When you ride up to the location, you are greeted by a family who runs a small farm on the village.  Upon arrival, they immediately started to offer their homemade Roselle juice, but we declined and entered the “split.”

This split is not the Grand Canyon but is still quite fascinating.  You can walk through and be amazed at how our seemingly stable land can split open it two.

Walking through the whole thing takes about 10 minutes.  When you exit, you are again greeted by the lovely family and with a sign offering the chance to give a donation.

Walking out, I offered a donation of 100 Baht (which is a little less than $3 USD) and walked away.  We were planning on heading out so I gave the donation and walked away.

Immediately, the owner runs over and insists that we sit.  He immediately brings over two drinks of Roselle (which taste slight less bitter than Cranberry juice).  We were pretty flattered, but he was not done.

More food came, including fresh sweet potato, banans, nuts, homemade jelly, plantain chips and nuts.  Wow!

While eating I noticed this book sitting next to us and I couldn’t agree more with its takeaway.  While a cynic could easily read this as asking for more money, it was obvious that this family just wanted to share what they had and create a deep bond (and memories) with the people that they served.

Having received this incredible gift and seeing this notebook, I asked myself “what more can I give?” and decided to leave an additional gift for him and his family. As we were walking away, I put a larger gift in the donation box and went to board the motorbike.  This wasn’t a life-changing gift for either  of us, but it was something I was drawn to do.

As we were about to ride away, he comes over again with more gifts!  This time he had two bags of stuff for us to take away.  In one bad was a can of homemade jelly, some plantain chips, and some nuts.  In another, a massive fresh Papaya.  Wow.

As I’ve embraced experiments in giving over the last year, I have continued to be blow away with the kindness and generosity of strangers.  In sharing this, I hope more people find out about this incredible man and his family who now have a place people come to because of a minor earthquake in 2008.

Isn’t life grand?

The post Receiving Incredible Gifts in Pai, Thailand at “The Split” appeared first on Boundless by Paul Millerd.

My MBA education and experience at consulting firms didn’t teach me anything about generosity. There is no space for kindness or connection on an income statement. Yet everything I’ve learned over the last year has convinced me that an embrace of the gift economy is an embrace of the future and a better way of “doing business”

Have I figured out how to fully support myself in the gift economy context yet?  No, but embracing a mindset of “living in the gift” has forced me to grapple with complex and confusing emotions, re-design my life, and question my relationship with money while opening me up to deeper connections with both friends and new connections.

Five lessons from embracing the gift:

1. Awkward Starts & $100 Bills

After decided I would embrace the gift in my work, I reached out to Andrew Taggart, a writer I admired and someone who had fully embraced the gift in his own life. His wisdom helped me frame my approach and I decided to publicly share the thinking behind my decision and develop guiding principles and questions for people to think about. I came up with five guiding questions to help people think about engaging with me:

1. Means: What are you reasonably able to contribute? (can be money, but if you have a vacation spot on a beach, I’m all ears)

2. Sustainability: What will help me continue to do this work?

3. Value: How much value does what I create help you?

4. Feeling: What feels right?

5. Community: How will my contributions encourage a deeper connection between people and doing work that matters?

I quickly realized that these questions put a lot of pressure on my conversations partners to make a guess at what gift they might offer (at all). While I had done the work of making sense of the gift economy, I was asking a lot of people who were being exposed to it in the first conversation with me.

It was especially awkward when in a coaching session with someone I was explaining that this conversation was a “gift” and that if he wanted to work further we would have the money conversation next time.

Even though I had e-mailed him my approach to the gift economy and shared that this first conversation was a “gift” it was likely too much to ask. At the end of our conversation, he asked, “how much do I owe you?” I said “nothing.” He then opened his wallet, pulled out $100 bill and handed it to me.

I graciously accepted, but never saw him again. Some people still need a price. Embracing the gift means moving away from some people who need a price, but it also means opening the door to people that want to work with others in new ways.

2. Patreon: Gratitude For Small Gifts

Along with every other podcaster on the face of the earth, I have embraced Patreon as a way to enable people to offer small but consistent gifts.

Every time I get an e-mail that says “New $x Patreon, XXXXX” I am immediately overcome with an overwhelming feeling of gratitude. While giving up $3 is not life-changing for me nor the giver, the show of support and the underlying belief in what I am doing is worth 100 times more than the gift itself.

One day an e-mail appeared saying “New $9.99 Patron, Greg.”

“Holy crap!” I was floored.

I didn’t know immediately know the person who had offered such a generous gift. After exchanging a couple of e-mails and talking on video later in the week, I realized we had a brief conversation the year before and I had shared some thoughts on his career transition.

He shared that he had been following my writing and felt compelled to support my journey. This is Patreon at its best, giving someone who is inspired by an opportunity to instantly connect with that person. As a creator, the thing that keeps me going is all the people who keep reaching out to support me. Seth Godin says that the job of the creator is to find the people that want to go on a journey with them. Patreon lets people “opt-in” to that journey in a powerful way.

I’m also a supporter of several creators on Patreon for amounts ranging from $1 to $5 a month. While I’d love to say that this is a no-brainer for me, I have been surprised by how much resistance I felt when about to click the submit button on my pledges. While I have worked through a lot of money issues, I still have not fully escaped the discomfort when giving money way. The mindset I of “you need to get something” for your money is hard to escape.  Yet being on the other side of this relationship, I know that my small gift can have a huge impact on that other person and their confidence to keep going.

I’m still a bit hesitant to think about platforms like Patreon in the context of the gift economy as their entire economic model is built on building a massive platform and extracting wealth from that power. But for now it is an easy and increasingly understood way of offering small gifts to creators.

3. Bringing Gift To Corporate

Last year the talent platform Catalant approached me about writing a report on the future of work. They offered me $500 up front for the work and I accepted but countered with doing the project on a gift basis.

While part of me wanted to truly embrace the gift, I would be lying if I said there wasn’t a small amount of resentment and greed that I felt from a rapidly growing and well-funded startup only offering me $500 for the project.

I acknowledge the feeling and moved forward. I ended up sinking 30+ hours into the project and was able to collaborate with them on a report I was proud of. During the whole process, we never had a further discussion of money and I fully released myself from the outcome.

As I was wrapping up the project, they offered an incredible gift of their own. They offered to pay for a two day trip to Dallas to participate in a conference they were hosting on the future of work. During the conference, I was able to learn from other participants and build connections with several people who share similar passions.

A couple weeks after returning from the conference, my project sponsor said that the payment had been finalized. They decided to pay me $1,000 for the project.

While I felt gratitude, I also acknowledged a feeling of greed that still lingered. I realized that I would have been disappointed if I had only received $500 for the project. In the same vein, I also realized that I had a lot of pride in my work and felt that I “deserved” the $1000 payment.

This feeling is also hard to escape.  This is the inverse of the earlier feeling where I felt I had to get my money’s worth.  In this case, I felt that they got more than their money’s worth and I should be rewarded.  I am actively trying to distance myself from this feeling and to truly get lost in the work for its own sake of being great.

4. Course: Gift + Price Models

This past summer, I facilitated a digital course experience called “Solopreneur Shift” where I offered it as a gift. However, since I was hesitant to have people sign up for a course for free and not having them follow through, I set a “minimum fee” of $100 and offered multiple tuition options, including the option of offering a gift after the course.

Of the ten people that signed up, nine opted for the gift option and one committed to the medium scholarship. After the course was completed, two people offered additional gifts. I made it easy for them to do this via a google form after the course and provided links so that they could offer the gift.

I realized from my earlier interactions that having conversations about the gift economy can be uncomfortable, but when you are able to offer people options, especially in a digital form, it makes it a lot easier for people to embrace the gift economy.

This hybrid form of a low fixed price plus a gift option seems like a great model to help people learn about the gift economy on their terms.

5. Random gifts — giving $100 to a stranger

People don’t like being given money. In my first essay on my explorations of the gift economy, I left a form at the bottom asking people to submit their name so I could send them a $25 gift. Hundreds of people read the post, but no one submitted anything.

Technology makes it easier to give monetary gifts directly. I had one friend start telling me about a book he was writing when I stopped him, asked him what it will cost and after he said $10, I sent him $50 on Venmo. I told him I wanted to buy the first five copies.

This past summer, I met up with a vagabonder traveling through Boston via Couchsurfing who was embracing the gift mindset. This was partly by necessity — she had no money. Yet when we talked, we didn’t talk about her lack of money. She shared that it had been relatively easy to find housing and food if you were willing to ask and she wasn’t opposed to sleeping outside. Yet our conversation didn’t focus on her challenging circumstances. The entire time she talked about projects she was excited by and things she wanted to do with her life. What she was lacking was the stability to get started. I asked her if she had heard about WorkAway, a community of people that host people for free for an exchange of a small amount of work. She hadn’t but was intrigued.

As we were about to part ways I asked her if she had a venmo or PayPal account and if she would be open to accepting a gift to help her pay for a WorkAway membership as well as whatever else she needed. I decided to send her $100. While I still experienced the discomfort of giving money away (I’m working on it!) I have no regrets. A few days later she messaged that she had found a place to live for a while through the network. I hope she gets a chance to start putting those ideas into the world.

What makes this story almost inexplicable is what happened within the next week. Randomly I received an e-mail from PayPal that a friend had sent me a gift of exactly $100. It was the largest unsolicited gift I had ever received and the first ever from this friend who I had been in touch with for several years. There was no reason other than being inspired by my work and a desire to support other creators.

In Charles Eisenstein’s recent course on “Living In The Gift,” he shared that a true embrace of the gift economy means having no expectation of a return on that gift. Yet, we often will receive gifts. As Eisenstein says “you don’t know when and what you will receive.”

Embracing the gift is about letting go and seeing what the world offers back. Releasing myself to that has opened me up to unexpected kindness and generosity of people

A Final Reflection: $20 For Noodles

Over the past year, incredible people have appeared in my life. I’m not sure if its related to my embrace of the gift or not, but I do my personal commitment to this journey has shifted my behavior to default to kindness and generosity when I might have been skeptical or guarded in the past. I continually ask myself “what more can I do for others?” instead of focusing on what I am lacking or needing.

Over the past year, I’ve had friends and connections randomly send me venmo gifts, support me on Patreon, treat me to dinners, let me borrow their cars and stay at their homes. I feel like the luckiest person in the world.

This past summer I also had the opportunity to gift some coaching time to an incredible man in Boston who has overcome a tough battle with addiction and is doing incredible things to help others now in that same predicament. After working out some of the awkwardness with the gift economy I faced when I first tested it with people, I had both a client and (now) friend who was fully on board. It worked well for him too since he didn’t have the best financial stability at the time.

Over the past few weeks, we have had a number of digital interactions and he keeps sending me small monetary gifts for “noodles” and other street food in Taipei. I keep telling him he doesn’t need to send me anything, but that I graciously accept.

In the past year, I’ve been gifted about $2,500 for courses, coaching, consulting, Patreon pledges and other sources (I share my full finances here).  While this clearly cannot support me yet (I still mostly am supporting myself on fixed-fee consulting arrangements), I’m willing to release myself to the uncertainty to see what happens.

In reality, the value of the gifts I have received is impossible to add up.  That’s because it isn’t about the gift at all.  The gift economy offers a way to do business with people in a way that is rooted in deeper connections.  Connections built on generosity, love, passion, and compassion.  If getting random “gifts” like a $25 venmo haiku isn’t a million times better than setting a price and extracting as much wealth as possible from the economy, I’m not sure what is.

41k+ Sold! (Top 1% Book) The Pathless Path is Paul's book about walking away from a "perfect" job with a promising future and starting over again. Through painstaking experiments, living in different countries, and a deep dive into the history of our work beliefs, Paul pieces together a set of ideas and principles that guide him from unfulfilled and burned out to what he calls "the pathless path" - a new story for thinking about work in our lives. Learn More & Buy The Book Here

The post Experiments In The Gift Economy appeared first on Boundless by Paul Millerd.

This question might be one of the most common questions we ask yet it makes increasingly less sense for the world we are moving towards — a work in which we will depend on people who can create, imagine, connect and love.

I made the leap to self employment because of a burning desire to be more creative and spend more time doing the work that matters to me. In a world where price and value and salary seem to be the markers of one’s value, people have challenged me at every step of the journey.

Yet as I have continued to share and create for the sake of creation, I have discovered a hidden side of life. A side where generosity, connection and love are central. I experienced this most recently when I had a conversation with someone in India who had taken my strategy consulting skills course at a discounted gift price. He had completed the course and set up a call to thank me. He told me it was the first thing that really helped him think about how to approach his job search and his work.

That conversation was priceless. I received his appreciation and felt loved.

It was not something I could have written ten years ago as an analytical, “facts-first” person focused on optimizing my career path and trying to break into an industry with high salaries and good “exit options.”

After leaving the corporate world three years ago, I now realize that with work, people are searching for two things.

They want the opportunity to love others and be loved.

However, we’ve abstracted so many aspects of work from this truth and have transformed so many aspects of work into formal processes and procedures that the basic acts like connecting with others, showing genuine appreciation and love and being able to take risks and create have become impossible.

That conversation was worth more than any of the work I did in my entire corporate career, yet it is nearly impossible to convince anyone who has operated with the truth that their income is their value in the world.

For more than five years, I’ve been crazy enough to share my writing and creations, working through the inevitable embarrassment that many feel when they put their ideas in public. Yet, through this and my embrace of a gift mindset, I’ve experienced things I could not have imagined, formed incredible friendships with open-hearted people and have accidentally built a life that is filled with love and connection.

None of this has been easy. It is one thing to intellectually embrace the idea of a “gift economy” and it is another to awkwardly tell a client or conversation partner that you don’t have a price and that you’d prefer to go through an exercise to explore their open-heartedness and generosity.

This essay was originally a way for me to make sense of what it might look like if I embraced the gift economy in my work in 2018. Since then I’ve engaged in many experiments and learned a lot more. Yet this is perhaps the best guide I can offer if you are starting to think about shifting to a new way of being in your work and life.

The current system doesn’t care about your gifts

As Godin argues in Linchpin, “The educated, hardworking masses are still doing what they are told, but they’re no longer getting what they deserve”

For decades, we have had a virtuous cycle of a growing economy, generous organizations that took care of people with fair wages, health care and pensions and people who were ready, willing and able to sign up for that offer.

People compromised being creative and doing what matters to them because they were being taken care of AND everyone else was doing it. Now we are in those same organizations wasting our gifts and genius without any of the payoff.

Yet, the world is craving our gifts. Individuals who embrace their gifts and unleash them into their organizations and into world without fear of looking silly will thrive. Seth Godin, The Oracle of Hudson Valley, nails it when he says that the the only choice for people is to “win by being faster, more remarkable and more human.”

There is a reason we pay attention every time Elon Musk launches a new venture. He is an original thinker, refuses to follow the script, and is willing to go broke chasing his dreams.

He is an artist boldly sharing his genius.

We are all geniuses and we are all artists

Seth Godin believes that we are all geniuses. In his book Linchpin, he challenges readers:

Have you ever found a shortcut that others couldn’t find?

Solved a problem that confounded your family?

Seen a way to make something work that wasn’t working before?

Made a personal connection with someone who was out of reach to everyone else?

Even once?

With this line of thinking, it becomes clear that we all have unique “gifts” to offer the world. Godin also pushes people to think of themselves as artists. Whether it be creating remarkable PowerPoint presentations like Carmen Simon or creating a fascinating Podcast like S-Town or reinventing the organization like basecamp or automattic or creating a remarkable customer experience at Zappos.com — it is only the artists and the organizations who embraces artists who will thrive.

The internet has lowered the “marginal cost of generosity”

Thirty years ago, gatekeepers controlled the world. If you wanted to publish a book you needed a connection.

The internet has eliminated many gatekeepers and lowered the marginal costs of everything to zero. Every day, people make edits to wikipedia, share code on github and offer advice on Medium and other platforms — for free.

As Godin says, the internet has “lowered the marginal cost of generosity”

Many people ask me “how will you monetize?” or “how do you plan on building a business?”

We are missing the point. The internet means that I can connect with hundreds of people a year from anywhere in the world who I am excited to talk to and help.

I create the work that I am most inspired to create. I do it for the reward from helping people and from the satisfaction of creating work I am proud of.

As Godin says, 

You cannot create a piece of art merely for money. Doing it as part of commerce denudes art of wonder that it ceases to be art

But we still need to get paid right?

A gift economy is not about the money, it is about unlocking generosity & gratitude

Charles Eisenstein wrote the book Sacred Economics (gift version) to imagine how we can build a better world by embracing a “gift economy.” His agrees with Seth Godin and believes that you are “here to give and that you have a unique gift to give.”

A gift economy is not radical. It is is already quite familiar to anyone who has operated within a large family, has bought a friend a drink, has offered help when someone needed it or offered our time to someone with no expectation of return.

Within the construct of “work,” however, we abandon this community or friendship mindset in lieu of contracts, transactions and salaries.

Charles Eisenstein shares his perspective in a talk from 2015:

One thing that gifts do is that they create ties among people — which is different from a financial transaction. If I buy something from you, I give you the money and you give me the thing, and we have no more relationship after that. I don’t owe you anything, you don’t owe me anything. The transaction is finished. But if you give me something, that’s different because now I kind of feel like I owe you one. It could be a feeling of obligation, or you could say it’s a feeling of gratitude.

In 2018, I launched a Patreon account so people could support my work for as little as $1 a month. When a good friend became the first person to support me, I was overwhelmed by gratitude. We already had a great relationship, but the idea that this person wanted to support me in a deeper way was powerful. It focused my attention on how I could help him too.

Being Open To Receiving Gift Is Not Always Easy

We don’t want to receive gifts because we don’t want to be obligated to anyone. We don’t want to owe anybody anything. We don’t want to depend on anyone’s gifts or charity — “I can pay for it myself, thank you. I don’t need you

Sacred Economics

Often when someone offers you a gift, your first instinct is to reject the gift. It immediately raises the stakes for the relationship.

I don’t want to owe them anything.

Yet with our close connections and family, we often only operate within the framework of the gift. When is the last time you paid your mother for a home cooked meal?

In a gift economy you cannot get “screwed” — instead it shifts the frame to a world where where people can support each other and embrace generosity as the default state. As Eisenstein notes:

It’s the generous person who is the wealthiest in those societies (gift economies)

Despite this passing the common sense test, , we operate in a world where we are always on the defensive:

In our society we are accustomed to constantly being targeted for the sale. In the world of marketing, we are consumers to be fleeced, objects to be manipulated. Of course then, we unapologetically seek the best deal whenever we can.

Eisenstein’s was discouraged at his first attempts to implement this approach in his own work:

With all this in mind, I set a tuition price point in alignment with the resources committed and the quality of the course — $320. Then I offered a range of scholarship options for people to self-select: half scholarship, three-quarters scholarship, 90% scholarship, and full scholarship. I asked them to choose the level that establishes a commitment and that also respects their financial situation.

The results were quite the opposite of what I expected. Dear reader, maybe you are more cynical than I am, but I was surprised that among the first 150 or so registrants, half chose the full scholarship, and the majority of the rest chose 90% scholarship. The next largest contingent was the three-quarters scholarship, and only a handful paid full price.

To expect everyone to embrace generosity would be foolhardy. We have not created the conditions where that is the accepted behavior. However, we can focus our energy towards the people that are more generous and continue to devote more kindness and energy towards those people.

If people want to nickel and dime you, they are not the type of people you want to work with anyway.

Practical tips for embracing the “gift economy”

I first discovered the term “gift economy” after listening to the interview of “practical philosopher” Andrew Taggart on the Rad Awakenings podcast.

I spoke with Andrew recently about how his use of the gift economy has evolved in his practice. His framing of it seemed to explain some of this discomfort I was facing. The gift economy was about shifting focus to the person and away from the transaction. The goal is to support someone else’s life and their ability to meet their basic material needs.

What I appreciate about Andrew’s approach is that within one thought he can move between Aristotle’s contemplation of the good life, to downfalls of our current economic approach to a practical application of how to bridge that divide. It would be easy to cling to idealism, but Andrew focuses on reasonable approaches given our current world.

How to apply the gift economy to our relationships

We cannot apply the gift economy to everyone equally. This framework does not apply to everyone equally. In our lives, we often have different levels of relationships with different people. In “How An Artist Can Hack a Living” Andrew offers three types of relationships.

1. Tribe,kith and kin — share openly with each to strengthen community

2. With strangers (and I would add, organizations), you enter into exchanges out of a sense of fairness in a way that strengthens social trust

3. With ones friends or other strong connections, you offer what you can based on what you have — this creates hospitality

The first group can be your immediate family and friends and people that are driven by similar passions. Gifting comes naturally within this group.

The second groups is people you would otherwise “do business” with — these could be clients, individuals or organizations that you work with. This group is the key to building a sustainable life and creating the virtuous cycle of people that support you and are generous.

The third group is a larger collection of friends, acquaintances and “digital friendships” that may be aware of your work, may enjoy your work or just enjoy you as a person. This is the largest potential for shifting more attention to the gift economy and away from the mindset of “what is the least I can pay” towards a mindset of “how do I support more people doing great work.”

How to have the “money” conversation in the gift economy

After establishing an initial relationship with his “conversation partners” and sharing his overall gift economy approach, he then gets to the point (typically a 2nd or 3rd conversation) where he has a more explicit and in depth discussion about money and what might make sense to offer through three questions:

1st Question: What can you offer to meet my needs?

“How much during a certain period of time would you be able to offer to help meet some of my material needs?

This may raise a number of questions.

First, you are wondering, what does he mean by material needs? Andrew defines it by starting with the six ways to die, outlined by Vinay Gupta and working backwards to what helps you avoid those:

1. too hot (cooling and shelter)

2. too cold (heating and shelter)

3. thirst (water)

4. hunger (see food)

5. illness (public health and medicine)

6. injury (medical treatment)

He also often gets the question, “does this mean just your material needs, such as water, food and nothing else?” He shares that he does save for the future, but gifts help him support his desire to “ live simply and in accordance with philosophical life.”

I am struck by how different this frame is compared to a contract. Contracts have a short section outlining the work, relationship and deliverables and then devote a large amount of legal nonsense outlining what happens when one person doesn’t follow through.

Instead, this approach, as Andrew says, shifts the focus to the “social relation holding us together.”

2nd Question: Will this prevent you from caring for yourself?

If you were to offer X, would doing so make it impossible for making you care for yourself or those dependent on you?

When the person responds with a number “X,” he does not immediately move forward. He tests the answer. He tells the person that they will go through a “meditation of a sort” to test the numbers:

I tell them that we’ll be going up until we reach some pain point, which would be an intuitive way of registering over-generosity. I mark that pain point: call it B. Then I slowly count down to a point at which they feel another kind of pain, which in this case signals under-generosity. Now we have a range (A-B) with X being somewhere between A and B.

Then Andrew goes back to question number one and asks the same question:

“How much during a certain period of time would you be able to offer to help meet some of my material needs?

The answer can be the same number X again, or it can be slightly different — lets call it Y. He then asks which number sits better with them, X or Y.

If the person chooses X again, he confirms,

So, are you willing to say, then, that X is neither too much to give in light of your current material circumstances nor too little to give in light of your current material circumstances but more or less just enough?

If they are comfortable with the amount, they move on to the third question. If no, they start back at the first question with a clean slate.

This may sound laborious and stressful but Andrew feels that “it’s very important to test the answer to ensure that it’s the best one” to avoid resentment. He also acknowledges this process is not easy and that “finesse, compassion, and patience” are vital to the process.

3rd Question: Wholeheartedness

If you were to offer X within this period, could you do this wholeheartedly?

If the answer is no, you would again go back to question one and start the inquiry again. If the person says yes, then Andrew responds that he accepts this wholeheartedly.

Is this number fixed in stone? Again, here is Andrew:

…the amount of the offering may change over time and with reason. At certain times and due to changing circumstances, it may make sense for you to offer more, less, or something else. We’d want to inquire about your reasons for wishing to explore this change. And yet what needs to be underscored from the outset is that the more your life comes to order, the easier it will be for you to give freely.

Andrew has found that this approach, while seeming awkward at first, actually “irons out a lot of difficulties with money.

While he is motivated by leading an ascetic life, he has been surprised by increase in the gifts he has received over the years.

Beyond Pride: Not Being Attached To What We Create Or Expecting an Outcome

As I tried to make sense of all of this, I used the word “for” as in: “here is a gift for what you did for me.”

Andrew calls this an illegitimate move. The goal in the gift economy approach is to support each other’s attempts to meet their basic needs. This means disconnecting activity X you may do for someone from the gift of supporting one’s life, Y.

When we create something remarkable or do great work, we are wired to think we should be paid for this.

In order for a gift economy to work, we cannot just apply the thinking of our existing economy. We need to pursue the work we are most passionate about and aim to create things that are remarkable — and once we create those things are created, continue doing the work that matters to us…

If we instead attach pride to our work, we will become obsessed with thinking we need to be paid for everything we create.

The reality is that some of what you create may inspire others, but many things may not. We need to continue to experiment, create and as Andrew says, “hack a living as an artist.”

It may not be easy and it may not make sense. There may not be a “business plan” and the model may not meet your basic needs at first, but judging by the increasing number of people embracing this approach, the benefits in connection, energy and the belief in other people seem to be more appealing than the old model.

The gift economy can be a spark to help unleash the huge potential in our world

In How an Artist Can Hack a Living, Andrew states:

the modern institutions, built in part, to financially support and encourage the creative life are in decline.

Yet, we operate in a world in which parents tell people to do what they love and where the advice we scream on Medium is “pursue your passion!”

This disconnect shows itself as the increasing anxiety and disengagement in our organizations.

To me this is good news.

This means there is enormous amounts of human potential and creativity waiting to be unleashed into the world.

But we need to bridge the gap to a better working world where people who wants to be an artist, a creator and do things that matter can pursue that path in a more sustainable way.

I do not present the “gift economy” as an absolute solution. I offer it, instead, as something that can be embraced more widely in our current system to help us operate in a more humane way.

As our economy increasingly pivots to one that not only enables, but requires remarkable experiences and connection, we need new models and mindsets to appreciate and encourage these behaviors. I hope that a broader embrace of the gift mindset can be one of these models.

Seth Godin is one of the best examples and champions of the gift economy. He sees incredible potential to not only unlock our creative spirits through a gift economy, but to bind us at a deeper level to each other:

The magic of the gift system is that the gift is voluntary, not part of a contract. The gift binds the recipient to the giver, and both of them to the community. A contract isolates individuals, with money as the connector. The gift binds them instead.

41k+ Sold! (Top 1% Book) The Pathless Path is Paul's book about walking away from a "perfect" job with a promising future and starting over again. Through painstaking experiments, living in different countries, and a deep dive into the history of our work beliefs, Paul pieces together a set of ideas and principles that guide him from unfulfilled and burned out to what he calls "the pathless path" - a new story for thinking about work in our lives. Learn More & Buy The Book Here

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