They opened them up. We flew out in a crazy manner. Five of us on two seats three kids two moms and then my dad stayed and at some point as the story goes my father was in the house with the driver. The driver's name was Rustam and he was rastrian so he wasn't Muslim and there was the revolution was Muslim for the most part. And they stormed the house to take my dad. And there was all the hostages that were taken and whatnot. And Rustam generously risked himself, stopped them and said, hey, knowing he could get in trouble, knowing he could get beaten, knowing whatever could happen. He said wait, you need to call the university and talk to the professors because his wife taught at the university, they know her. And they're sitting around the kitchen table apparently, smoking cigarettes, machine guns, they call, somebody says yes, let him go, and my dad drives out through Afghanistan. Rustam, like that's a generosity that is, most of us don't even get a chance to experience that level of generosity. 

Brett: Yeah, 

Joe: And then most likely my dad at the time, that came from probably years of my dad being generous with Rustam never looking down on him. It was something that my dad could do in a way that I still admire.

Brett: Yeah, I'm now seeing a linkage from generosity, not just to being seen or seeing, but also to respect. There's a respect in it. 

Joe: There's a respect in it, isn't there? Yeah. 

Brett: And if it's done without respect, then it doesn't have the same juice. 

Joe: With my daughter, for instance, she was traveling through Europe, some part of Spain had her passport stolen and she came to me later and she said how it was one act of offense led to her experiencing 30 acts of generosity. People giving her shoes, people paying for her trip to get to Barcelona so that she could get the new passport and a woman giving her a bed in her ferry ride and just endless moments of generosity when somebody saw somebody else in need. 

Brett: Wow, yeah. 

Joe: And for her she said it was hell but it was totally worth it just because it was the first time that she got to experience that kind of generosity from humanity 

Brett: Yeah, we recently talked about my brother, he has terminal brain cancer, and as of today, he's in palliative care and in the hospital, same hospital that he and I were both born in. And I called my sister today and she was with him, and in the background while she was talking to me, I hear this lullaby playing, and in this hospital, every time you a child is born they play a lullaby. And so it's just back and forth you're just listening in the soundscape and there's just like code blue somebody's on the way out lullaby someone's on the way in but basically he's dying and they're caring for him. He's got internal bleeding, pulmonary embolism, I don't even know how brain cancer leads to all the stuff that's going on for him, but it's systemic and severe and he's still there. He's able to speak and be spoken to. And so over the past days, I've been on the phone with him and my mom and my sister and my dad and we've just been crying together, sharing, not even stories anymore, but just sharing love. 

Joe: Yeah. 

Brett: And the way that this relates to generosity is that my brother's wife posted on Facebook recently to update everybody on his current status.

Joe: Yeah. 

Brett: And she said, if you want to support us, if you want to offer any kind of assistance, support, we really love that. We appreciate it. What we ask is that you go out and do it into the world. Give it to somebody. Donate a book to a library. Bring somebody cookies and what I've been seeing happen in the wake of that just in the past couple of days has been earth-shattering for me 

Joe: Yeah first of all, it's incredibly generous of her. If we're defining generosity as being seen, the helplessness of having someone you love die, and you can't do anything about it. 

Brett: Yeah.

Joe: And her saying here's something you can do. 

Brett: In a moment I saw that post, I hit reshare, yeah, this is, I want this out there. And within a couple hours, somebody in this community posted that they had paid off the loan of a single mother in India with a disabled kid in Scott's name.

And then I got to pass that back and my sister got to tell Scott and he cried and then on the drive here to do this recording, I was talking to Carrie, my sister, and she said that one of her acts was that she brought cookies to a couple of homeless people under a bridge nearby where she lives. She found one of them is homeless because he got brain cancer and he lost his home and he had nobody to care for him. He didn't have any backstop and he's under a bridge with brain cancer. My brother is in a hospital with health insurance and a family and people giving around the world on his behalf and this person's under a bridge. And cookies, what the fuck do cookies mean? What are cookies? But I can only imagine to be seen in that way. When my sister learned that piece of what was going on for him. 

Joe: Yeah. 

Brett: Whatever happened for her and him in that moment was worth far more than cookies. 

Joe: Yeah. 

Brett: Something that my brother apparently said after hearing some of these stories, is yeah, there's a million opportunities to be generous every day. But there's also a million ways that you've been generous that you haven't even seen. A million acts of generosity that you haven't even recognized, as well as the opportunities. 

Joe: That's a crazy one. That's a crazy one. If I consider that for a minute. This has been happening to me a lot recently. People get on the calls and they thanks for doing this. It's really generous of you. It never feels like generosity to me. Yeah, we don't have to do things for free. We don't have to do the podcast for free. I get that, but it doesn't feel like generosity, and I'm wondering now how much of that is me not letting it in, and how much of it is that I can't think of another way to do it. I feel like generosity is only there if there's a choice to it. If that makes any sense, like I can't imagine not doing this. It's interesting. 

Brett: What is a choice? Something that feels automatic to me now, may feel automatic now as a result of the choices that I've made. 

Joe: Absolutely. 

Brett: To become the kind of person I am now. 

Joe: Oh, for sure. I remember when I first started this work, I did feel generous. It doesn't now. Now it feels oh, this is, it's like living on purpose. To not do it feels, it would feel painful to not have my first priority be making a living by supporting people in their authenticity. 

Brett: So on the one hand, we have the recognition of all the ways we have been generous and haven't seen it. And then on the other hand, just like Esme the recognition of the generosity we've received that we haven't recognized. 

Joe: That one in itself is amazing. My daughter went to school, there's all these teachers who taught her. There's generosity in each one of them. To become a teacher for a living, there's a generosity in that maybe they didn't even recognize it.

My daughter, she recognized them as good people, but she probably didn't recognize it the way she recognized it while she was getting help with a pair of shoes, trying to regain her passport, right? If I really let that in for a second, our business wouldn't be here if it wasn't for the generosity of a lot of people. You, Kat behind the camera, yeah, it's a bit overwhelming to allow that full experience in. 

Brett: And sure as shit, I didn't recognize the generosity of my brother's cancer when I first heard about it. The generosity that he didn't die in a car accident that very day. The generosity that I've gotten to say goodbye to him.

Yeah, a number of times and every time I've said goodbye to him, I walked away and I was like, oh, there was a way I could have, I was still holding it together, man. I was still trying to be, like the strong little brother for the big brother in some way. And I got to process that each time and the last time I saw him in person this time last week, as I said, goodbye, I got to allow myself just to cry and just to fully let go. Which gave him the opportunity to feel seen where he's barely able to move his arms, just lift them and do one of these. And for me to come in and like I had wanted the previous time to actually be able to cry on his shoulder and have him hold me. And have my mom hold us the way she did yesterday on the call where she prayed with us, and it's the first time I've unironically prayed with my mom in decades. 

Joe: Maybe that should be the highest act of generosity. It's not giving at all. It's just being with somebody without needing anything to change.

Brett: Yeah, I'm fucked with my conception of what prayer even means, because what it felt to me there was simply the three of us letting go of everything in the way and surrendering to being there with each other and I'm deeply grateful for that.

Joe: That's a good place to end. 

Brett: Yeah. 

Joe: Cool.

Brett: Thanks everyone for listening to The Art of Accomplishment. You can find us on YouTube, Twitter/X, and all the platforms @artofaccomp. Joe is on X as @FU_JoeHudson. I am Air Kistler, @airkistler. And we've got a bunch of shorts coming out these days on YouTube, so be sure to check out our YouTube channel. And if you liked this episode, please share it with a friend. This podcast is produced by myself, Brett Kistler and Joe Hudson. The production coordinator is Mun Yee Kelly and reasonable volume edited this episode.