A Giving Spirit

Isaiah O’Connor

Today I am going to start with a question. Who do you think is the most successful type of person in general. The hard driver who does not care who they step on, or the nice guy?

Well, a professor named Adam Grant did a study on this very topic. You can find an article about it here.  In his study, he actually found that in a sense nice guys do finish last, but the hard-driving one does not win either. He found there were three types of people, Operators the aggressive selfish types, Matchers, The general public who do things for others but keep score “I scratch your back you scratch mine” type, and Givers.

The givers populated two sections. The top and the bottom. He goes into details on this in the article but in a nutshell, the givers that are also assertive enough not to be doormats are the most successful people, and the nice guys who give but let people walk all over them are at the bottom.  

This is also a theme I have noticed in several books on business I have read. The idea of a person being a nice giving guy but yet still strong and assertive pops up in unexpected places. This includes an audio course of business skills I took online. I have found that if there is a principle that multiple unrelated sources mention, it is most likely true.

Giving people tend to take care of others needs. They tend to be more agreeable to work with and in my personal experience more trustworthy.  Givers tend to attract people to them as well, and that includes customers. Their employees tend to be happier as well, which translates again to happy customers.

Some of the most successful people in my industry are givers. Even if they are busy within there own companies, doing Balloons Everyday, or setting up and maintaining an Australia wide balloon network, they take the time to help out up and comers struggling to make it. I owe a lot to these guys.

The thing to remember is this. It is okay to be generous as well as dangerous. For me, I have had to learn to be assertive. I have often been a doormat and let others walk all over me in an attempt to be nice. Learning to be dangerous as well as kind and generous has been a long journey for me.

So the take away is this, in order to be successful you need to have a giving spirit, and yet still remain strong and purposeful. This will help you push through the bottlenecks that we may face at times. That brings me to the subject of my next post and that is bottlenecks.

Your Friendly Neighborhood Entrepreneur,
Isaiah O’Connor.

For my Podcast on the subject, please click here.
To read my blog about being dangerous, click here.

For more content, you can check out my Bootstrap Podcast Or Jason’s podcast. Or if you need more help you can reach out to me at Isaiah@ballongeventbyraa.com And finally If you like my content, please consider supporting me on Patreon