Be stingy with your time, but not your ideas

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Laura emailed me with a great question. She wanted to know why I give so many ideas away for free.

I’ve chosen to share my answer with you, because I believe it contains a really useful idea.

The contribution mindset

I see it like this:

• If you own 3 bags of gold and you give 1 of them away, you are left with 2 pieces of gold. Give all 3 bags of gold away and you’re left with nothing.
• However, if you give someone an idea, you still have just as many ideas as you had before. Plus, you have just enriched the other person. Even better, you may have just made a new friend too.

Scaling generosity

The key is to find a way to share your ideas, which scales. In other words, a way to be generous with your ideas that doesn’t leave you with too little time to do the things that you need to do.

• If you give an hour of your time away to 10 individual people every day, you have just lost 10 hours of your time. It doesn’t scale. It’s unsustainable. You’ll soon end up broke.
• However, if you give an hour of your time to your community every day, in a way that reaches 10 people or 10,000 people you have still only invested 1 hour. Blogging, newsletters, vlogging and podcasts are just some of the ways you can achieve this.

We must be stingy with our time

It’s important to remind ourselves that the clock is ticking. We only have a limited supply of time each day. But when it comes to helping people, by adopting the right strategy we can choose to be generous. We can choose to contribute to the success and happiness of others.

Being generous with our ideas is always important. But especially so in times like these, when so many others really need our help.