DailyJim: Gifted and gifting: The business model of deep emotional connection

Hello everyone, welcome to another Daily Gym. Today is Monday, July 29th, 2024. And this is the second take I'm doing this, but I think this episode might be quite powerful, so I wanted to make sure I got interrupted earlier. I didn't want to start from where I left off. So today's episode is about gifted and gifting the business model of deep emotional connection.

And so this topic comes because i started thinking about a friend of mine for my birthday, gave me this beautiful wallet it's a very nice wallet so he makes very high quality leather goods and he um was just very excited to give me this gift for my birthday and i feel so grateful And when I think about it, a lot of people have given me gifts over the years, whether that's sometimes monetary gifts for special occasions or from family members or things like this, or even some random people. Or if it's a gift of a dinner or a gift of a beer or a gift of time spent with me or a gift of, for example, Caleb helping me do the intro and outro music for the podcast. I think a lot of times people have voluntarily given me things with no expectation in return. turn. And when I think about what I've done so much with the work, it's that I have given things to people, gifted them without really any expectation in return. I feel you, emotional self-defense workshops, classes, Imoko training online, this podcast, all these different episodes, one-on-one informal conversations, time spent with people, holding them when they cry, I'm talking them through the anger, helping them with relationship issues with their family, with their romantic life, financial life, things like this. And I have been struggling so hard to figure out what is the business model of deep emotional connection. I've been so afraid, so unknowing for the last couple of years because as I became more connected to emotions, it became really hard for me to want to charge money to people for the things that I was giving them because I felt connected to the pain that they were going through or even the dreams that they were having, the excitement. And I think that's often when we give a gift to somebody, if it's not on a normal special occasion, sorry, normal special occasion, if it's not on like a prearranged date, like like a birthday or a specific holiday when we're supposed to give, often we give it to people just because we feel that desire towards them to connect with them, to maybe change them from one emotional state to another or to receive that gratitude from them.

That makes it hard to be in a transactional business of what I would say maybe a business model of lower emotional connection or no emotional connection. Transaction, I'm giving something to you, you're giving it back to me immediately.

And I've realized that if people are in a business model that's transactional, say they work an hourly job, or say they sell something on a daily basis, or say they, there are much more transactional jobs. And there are some that are less, you know, if you have a salaried employment, so you get paid every month or every, you know, you have an annual salary figure that you're given, there's a little more flexibility and communal relationship there. But I'm talking about the extreme version of it. What happens when somebody goes from a transactional orientation to the world and exchange orientation to a more communal orientation, feeling much more connected to emotions. And I haven't had an answer for the business model. And so I've been really afraid to bring other people into the sphere. You know, if I help them open up and start to care more about themselves and other people, shit, what happens when they can no longer do their job because they care too much for the customer. And so they're not even charging the customer anymore. And the boss is like, hey, dude, you got to charge your customer. Oh, but you know, the customer's going through a hard time. And, you know, I'm just so happy to see him. I'm just glad he's here. No, man, you got to charge a customer. And so I've been thinking, okay, what is the next level of that? And I really think it's this idea of gifting. And I've talked about it before. But what feels different for me now is that I think the phrase that came to me is that the more gifted I am by others, the more gifting I can be to others.

And what do I mean by that? I think oftentimes we will say that we're blessed, but another way to say it is that we have been gifted or we are gifted. Often that phrase is we are gifted with certain talents. But you know what I've realized living out here or being out here in Nairobi is that.

I'm gifted in many ways. I have been gifted in many ways. Yes, I've been gifted with the ability to learn certain things. I've been gifted with the ability to have an American passport. I've been gifted with all these different things. So let's take an example. So for example, iFeelio. How do I build and create a gift like iFeelio, which was the app for journaling back in the day? One, I was gifted with the ability to learn computer science and computer programming. coming. Two, I was gifted with the ability or the, I was gifted from family members, the opportunity to go to not only good primary and secondary schools, but also a good university. Three, I was gifted with the ability to interact with people. I was gifted with the opportunities to practice interacting with people because when I was younger, my parents often let me do a lot of sports. And so I interacted with many, many different people. I was gifted with the interest, maybe into language. And so a lot of these things come together to help me create the gift that I give to somebody else, which in this case would be I feel you. But we can use the example of the wallet. My friend is gifted in visual design. He's very gifted in manual dexterity to create these things handmade. He's been gifted in the opportunity. I think he said that his father worked a lot with leather or at least had a lot of leather around the house. And so he was gifted with the environment of being around leather as a child. I think he was gifted because his sisters, a lot of them were involved in some type of fabric making. He's gifted because he went to university and studied textile engineering. So he has the knowledge about textiles on a much deeper level or more technical level than many may do. And so combining all those things that he's been gifted and then turning it into a gift and giving it to somebody else. Now, yes, one could sell it, but it's different. We give gifts often because we feel so close to someone, we feel so connected to someone, we care about them.

Yeah, so for me, that's the pull. I can only gift as much to other people as people have gifted to me.

And like I said, many people have gifted to me. But I also wonder, how much more can I gift to others if people gift more to me? What would that even look like? What if people gifted me design skills for the website to help make it better? Maybe it was web designing skills or web programming skills or app development skills. Or maybe it was not a skill. Maybe somebody gifted me an opportunity because they know somebody and they say, hey, I heard of this opportunity. Let me tell you about it. Or they say, I have this friend. Please talk to this friend. I think you two might want to get along. long. Or maybe it's not an opportunity or connection. Maybe frankly, it's gifting money and saying, listen, I know you want to do things. And if I give this to you, I imagine you might be able to gift it to somebody else. Or you might be able to use it for yourself.

But even the using it for ourselves, there's this book, I think it's called The Gift. And I think one thing that he talks about this idea of a gift economy is that it doesn't stay with the person. If it stays with the person, then that person is kind of kicked out of the gift-giving circle. Because the idea with gift is to gift it to one person, and then that person gifts it to somebody else, and on and on. And it's not necessarily the same gift. It may change form as it goes, but it's this giving or gifting to the next person.

And yeah, I just wonder how many years I've spent being so afraid to recognize this principle, because this is something that I talked about with iFeelio back in 2013, I believe. Definitely 2014. I put something in the app where people could gift a monetary amount that was similar to a beer, a coffee, or a tea, I believe. Or a meal. I think it was a meal.

And so this idea has been percolating in my mind for a very long time, and yet I think it's quite counter-cultural because a lot of times we only give gifts to people we feel very connected to and often those are people that are in our family or very close friends. Um...

But what if it didn't have to be? What if we could feel much closer to a lot of other people? I'm not giving these tools that I'm making to just my very, very close friends. I'm giving them to random people I meet. I'm giving them to friends of friends and acquaintances and strangers. I'm giving sometimes my time and energy to strangers. And sometimes I'm giving my ability to listen or my ability to even lift and carry stuff. You know, like so often we're gifting or giving these things to other people.

What if we could just kind of close that loop? So anyways, I'm just talking about this a little bit tonight. I think I've gone over time. But just this idea that love and deep emotional connection is not about buying and selling. It's about being gifted and being gifting. And just trying to understand how if we don't one paying more attention to how much we have already been gifted by people and by things in life situations whatever it may be dna who knows um luck of the draw but also what could happen if we either let people gift us more you know or give more gifts to us or we even ask people to give more gifts to us, so just to end like i notice sometimes interacting with women they'll say oh i like it when a guy gives me gifts and i think sometimes they say you know i mean they're talking maybe chocolate or roses or sometimes it's a little thing but i think sometimes if they're struggling financially they like if the man will gift them some money too and say listen here go take care of your stuff i trust you and i love you i care about you and i want to see you well um.

Yeah, so just really thinking about this, and I felt so relaxed thinking about it earlier because that seems to be the business model of deep emotional connection. And as I go towards deep emotional connection, how can I experiment and maybe lead the way in seeing how this business model might play out for other people too? Because there are a lot of other people in this world, especially nowadays, that are gifting things to the world like open source software or people who are recording videos online or, you know, God, how many YouTube videos are there where people are helping somebody fix a specific car or vacuum cleaner or teaching people how to cook or garden? And yes, sometimes they get money from advertising, but what if there are ways to show appreciation to them that's not so much like a tip? Heck maybe it's giving a gift isn't even related to the gift giving so much so maybe it's not like, giving a like maybe it's like giving a wallet or giving something that that person has the ability to do so something i'm going to experiment with is instead of calling it crowdfunding on my website or donation or something like that i don't think that's the right concept i think the right concept is gifting. I want to gift more to other people. And I want people to gift more to me. I would love to receive gifts from people. Oh my goodness. Yes, money would be nice because I could transform it into other gifts that I could give to people. But really, I'm curious to see what people want to give, you know, what skills they have or what desires they think I have or needs. I'm just really curious. So I'm going to experiment with that a little bit and hope to see where it goes. And hope, like I said, that maybe I could lead the way and show people a new business model so that we don't have to stay in this transactional mindset. All right, take care, y'all.