Linchpin_ Are You Indispensable_ - Seth Godin [68]
You best give a gift without knowing or being concerned with whether it will be repaid.
A waiter does his art for table twelve regardless of whether or not those customers are big
tippers. An artist paints his painting without knowing if someone is going to buy it.
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.
Gifts as a Signal of Surplus
It's difficult to be generous when you're hungry.
Yet being generous keeps you from going hungry. Hence the conflict.
A business coach writes and gives away a two-hundred-page e-book jammed with useful
tips and secrets. Everything he knows, online, for free. Is this generous or stupid? Is there
an easier way to make it clear that he has wisdom to spare?
Gifts not only satisfy our needs as artists, they also signal to the world that we have
plenty more to share. This perspective is magnetic. The more you have in your cup, the
more likely people are to want a drink.
If I meet you at a party, I hope you'll ask me for free marketing advice. I'm always
amazed that people are willing to listen to what I have to say and I'm happy to share. The
act of giving the gift is worth more to me than it may be to you to receive.
(Dunbar's Number and the Small World)
British anthropologist Robin Dunbar theorized that a typical person can't easily have
more than 150 people in his tribe. After 150 friends and fellow citizens, we can't keep
track. It's too complicated.
For tens of thousands of years, our nomadic ways, small villages, and lack of transport
kept the world small. The key unit of tribal measure was the village or the nomadic tribe.
When our community got too big, it split and people moved on--we needed to know the
people in our tribe, and since we couldn't process more than a hundred and fifty people,
we divided. We had a brotherhood, an extended family, people who watched our back,
helped us succeed, and did business with us.
When we meet a stranger, we do business. When we encounter a member of the tribe, we
give gifts.
Technology (travel, communication, and manufactured goods) meant that a few thousand
years ago, a great leap of productivity was ready to occur. This leap could occur only if
we had more people to trade with, more people to hire and interact with. We could make
the leap if we were able to make the world bigger. This need to make the world bigger,
though, conflicted with our cultural and biological desire to keep the world small.
A lot of the stress we feel in the modern world comes from this conflict between the
small world in which we're wired to exist and the large world we use to make a living.
Gifts Make the Tribe
The biblical proscription against usury goes all the way back to Moses. The rule was
simple: you couldn't charge interest on a loan to anyone in your tribe. Strangers, on the
other hand, paid interest. This isn't a matter of ancient biblical archeology; the edict
against interest stuck for thousands of years, until around the time of Columbus.
It's worth taking a minute to understand the reasoning here.
If money circulates freely within the tribe, the tribe will grow prosperous more quickly. I
give you some money to buy seeds, your farm flourishes, and now we both have money
to give to someone else to invest. The faster the money circulates, the better the tribe
does. The alternative is a tribe of hoarders, with most people struggling to find enough
resources to improve productivity.
Obviously, there's another force at work here. When I make an interest-free loan to you,
I'm trusting you and giving you a gift at the same time. This interaction increases the
quality of our bond and strengthens the community. Just as you wouldn't charge your
husband interest on a loan, you don't charge a tribe member.
Strangers, on the other hand, are not to be trusted. Going further, strangers