Generosity by doing less

A water lily just sits there being a water lily. It’s enough. (Image by Couleur)

One of the things you learn as a teacher is to hold back.

You can’t share everything you know, no matter how willing the student is. You have to slowly drip out the information over time. It’s even better when you can structure the student’s learning such that they are taking actions that lead to growth and insight without you having to explain anything.

For a student who is hesitant or uncomfortable, giving them everything you’ve got will be overwhelming and frustrating. You serve them better when you do less and give less.

To high-achieving people, the idea of coasting is often a foreign one. But if you’ve put effort into building structures that allow your work to be more effective, more effort is often wasted effort.

If you’ve written a book, for example, an extraordinary amount of your wisdom is collected in one place. The book supplants the need to answer people’s questions individually if what they’re asking about is covered in your book. For you to cover the same ground and respond thoughtfully to every inquiry would be to duplicate the work you put into the book — and delay the next one.

As much as I loved teaching music lessons, I wish I had created a course or curriculum that would have allowed me to serve more people (and serve my existing students more effectively). Filling as much of my time as possible with music lessons at $40 an hour kept me from having any resources left over to build something bigger.

True, my students benefited from my time and attention, but there are other ways I could have supported them.

Many of the things we do at great personal cost can be justified by the fact that they are appreciated by someone else. That doesn't mean we're obligated to do them.

On a practical level, an activity that involves sacrifice on our part is not fundamentally more generous. In fact, our sacrifice could be less generous in the long run. I could support my family by doing work I hate and then come home so miserable that they don’t want to be around me, or I could do work I love and also contribute to a harmonious home environment. The misery certainly doesn’t make the work more valuable.

The steps you take to making more effective use of your time, attention, and emotional energy will feel uncomfortable and wrong if you’re used to measuring your value by the effort you put in. There’s a strong precedent for that, going back to your upbringing, your academic experiences, and your early career. However, as you progress, a more useful metric is impact. It’s possible to have a profound impact without commensurate effort.

This is a very different lens through which to view your activities, and it may feel uncomfortably lofty or even lazy at first. It may trigger imposter syndrome or the fear that you’re having delusions of grandeur. But on a practical level, it’s exactly the move to make when the demands on your time and attention rise to a level that is truly impossible to satisfy. When you actually can’t work more or do more, you have to make tough choices. You might as well choose, whenever possible, the activities and practices that scale.

That’s not to say that you should never help anyone one-on-one. But maybe you don’t want to be the one to help them move to a new apartment. Maybe you’d rather support them in the way that only you can, using the specialized skills you’ve honed over a lifetime. I’d say you’ve earned that.

It takes practice to learn to respect your own effort and time at a higher level. You may always feel that nagging sense that you’re not doing enough or giving enough. But over time, you can use the space that you’ve opened up in your schedule and psyche to create something more powerful than you ever could have before. That benefits everyone, including you.