Jay Papasan:  
All right, gang. The secret is out. Scientists have discovered the ultimate life hack, and it’s not a pill, it’s not a supplement, it’s not an expensive gadget that you will put in your gym or you will jump into full of freezing water or really, really hot air. It’s actually giving. 

It’s so beneficial to be a giver that researchers have often wondered if any altruistic act can actually be altruistic at all because we benefit so much from it. And I’m just gonna rattle off a few of the research reports that I’ve gone through and people who volunteer tend to have fewer aches and pains. Okay. That’s not a big deal. Giving to others protects our overall health about as twice as much as aspirin does for our heart health, right? So, for all of our life, we’ve heard taking aspirin is good for your heart. Well, giving is like twice as good as that. 

People who are 55 and older, so, a little bit older, who are volunteering for two or more organizations have an impressive 44% less likelihood of death. And when you boil it all down, they’re eliminating all these other factors, the short answer is people who are volunteering, over 55, for two organizations, so that’s a group, but it’s actually almost as beneficial for them as quitting smoking. So, it’s actually more beneficial than exercising four times a week. So, you can keep going through there. 

They have this thing called the Helpers High that when people are volunteering, are giving, they experience like these really positive emotions. They feel stronger, they feel more energetic, they feel less depressed, they feel calmer, they have higher feelings of self-worth. You can just rattle off all of these statistics, and when givers give, they actually get, they actually get a lot. Even when they don’t intend to, there are massive benefits to being a giver.

Now, whenever I meet a podcast fan out in the world – and I’ve met two in the last week before recording this – I usually ask them, “What do you like about the podcast? Do you like the new format? What can we do better?” And I always ask like, “What’s a topic that you would really love to hear us talk about on the podcast?” In the last two times I met  someone in the wild, they both asked for giving. So, that’s why we are gonna talk about giving in this episode. And it’s kind of a one thing kind of episode. And then I’m gonna line up five dominoes. I’ve got a five part framework that I’ve been teaching for close to a decade now on how we can all be better givers. So, let’s dive in.

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I’m Jay Papasan and this is The ONE Thing, your weekly guide to the simple steps that lead to extraordinary results.

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So, when I think about my journey as a giver, and I’ll say “my” very generously ’cause it was me and my wife, Wendy, our family, and as a large, as a whole rather. So, it wasn’t just me on this journey, but I think about my journey in three parts. The first thing I did was witness it. I watched my parents role model great giving. Later, I experienced it at work where I was influenced to start giving more, and we started giving with more purpose. And finally, I started teaching it. And as a lot of you out there know, if you wanna learn more than anybody else in the room, start teaching something ’cause it forces you to level up your learning.

So, I go all the way back to the beginning. When I was growing up, my parents took me to church every week. And when the collection plate was going around, they always made sure I had a quarter or a dollar. And it wasn’t a conversation, I was just expected not to keep it, not to buy candy with it, but to put it in the plate. And they would explain like, you know, if we all donate, that’s what keeps this whole process going and we’re able to do great things. Real simple message for little kids. A lot of you, if you’ve gone to church, whatever your religion might be, that it seems to be a common thread through all of them, is to give back. 

Later on in life when I’m a little bit older, my father was an executive, he also volunteered at a lot of organizations around Memphis, and he raised a lot of money. And when I was at his funeral a few years back, there were a lot of leaders. We had two different mayors show up, and they would always joke that when Larry walked into the room – that was my dad, Larry – on one of his fundraising missions, they always were kind of, like, jokingly dreading it because they knew they were gonna say yes, and they knew that they would probably give more than they would ever plan to, and they never regretted it.

And I watched him raise tons of money for the Memphis Zoo, which went from being really kind of sad to a world-class institution. I watched him raise a lot of money for Le Bonheur Hospital for children and many other causes. And they were often, when he would do his fundraising, there were commas, two or more commas in those fundraising because they thought really big, and he worked with all of the leaders around Memphis. 

So, I got to see this at a young age that giving back, either personally, you would give to your church or to a cause, or raising money in your community was a normal thing and what a gift that was. So, I thought that was kind of normal, but then I went, I worked at a few places and realized, “Okay, maybe not so much.” But I’m not thinking about it. I’m a guy in my twenties, in my early thirties. I’m getting married. 

But then I started working at Keller Williams Realty. And if you don’t know anything about this institution, there is not one but two 501c3 nonprofits in this building. There’s KW Cares, which it helps different associates in our organization. A lot of entrepreneurs you might guess don’t have health insurance. It helps them pay for medical bills and handle things in a crisis, gets them out. And we’ve raised millions and millions over the years to help people from hurricanes and natural disasters, to you name it. And there’s also another organization called KW NextGen, which does scholarships for young men and women that can go and learn about leadership. And that has been an amazing organization helping drive just another generation of amazing leaders. 

So, those are both just inside the company, right? They’re just built into your everyday life. When we are getting our payroll deductions, one of the things that we could do is we can give to our 401k or we could give to one of these charities. So, it was always kind of baked in and I got to see giving done at, kind of, a world-class level. And I want to credit not just Gary Keller, the founder, who came up with the big ideas, and then later Mary Tennant and Mo Anderson, who rolled out some of the charities. 

But Mary Tennant, in particular, was president, and I reported to her as one of the department heads. And I remember her looking around at Christmas time, and everybody in the corporate office, they’re buying a bottle of wine for their boss, and they’re buying little presents or books for all of their employees, and she started adding it up. And she’s talking to all of her leaders, and she said, “Look, we’re spending tens of thousands of dollars, people who have a lot, who are benefited a lot. We are in good shape and we’re just giving gifts, sometimes out of professional obligation to each other. What would it look like if we kind of outlawed any sort of obligatory giving in the building, and starting next holiday season, every department would pick a charity and instead of giving gifts to each other, they would give back to the community?” And we all voted on it and said, “Absolutely, yes.”

And I can remember, I was running our education department, and we picked a small charity called Children’s Settlement Home. And we adopted multiple kids around the holidays. And the stuff they asked for, for their holiday presents like fresh socks. Like it wasn’t a bicycle. It was like the basic necessities. It was heartbreaking. But we would hold charity concerts, raise as much money as we could, and then we would use that to donate and support these children. And we did it as a team. And it was really transformative. 

And that was a turning point for Wendy and I because we had two kids. We are very early in our careers. I think Wendy was at home at that point, hadn’t yet started her business, so we didn’t have a lot of income. And we were of the mentality that so many people are that we didn’t have enough to really make a difference. But we started setting goals. We were already goal setters. You’ve heard our story on this podcast before. We’ve been doing it for 19 some odd years. We started setting goals on where we would give our time, where we would volunteer, how much money we would try to raise for those organizations, and then how much money we would commit to give.

And I’ll tell you more specifics about what we did a little later in the framework that I’m going to share with you. But that was the journey. We started tracking it. And I did the numbers right before this podcast, and we’ve only been formally tracking going back to 2018, 2018, but we started this journey at least 10 years before. But just what we can track, since 2018, we’ve been able to give away over $850,000, and we’ve raised more than $4 million for the causes that we care about. And so, you can immediately see the gap. We have the ability to raise far more money than we are able to give, and we started tracking both. And I wish I could tell you how much time we donated, but we never tracked it. But every year we would say, “Here’s where we’re gonna volunteer,” and then we would go do it. 

But thank you Mary Tennant for having that conversation about a lot of the things that we give to other people professionally or otherwise that’s really kind of obligatory versus really trying to make a difference. Being a little bit more strategic about it.

And the last stage of this is becoming a teacher. I remember, I was on a road trip with my friend, Ben Kinney, and we were talking about our businesses and our goals, and he just asked the question, “Wouldn’t it be so cool, Jay, if we could grow a business so big that you could give away a million dollars a year every year?” And it just got quiet in the car. And we’re thinking about it. And I was like, we’d written a book called The Millionaire Real Estate Agent – Gary, Dave and I. And at the top of it was “Net a Million.” You earned a million, then you net a million. And then, receive a million was ownership. And he goes, “Well, what if there was a give a million, like at the very top, where the ultimate statement of your success wasn’t how much you earned and kept. It was how much you were able to give away?”

And that started us down a journey where for, I’m gonna say, seven years at our annual convention, Ben and I raised our hands, we’re both in the master faculty and would teach class on helping people become better givers. And that, by the way, is the framework I’m gonna share with you. But before we get there, I want to go back one more step because there are some things that get in the way. They did for me, and I wanna make sure that you don’t have any faulty thinking about why we’re even having this conversation at all.

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So, when we would teach, there were kind of two groups of people that would show up, and they had, I’m gonna say, misunderstandings or myths in their heads, misunderstandings around why giving was important at all. And for a lot of people, if you’ve never experienced the gift of giving, volunteering, if no one’s ever taught you to do that before, a lot of people just say, “What’s the point?”

And I remember Ben had a young gentleman in his organization, and he shared the story with us, and then he shared it on stage. So, I hope it’s okay that I’m sharing it now. Ben had decided to fund a scholarship in his high school to help someone start out their college career. And he had raised the money, and he went with this employee to the ceremony. The young employee did not know this, but Ben was supposed to present the check, the scholarship check to the winner. And what he did is Ben turned to this young individual and said, “Look, I want you to be the one to hand the check off. You don’t have to say it’s from you. You don’t have to pretend, but I just want you to experience the look in this person’s eyes.”

And so he did, and he came back, and he was emotional. And he’s like, “Man, what do I have to do to feel that feeling again?” Because when you are the person who’s able to give to others, there is that helper’s high, there is this sense that you’re making a difference, and you get to see when someone is receiving the gift, if you’re lucky enough to see it, a lot of times it’s anonymous, it’s a deposit here or whatever, but sometimes you get to see the gift actually be received, and it is amazingly powerful. So, I will tell you, until you’ve experienced it, you don’t quite get it. But once you do, it can also be very addictive to become a giver.

The other big complaint, and this is the one that Wendy and I had, is like it’s not just what the point, we got it. I was raised that way, but like we don’t earn enough. We won’t make a difference. And there’s all kinds of stats out there that say that it is actually the small givers that actually matter the most. And I’ll just give you a few things that I just went on the internet. Like for $3, you can provide betting and netting, so that people can avoid getting malaria in different parts of the world. So, just three bucks could save someone’s life. 

Twenty-one bucks at this one institution I found is tuition for an entire year in Africa, right? So, that’s just a couple. You know, it’s you and your two friends going out for coffee. You could provide tuition for a student in Africa for the whole year.  And there’s this amazing organization for as little as 35 or 40 bucks, you can actually give cataract surgery to someone who’s blind. So, you can actually give sight to someone for less than 50 bucks. 

So, those small donations actually can make a big impact in and of themselves. But if you look at giving across America, the wealthiest of the wealthy give 25% of all giving. And that’s what you read about in the newspaper and you see it in the news. So and so endowed this institution with this much money, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. And it makes us feel like our dollars don’t count. 

But here’s the thing, 75% of all giving is small donations. It’s people like you and me. It’s those people in the very beginning who have a $5 bill. They can make a $10 donation or a $50 donation or a hundred. It’s not having to have lots of commas in the checks. Those small gifts add up when lots of people do it. So never think that your dollars don’t count. They add up over time, and they make a huge difference for these nonprofits that rely on givers like you and me to actually make the whole world run a little bit better.

Now, right before we go to break, I’m just gonna share with you a book, not one that I’ve written, but that was a game changer for me. Adam Grant wrote a book called Give and Take. He actually came into our organization and gave a speech many years ago. But I’ll give you, kind of, the summation of the book. He did a bunch of research around the top performers across many industries, the people who earned the most and were promoted the most, and he wanted to see if giving mattered.

So, he divided people into three groups. They’re the takers, right? These are the people, we all have worked with them before. They’re gonna take their unfair share, and they’re going to try to knock everybody else off on their way to the top. They’re very aggressive. They’re in it for themselves.

There’s a middle group that I was unaware of before this, and it’s the matchers. And these are the people that kind of say, like, “Look, you buy me lunch and I’m gonna buy you lunch next time.” They want to keep, kind of, the playing field even, and they absolutely are offended by takers. If they’re in the room, and they’re watching a taker take, they will make it their life mission to take them out. The matchers are one of the people that actually kind of level the playing field. They really want things to even out. 

And the last group are givers. Those are the people who tend to be the most generous, who want to pave the way for others. 

Now, when Dr. Grant did the research originally, he was very disheartened because it actually was the matchers and the takers that were at the top of the pyramid. And he’s like, “How can that be? How can givers actually be at the rock bottom?” They looked at the research a little bit more carefully. And actually, at the very top, in this little 5% margin or whatever up there, you’ve got the highest of the high performers. The people who succeeded at the highest level were actually givers. And then, under them was this mix of matchers and takers. And then, at the very bottom were more givers. And he had to ask the question, what is it about some givers that they excel better than everyone else and others get taken advantage of?

And so, all those givers at the bottom were often giving at their own expense, right? They were doing other people’s jobs. They were being taken advantage of by the takers. They were basically being kind of a doormat. And there’s like, I don’t wanna say that that’s bad. It’s not, professionally, a great strategy, right? It’s not going to get you ahead necessarily in the workplace. The people who give too much and don’t leave any of it for themselves or for their own career, often, do end up at the bottom of the heat. That’s what the research said.

But then, there was this group of strategic givers, and they were thoughtful in how they give. And one of my favorite little bits in there was this idea of a five-minute favor. You could go up to a billionaire, and if you asked for the right thing, a five-minute favor, it was a “small act.” It was something they could do very quickly, they almost always would say yes, and they would even invent mechanisms for making it happen, right? 

I have known one very successful individual that just shows up at the same coffee shop in Florida near where he worked as the CEO of an incredibly large, famous institution. But he would just show up, and he would mentor people, but he would just be there for an hour. He made it kind of public when he would be there, and people would show up and they would get his time. He would give back. So, he made himself available, but he did it on his own terms. He didn’t go there every day. He didn’t follow their schedules. He just said, it’s kinda like office hours with your professor, “On these days, I’ll be there. And if you’d like to hear from me, show up.” Didn’t ask for them to buy ’em coffee or anything, but that was like an act of strategic giving. 

And I could give you example after example, after example of people who found a way to say yes to common requests, so that they could be the person who was giving back and helping others move forward, but they did it strategically. They did it where they could control their time and the amount of energy they had to give every individual ask ’cause the more successful you get, the more people who are going to ask. 

That book changed my mind. I just realized there is giving and there is strategic giving. I want to be a giver, but I also wanna be a smart giver. And I want to use it not to get ahead. I want to give for the sake of giving, but I don’t want my giving to actually be a detriment to my own success. So, with that in mind, all of this is about strategic giving in The ONE Thing framework. Let’s take a quick break, and then I’m gonna walk you through my five part framework on giving.

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All right. Welcome back, folks. Let’s go through my five part framework on giving. And I taught this for many, many years with Ben as I shared earlier. And so, we’ve added to it over the years. And so, maybe one of these stories is a little older ’cause we grabbed it early in the journey, and we could have done better, but it’s just still the framework. When I’m asked on the spot to teach, I know that I can go and walk you through these five steps. 

The big kind of idea here is just like in the book, we’re gonna think big. Ultimately, we wanna be strategic givers. We want to be successful and we want to be givers. We want to be net positive to this world we get to live in. So, we’re gonna think big, but we’re gonna go small, just like we wrote in the book. Wherever you are, you don’t have to be a giver everywhere. You can start right where you’re able to today and do the things that everyone is able to do. 

So, the first level of giving in this framework is to give you gratitude. It’s absolutely free. You can have an endless amount of gratitude, and it just tends to beget more gratitude. When you thank others, they tend to thank others. But there’s actual research around giving, right? I can’t afford yet to donate my time, I can’t afford yet to donate my money, whatever that is, you can thank the people who are. And so, some of the research that I’ve read, people who thanked people who were giving, the people who were donating, reported that the people who were thanked were twice as likely to donate in the future. 

And there was one, I think it was the University of Pennsylvania Foundation Study, they found that when they thank the people who were doing the fundraising, they did 50% more calls. So, the very act of gratitude is amplifying the giving that’s going on in the world, whether it’d be the people that you’re thinking because they made a donation, are twice as likely to donate or if you’re thanking the people who are going out and asking for the donations got them to call 50% more people. All of those are amplifiers. 

And I would just tell you the act of gratitude is a gift in itself. There’s a lot of research around keeping a gratitude journal. It’s something that I’ve done. It’s something that we did with our kids. Every day, when we would sit down at our meal, that was one of our rules as a family, we would have dinner at the table, as our kids were growing up, as a family, and we would start it off with one question, what’s one thing today that you are grateful for? And we would each say whatever it was that we are grateful for that day, and it’s a great insight. If you’ve got a four or a five-year-old boy, you get to find out exactly what toys they’re grateful for. As they get older, it might be the video game that they’re grateful for. 

We’re not trying to say, “Oh, you should be grateful for the food on your plate.” I just want them to express gratitude because people who do, people who write gratitude letters to other people, they have lower levels of depression, they have better energy and health. There’s so many benefits to this practice of gratitude. And most of all, it just helps lighten the world up a bit. If you realize that you have things to be grateful for, you’re less focused on the stuff that’s missing.And that in itself is a shift. It is a gift to ourselves, as well as a gift to whoever it is we’re thinking. 

So, first and foremost, everybody here, everybody listening, no matter how much money or how much time you have, you can be grateful. You can be grateful quietly with yourself. And because of that, maybe your viewpoint will be lighter. There’s always something to be grateful for. As one gentleman said, I said, “How are you doing today?” He goes, “It’s a great day. I’m on the right side of the ground.” And he was an old man, so he was joking about the fact, “I’m just happy to be alive today.” He found whatever the smallest thing is to be grateful, we have something to be grateful for. And what we focus on expands. What we give our attention to expands. So, let’s focus on the things that we can be grateful for and share it with as many people as possible. 

All right. Give your gratitude is level one. Level two, give your time. This is volunteering. And we talked about so much of the research around the health benefits of giving. It’s not about people who write checks, it’s about people who give their time. Why? It’s that whole, “What’s the point?” conversation. When you’re volunteering, you’re often on the front lines. You’re in the mix. You get to see the beneficiaries of the time that you’re donating. You get to be a part of the big outcome, the raising the money, hitting the goal, making sure that these many kids got present at the holiday time, or these many kids got a treatment that they really needed. Whatever that was, you got to be a part of it. And there are amazing benefits. 

That’s not why we’re doing it, but you need to realize, you’re gonna be strategic about it. It’s a really amazing life hack to take on the mentality of a giver. It can start with gratitude, but now we’re gonna give our time. And this was one of the first places that Wendy and I realized like, “Look, we don’t have a lot of money to give, but we can volunteer.” We can volunteer to help out different organizations. And so can you. Even if it’s just one day a year, maybe you take your kids and you work in a soup kitchen. I see a lot of people do that at holiday times. Maybe you gather food for the local food bank in your neighborhood. There are lots of little things that you can do that don’t demand a lot of your time or energy that actually can make a huge difference in the world.

You’re listening to this, you’re probably in business. You’re probably a high achiever. A lot of nonprofits, because they can’t pay a lot, struggle to attract the best levels of talent. So, having someone like you as a volunteer is a huge gift. Maybe you’re a real estate agent, and you really understand marketing and sales. Maybe you’re in marketing, and you can really help with their website. Maybe you’re an attorney. I mean, attorneys are really in demand. You can help them with all kinds of business decisions. An accountant, you can serve as their treasurer. There’s so many ways that you can give your time to any of these nonprofits, and you would be a massive asset to them.

Now, think about it. Just write it home in your office. You know, y’all could do a bake sale. You can set fundraising goals together. You can do like we did here a long time ago, and just say, “Hey, this time, when it comes around to Christmas or Hanukkah, or the holiday season, whatever that means for you, instead of giving gifts to each other, do y’all want to give back to our community? Do y’all wanna raise a little money for a good cause that matters to all of us?” And I’ve seen that play out through department after department in this organization over the years, whether it’d be helping a local dog shelter or funding anything else, like you name it, there’s too many options for me to even run through here, but you can choose and you can do it together as a team.

When you’re out there on the road, and you’re actually doing things, you can donate your services, your business. You can say, “Hey, I will donate a free consultation on a will,” if you’re an attorney, “in your next auction.” There are services that people pay you for today. I often would donate speeches. If people would make a donation to my charity, I would offer to speak for them for free. And this was when I was starting to command 10,000 and far more than that for a speech after a book became a bestseller. There were people in organizations that I wanted to support that could not afford my services, and I just made it a donation. It was an exchange of my time, so that they could donate what they could to an organization that mattered to both of us. 

So, you can donate your services, which is also your time. Offer it up as an auction prize. Maybe you make candles, right? And that’s your side gig. One of my neighbors does that. She has a little shop open at the local fair every weekend. She makes these beautiful candles. Like, donate some of those to a charity. So, you can auction these off. It’s not that they need the candles, but they can auction them off to raise money for the things they do need.

So, number one, you’re gonna give your gratitude. Number two, you can start donating your time and set goals around that every year. Let’s get to number three. This is where everybody thinks about, let’s talk about giving your money. What does that look like?

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Now, remember, when you talk about giving your money, it’s not the size of the check. It’s that you’re writing a check at all. Small donations add up. Almost 75% of all donations to charity across the country are actually small donations. So, those are the things that are actually the lifeblood of all the charities that you know about. Those little gifts, $10, maybe $50 add up to fund hospitals for children, you name it.

So, for Wendy and I, we knew that we had a very limited budget in the beginning. And we tried to start at home. So, what we started is we called it our Say Yes fund. I thought about all the times that my coworkers, because I worked in a giving organization, so lots of people were volunteering, and they were coming around, whether it’d be Girl Scout cookies or some other fundraiser for the community home or whatever that was, they would come by and they’d say, “Hey, would you make a donation?” And if you’ve ever been in an office environment like that, there are days where you got no money left in your wallet, and you’re like, “Should I just close my office and pretend to be on the phone? How do I get out of this trap?” And the reality is we ended up saying no, not just to that charity, but to also to our teammates.

So, my wife and I kicked it around, and we said, “Look, how many times do you think people come and ask you through the year?” And then, we both thought maybe 15 to 20 times. I said, “So, great. We will budget to be able to say yes every single time, but we’ll limit how much we can give. We’ll say up to $25, we will say yes. And we each get 20.” So, that was a thousand dollars for the year, which was a lot of money to us then. We weren’t sure that it would all happen or what if more people, they heard us saying yes, and more people came running?  What would show up? I think we ended up saying yes a little less than 40 times that year. We actually did some pretty good math. In both of our workplaces, we were getting about 20 requests. And then, we kind of rounded up those last few checks at the end of the year, so that we could hit our giving goal. And that was the beginning of us setting formal giving goals. 

And over the years, every year we would sit down, as our prosperity continued to grow, we would ask, “What do you want our Say Yes fund to be this year?” And it went from $25 to $50, to $100, to $150, to $120, to $250. We just kept raising it as our fortunes grew, so that when people came up, it not just became a yes, it might become a delightful yes. “What? Really?” And now, you’re that teammate. You’re building all of that social equity. It’s a really great feeling. 

So, that was the start for us. The next one was to make it automatic. So, if you’ve ever had a 401k that automatically got deducted from your paycheck, we’ve done it here in the office where you can select charities that can automatically be deducted. You can also, as a business owner, automate your giving. I knew one year, my wife’s team became the number one giver in our system for KW Cares, and they made the simple decision that on every real estate closing, they would give $50 to the charity. And so, as one of the top teams, those $50 added up over the course of the year to make her one of the top 10 givers.

I remember we got invited to this table, and everyone around us was like a regional owner owning these huge businesses, but we had just done a lot of little giving. Think about those small domino that build momentum that added up to a lot. And since then, I’ve heard of stories of teams that have set aside commission dollars from their real estate transactions, and they’ve helped people escape homelessness. They’ve added it up, and all they did was make it automatic. So, whether it’s on a paycheck, or a commission check, or made it a fraction of every purchase or every dollar, you see it sometimes in different businesses, “Today, all of our net proceeds will go to…” You just set it up. And then, everything that happens automatically goes to the charity that day, that week, or every time there’s a transaction or a paycheck. 

Automate it. How could you automate giving in a way, so that small things added up over time? So those little yeses, those little deductions from a commission check or from a paycheck don’t feel substantial at the time. But if you have 25 pay periods a year or 26, depending on how you get paid, you look up, those little donations added up to a lot, and you’re actually making a difference over the course of the year.

Leveling up a little bit. Now, you’ve got more money, you’re wanting to do more. You wanna raise more funds, match. If you were gonna write a check for a thousand dollars, and you’re at the local event, or the auction, or whatever, you can tell the host say, “Look, I would like you to let them know, you don’t have to say who I am, but we’ll match the next $2,000 at this stage.” And you’ve seen it if you’ve ever gone to a charity function, they’ll say, “Hey, we’ve got a donor. So, the next 10 people who donate a hundred dollars, effectively, your donation is doubled ’cause they’re gonna match it.” 

And so, what happens is with that matching, you’re giving the same amount you are going to give. You’re just doing it strategically, and you’re getting more people to feel better about the money they’re giving because they feel like they’re doubling the amount. 

It all shakes out the same way when we get our tax deductions, but it creates different energy around it. And kind of the big level up there is to become a sponsor. If you’ve got a business, you can actually sponsor a charity or sponsor an event. And Ben taught me this, to be the named sponsor at event, in a lot of small charities, the difference might be five to $10,000. But, now, also, every time they advertise it on the radio, when they advertise it in the newspaper, when they put out the flyers, they’re gonna say, “Brought to you by the Papasan Properties Group,” or the Ben Kinney team, whatever that was, you get to be the named sponsor for that event. That strategic giving is not why you’re doing it, but if you’re going to give that money away, why not make it a benefit to your business. 

So, you can automate your giving. If you’re going to be just writing a check, can you use it in a matching way to accelerate the giving of others? And if you own a business or a service, can you be a sponsor and use that to strategically promote your business while doing great work. 

So, we’ve covered giving you gratitude, we can give our time, we’re giving our money, and we’ve got the two surprise entries that a lot of people don’t think about. The fourth level is to give your leadership. I talked a little bit earlier about volunteering your time. You know, if you are an attorney, and you’re working in one of these small nonprofits, chances are, at some point, they’re gonna invite you to serve on the board ’cause they realize that you are a professional service and you bring certain skills to the table that if they have to pay for them, are very, very expensive. 

Attorneys aren’t cheap by the hour, neither are CPAs and a lot of professional services. If you are a business leader, don’t underestimate just because you’re not an attorney or a CPA or a technologist, that you don’t also have great value to these institutions. You know how to read a P&L. You know how to market and prospect. You know how to negotiate. You have all of these skills as a business owner or a leader. And I can tell you, a lot of these nonprofits, if you would kind of give your leadership, you would serve, you can make a huge impact because you can bring your best practices, your one thing knowledge to that organization and help make it a better organization. You can attract a higher quality of volunteers. You can get more out of the volunteers that are there because you are a leader. You are an achiever, and that’s what you do every day. Why not do it for a great cause?

You can also give by example, right? Are you role modeling giving to your employees just like you would want to role model giving to your family? My parents did. I don’t know if it was a conscious choice, but it stuck. And it eventually kind of bloomed in me later in life maybe than they hoped. But by the time I was in my thirties, we were committed givers and we were being very purposeful about it. But you can give by example. 

One of the ways that Wendy and I do it, when we go to our favorite charities, instead of just buying two tickets, if we can, then it’s a charity that we really want to support, a lot of times, we will buy a table. That means there’s two tickets for us and eight for the people we invite. We don’t just invite strategic partners, people that we want to be in business with. They’re not just prospects. Most of the time, we’re inviting a few friends. And a lot of times, our actual employees are the people that work with us. What we want is for them to experience giving, to be at a table when the paddles are going up and money is being raised. They get to have a great meal. They get to dress up and have a fun night out. And they are seeing that, “Wow! This giving thing, it can be actually fun. Maybe I’ll win something cool while I’m at it, right?” 

So, you can give by example, whether by setting it up in your office, inviting people to give with you, saying you could do a matching fund with your employees. “Hey, I’m really trying to raise a lot of money for this dog shelter, and I will do this. If y’all can raise X dollars, I will match that,” and see where it goes. Lead by example. Give your influence. 

Now, this is one that’s a little bit trickier, but when you’re giving your leadership, you’ve developed a certain amount of success. People recognize you for being great at the one thing that you do so well. Maybe you run a business, maybe you’re number one at something, maybe you’re an amazing athlete. Your influence, the people who look to you, maybe follow you on social media, can be turned and directed on behalf of a charity.

Matt Inman is a guy who runs an online comic called The Oatmeal. And maybe you don’t like it. I love it. It’s a little dark, it’s a little weird, but he’s out there. But I love his comic, and I’ve loved it for many, many years. And over the years as I followed Matt Inman, I’ve seen him raise money again and again for the charities that mattered to him. He did a cartoon and raised $230,000 for the World Wildlife Fund. He did it again for the American Counselor Society. One year, he was helping raise funds for a Tesla Museum, and he’d done a lot of different cartoons around Tesla. This is Nikola Tesla. He raised $1.3 million. So, he used his influence out in the world to absolutely raise money for this charity.

So, where’s your influence? You might be going, “Well, I’m not a famous cartoonist. I’m not an athlete,” but I bet you got an email list. I bet you got a lot of people in your phone.You’ve got people that, like my dad, if you knocked on their door and you said, “Hey, this year I’m raising money for ____. I’d like to ask you to help me out,” I think a lot of people, because you have influence, you’ve built a reputation, you’ve built, relationships will want to help you, and then therefore help that cause. 

So, that’s number four. You can give your leadership, which is really serving or giving your influence to these charities, so that they can raise more money. The last step. Step number five is to give your wealth. This is a little bit like giving your money, but this is the one where we just read about it. You can set up your will or your estate plan, so that when you die, on average I’ve read, I think it was Bill Perkins book, Die With Zero, most people inherit money from their parents at age 65, when they really don’t need the money. They needed it when they were gonna buy their first house. They needed it when they had a hospital bill. They needed it when they were trying to pay down their college, right? But a lot of times, we get it very late in life. 

So, instead of just giving that money or leaving it to your children late in life, you could set it aside for a charity, or you could go out and you could start your own foundation or your 501c3. I always get it backwards. I’ve got it like a mild form of dyslexia whenever numbers show up and I transpose them, but you know what I mean. A nonprofit, you could start your own. And not only would you be donating to it, you can be raising money for it.

The most famous example I can think of is, of course, Mr. Bill Gates, who not only gave his great wealth to his foundation but got people like Warren Buffett to commit to giving theirs as well. And here’s an institution that’s going around the world in eradicating diseases and making great change. So, they’ve set up something, so that all of their hard work, all of the things they did so well, they did their one thing so well, they’re not just giving thousands of dollars, they’re giving millions and sometimes billions of dollars to make the world a better place. That’s what we mean by “give your wealth.” You can set up one of these institutions. 

Now, I know Mark Zuckerberg did this, but the most famous example is actually Paul Newman, the late Paul Newman. He started Newman’s Own. You’ve probably had the salad dressing more than once in your life. It’s actually really good salad dressing. Guess what? It was built to be a for-profit enterprise where all of the net profits were given away. So, they designed this thing to run with all of the efficiency of a business but to create all of the good of a nonprofit. I thought that was a very interesting twist on things, but it’s something to think about.

So, if you’re farther along this journey, have you thought about what happens to all the assets that you’ve accrued? What happens when you’re gone? Maybe even before you’re gone? You could give it away. So, if you’ve ever heard about Chuck Feeney, he was the founder of Duty Free. He went on to become a billionaire because he had this brilliant idea to sell stuff in an airport tax free, right? Duty Free. He became a billionaire. He very quietly moved the vast majority, I think all but a tiny percentage of his company into his charity. And I’m gonna look it up. It was called Atlantic Philanthropies. And his goal was to give away a hundred percent of his money by the year of 2016. He did, he shut down, he lived in a few apartments he had purchased around the world that are all very humble places and had a modest salary from the foundation, but he gave it all away. 

More recently, if you’ve ever had a 5-Hour Energy Drink, that founder also, I think he wrote a book called The Billionaire Monk, he also set it up to give away all of his fortune very early in the journey. So, you look up, I find this inspiring, there is something that you’re building out there, whether it’d be a business or an institution or whatever, what’s going to happen after you’re gone? Have you thought about it? It could happen before you’re gone, and you get to get the helpers high. 

So, that is my five part framework starting really, you can think big, but we gotta go small in the beginning. We give our gratitude. Then, we give our time. Then, we can give our money. Then, we can give our leadership. And finally, at the end of it all, we can give our wealth.

And I’m sure smart people who are listening will point out something that I’ve missed. But that’s my simple five part framework that everybody can start somewhere on the journey and go out there, make this world a little bit brighter and a little bit better by giving back. 

And I can tell you, it’s the ultimate life hack. It will make you happier. It will make you feel more energetic. It will increase your self-worth as you go. It’s not about demonstrative giving, it’s just the act of giving in itself can be healing, and you will feel better for it. 

So, I encourage you to pick a spot on this journey where you can start. In fact, that is our weekly challenge. Not knowing who’s listening to this, I’m just gonna give you all the same challenge. My challenge is that you will give gratitude for the next week. So, however many days, seven days, maybe ’cause you are listening the day this podcast drops, for the next seven days, I just want you to be purposefully thankful to someone that you randomly meet every day. Maybe you can just really thank the person who served you, that barista at the coffee shop. Maybe you can just hop on your phone and just say, “Hey, buddy, I was thinking about you. That thing you did the other week, I’m not sure I said it, but I really appreciated it.” If you want to go all the way, my mom loves this, write a handwritten note, but put a little gratitude out in the world, one per day for the next seven days, and see how that small start will make you feel and see if you can’t build a little bit of momentum.

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This podcast is for general informational purposes only. The views, thoughts and opinions of the guests represent those of the guests and not ProduKtive or Keller Williams Realty LLC and their affiliates and should not be construed as financial, economic, legal, tax or other advice. This podcast is provided without any warranty or guarantee of its accuracy, completeness, timeliness or results from using the information.