Generosity is your Margin of Growth

If you imagine a gap between where you are now and where you want to be, that’s your margin of growth. It’s the career, goals and impact you aspire to. The distance between here and there can be bridged with generosity. 

Generosity is my margin of growth. This is a phrase I used to whisper to myself all the time, especially in my first years of business. The more I held onto those six words, the more opportunities opened up. It’s one of the most magical mantras I’ve ever come across.

Obviously, there’s tangible generosity, i.e. giving away awesome freebies in exchange for emails, shipping advance copies of your book to help spread the word, and being known as a giver not a taker in your professional networks. Ironically, transactional generosity is less powerful. It’s exactly that quid pro quo relationship that confines generosity and makes it short-lived.

The generosity that produces abundance in the natural world is a far better model to aspire to. Think of the spiraling nature  of galaxies, planets, time, DNA and unfurling flower buds. Even language spirals out of these root words becoming richer and richer as it unfolds and expands. It’s that same spiraling virtuous cycle that propels us in the direction of our soul purpose. That’s where the magic happens.

A book in and of itself is an extremely generous object. The more of yourself that you put into it by cycling back to the page, drafter after draft, the bigger your life becomes. The biggest conversations in history are made of books.

The Kindness of Water

When you’re in alignment with that humble creative spiral that propels the Universe forward in time, synchronicity starts to permeate your work, much like water distributing itself through crevices of parched earth.

While I was working on this chapter, this metaphor literally stopped me in my tracks one day on the way home from the grocery store. I was in line to check out and I saw the woman in front of me had five bottles of water. At that moment I realized how terribly thirsty I was and I still had a long walk ahead of me. I didn't want to lose my place in line but my mouth was watering. Synchronistically, she didn't have enough cash for all five bottles and left one behind. I told the cashier I'd take it and set off for home.

In Bogota we have traffic light performers. They make music and do cool stunts for people sitting in traffic. They're like street performers but they're traffic light performers. At the traffic light in front of our apartment there’s a juggler and that morning he’d been working for tips in the sun without a break. He eyed my water ravenously and asked, "Please, can I have the rest of your water?"

Laughing, I realized that despite my thirst back at the checkout line, I’d taken little more than a sip of my water. I figured this particular synchronicity must have been for him and handed the bottle over.

I used to think synchronicities seemed like predestined moments where, for instance, I got to be the special person who delivered this particular bottle of water to this particular juggler. But then I realized it’s  a cosmic play which distributes resources to where they’re needed through interesting slights of hand. This feels even more magical because it reminds me that I’m connected to a larger spiritual ecosystem that I’m always tapping into. Rather than cling to my own water bottle, I get to become the right person at the right time for a stranger. Eventually all synchronicities dissolve into the kindness of water, rushing to distribute itself through a parched population.