The Balance of Giving: 4 Ways to Transform Your Kryptonite into a Superpower

Welcome to buildbetter, your weekly guide to understanding and building meaningful relationships in all aspects of your life.

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Read time: 4 minutes

Today at a glance:

• Topic: Finding the right balance in giving

• Tactic: Four ways to become an otherish giver

• Recommendation: Gratitude Plus App

• Devin's Finds: 📰, 📰, 🎞

• Commitments: 🤝

If you missed last week's buildbetter, we talked about how to become a better giver. There are three types of givers:

• Selfish: Givers with high self-interest and low other-interest, resulting in transactional giving where something is always expected in return.

• Selfless: Givers with high other-interest and low self-interest, who end up giving their time and energy without any regard for their own needs.

• Otherish: Givers that care about benefiting others but also have ambitious goals for advancing their own interests.

We should all strive to be otherish givers. You may think striving to be a selfless giver is the route to fulfillment, but in reality, when people continually give without concern for their own interest, they are at higher risk for mental and physical health issues.

Research shows that the stress and overload from selfless giving can lead to conflicts amongst colleges, friends and romantic partners. This causes burnout and the result is that selfless givers stop giving all together.

By balancing concern for themselves and for others, otherish givers don't face the same negative health effects. In fact, by avoiding burnout, otherish givers can give much more over the course of a lifetime!

But it begs the question, how do we find the right balance when it comes to giving?

Finding the Right Balance in Giving

1. Chunking vs. Sprinkling

There are two main ways you can distribute your giving. Let's say you have seven acts of giving covering things like making a new introduction, doing a mentorship session, donating money or time to a good cause, etc. You can chunk all of this giving into a single day or you can sprinkle it across an entire week.

If you’re like me, you might think sprinkling lets you feel that helper's high each day of the week. You'd be wrong.

Studies show that happiness increases when people chunk more of their giving into a single day rather than spreading it across longer periods. The studies speculate that spreading out your giving over multiple days may diminish the effects the giver felt—perhaps because they couldn't be differentiated from the givers habitual kind behavior

This is why chunking is an otherish strategy. Otherish givers that chunk end up doing so when they have appropriate energy and time. Meanwhile selfless givers are more inclined to sprinkle their giving and help as soon as people need them, which can be at inopportune times. 

2. Learn From the 100-Hour Rule

Studies show that 100 hours per year is a sweet spot when it comes to giving. When looking at Australian adults, those volunteering 100-800 hours per year had much higher levels of satisfaction and happiness in their lives than those volunteering less than 100 hours or more than 800 hours.

The benefits of giving start to have a diminishing effect as you help more and more. Then there's a point where additional volunteering actually does not provide any additional benefits (right around 800 hours in this study).

So if you want to give regularly, try to chunk them into 2-3 hour slots per week (that represents 100-150 hours in a year).

3. Have Good Reasons For Giving

If you force people to give in a specific way, they won’t necessarily be happier on days they give versus days they don’t.

But if you allow them the choice to give in a way they feel matters, you’ll see major spikes in their happiness and energy levels. This is because they were giving out of enjoyment and purpose, not obligation. Plus, their perception of it doing more to help others plays an important role in how they feel after. 

Make sure you are giving for the right reasons; otherwise’ you aren't going to get any benefit at all.

4.  Remember to Reflect on Giving

The "boost" you get from giving isn't always immediate. Many may not feel much from giving in the actual moment. It's common that only after reflecting on the impact of your actions do you actually experience the full boost from giving!

Make reflection a regular habit when it comes to giving to others!

Recommendation: Gratitude Plus App

This section is not sponsored. These are recs for things I've used, researched or vetted.

Deepen Your Relationships with Gratitude Plus

Part of me always knew that reflecting on the positives each day helps rewire your mindset to focus on the good amidst the chaos. But I never knew that reflection could be used to build better relationships until I started using Gratitude Plus. 

It’s the only app I’ve found that takes daily reflection and makes it social. It lets me create private circles with my parents, friends, and fiancé where I take ~2 minutes to share a few daily gratitudes and then see their daily reflections.

Since many of them live far away, Gratitude Plus has been the easiest way for me to feel like I’m a part of their daily lives again. Now when I see them in person, there’s loads of new things to talk about without feeling obligated to fill them in on the last 2 months.

If you don’t want to use it for private circles, there’s also a global anonymous gratitude feed that you can doom happy scroll to see other people’s reflections. The best part is that all of this is free to use!

Devin's Finds:

📰 How Can We Weave Healthy Communities (5 minute read with extra resources): If you bring people together, this is for you! Fabian Pfortmuller and other co-creators present a framework on how to weave and strengthen communities. The article discusses five elements that help strengthen the health of a community and even provides deep dives with tons of resources for implementation.

📰 The Fundamental Attribution Error: Why Predicting Behavior is so Hard (6 minute read): This is an important mental model to keep in mind when connecting with new people. At its core, we tend to believe that a single action can define someone's character and predict their future behavior. Essentially, we assume a bad person is bad across the board. But in reality, people are more complex, and this mental model explains why it's often wrong to use a few actions to define someone's character.

🎞 1 minute feel good video: Watch a stranger answer the question "What's your dream?" by sharing that all his dreams have been fulfilled because of the relationships he has in his life. ⬇

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Best of luck building,

Devin