Gifting.

The Future Does Not Fit in the Containers of the Past. Edition 312.

Six years ago in August of 2020, I wrote:

The idea behind this newsletter is that of a gift.

Like a gift it is free (no subscription fee, no up-charges to access special content, no advertising, no affiliate links, your email will not be shared or sold, and no algorithm is running in the background mining your behavior.)

I hope it will be of some value in helping you see, feel and think differently about how to grow yourself, your team or your company in the future.

Like a gift, I hope it will generate goodwill for the giver. Your attention and time which is so valuable. Good karma. Stronger relationships.

This newsletter will be bohemian and eclectic in that it will mix art and science, it will have a certain wanderlust and will roam into different areas.

I have published “The Future Does Not Fit in the Containers of the Past” every Sunday morning for the past 312 weeks. It has remained completely free and the writing has covered multiple subjects from poetry to strategy, from photography to organizational structure, from culture to marketing and much more. In order to remain evergreen I have not written about news or politics.

The newsletter is now read by 32,000+ leaders. It is a body of work spanning almost half a million words.

To make the writing more accessible, I had curated the best of the writing on a single page organized in 12 subject area which you can find here: https://rishadtobaccowala.com/100

Generosity as an approach to Life.

A CEO shared a story about how a poor family of immigrants stopped to help someone who had a flat tire in bad weather. After the tire was changed, the individual offered money to the family. They turned it down saying “Today it was you. Tomorrow it might be us.”

Sooner or later, everybody finds themselves needing help and depending on acts of generosity. It might be some form of aid, guidance, a person to talk to who will listen, a leg-up or sometimes gently delivered difficult to hear advice.

By being there and helping when someone is in need ensures good “Karma.”

If what goes around comes around it may make sense to send good stuff people’s way.

Generosity makes for a better life for not just the recipient but also to the giver.

Generosity as a differentiator and moat.

If strategy is future competitive advantage, generosity is smart for individual or company strategies.

Generosity builds good will which is both an asset and a moat.

It is an asset in that it can be tapped in the future.

It is a moat because when an individual or a company has been generous in times of trouble their employee or customer are less likely to switch to a different firm for a lower price or higher pay.

Generosity is also a key differentiator in that usually when a person or firm needs help there are few people willing to help someone out of power or in trouble. Those individuals and brands who do help stand out and their showing up and helping when others are not burns into the emotional and mental memory of the recipient.

Emotional connections are harder to sever or replace than financial connections.

Gifts beget gifts. Generosity begets generosity.

Three days ago, at the request of the legendary Jon Bond, I took a call with Sean Clayton who runs a company called Singulariti which is a marketing intelligence system that organizes the fragments of how organizations learn, decide, and act into a coherent operating system, built around three instruments that map agents, prove performance, and return knowledge to behavior.

During our call, I shared the page containing the best of my writing with Sean who 24 hours later spun up rishad.ai as a gift in return. It is a way to navigate, learn and interrogate the best of my writing.

Check out rishad. ai which allows one to filter the best of 6 years ( from a subset of 100 posts selected from all 312 by me) of The Future Does Not Fit in the Containers of the Past. One can navigate by 4 lenses, or by 12 subject areas , or by interrogation and much more. Each question provides an answer with links to six key articles and additional areas of investigation.

rishad.ai turns four decades of knowledge and six years of writing into a usable tool and resource to help everyone build their own thinking, interrogate the material or share all the writing as a gift in one single link for anybody :

rishad.ai

One Single Thing.

A book that is transformative on the concept of gifting is the classic called “The Gift” by Lewis Hyde

Here is Margaret Atwood’s opening in an article on the book from The Paris Review

“Gifts pass from hand to hand: they endure through such transmission, as every time a gift is given it is enlivened and regenerated through the new spiritual life it engenders both in the giver and in the receiver.

And so it is with Lewis Hyde’s classic study of gift giving and its relationship to art. The Gift has never been out of print; it moves like an underground current among artists of all kinds, through word of mouth and bestowal. It is the one book I recommend without fail to aspiring writers and painters and musicians, for it is not a how-to book—there are many of these—but a book about the core nature of what it is that artists do, and also about the relation of these activities to our overwhelmingly commercial society. If you want to write, paint, sing, compose, act, or make films, read The Gift. It will help to keep you sane.”