Generosity

Generosity gives knowledge another person can use

A colleague is leaving your upholstery business to start a small workshop. They ask how you estimate awkward shapes without wasting cloth. You show your reusable paper-layout method, then let them arrange a trial. Their pieces fit; yours include a grand paper flourish that fits nowhere. You hand over a clean copy of your general guide without asking for referrals. The useful part of the lesson is already leaving under its own management.

An illustrative scene.

Generosity: finding the balance

An employer freely teaches general know-how to a departing colleague who will become a competitor.

Ordinary wages, agreed training and promised documents are owed; supplying them is not an extra gift. Generosity begins with something useful the giver can freely offer, and the recipient remains free to decline.

What Generosity makes possible

A technique can become useful in more than one workshop. Teaching it gives a departing colleague a better start and gives the employer an opportunity to articulate what experience has taught. Cooperation can continue in a new form without requiring the new business to remain dependent on the old one.

Generosity in ordinary life

A departing teammate

Offer a general technique they want to learn, with time to try it.

A useful introduction

Ask both people before making a connection; leave them free to decide what follows.

Nearby virtues, different work

Magnanimity

Magnanimity resists pettiness around another’s standing. Generosity concerns readiness to give.

Fairness

Fairness supports defensible terms. Generosity may go beyond those terms by choice.

Generosity and its counterfeits

A gift with an invoice waiting

Help counterfeits Generosity when an unspoken debt is collected later. Make conditions explicit or give without them.

How to cultivate Generosity

1. Ask what would actually help the other person.

2. Choose something you are free to share.

3. Let the recipient use the gift without performing gratitude or dependence.

Try it today

Offer a short explanation of an ordinary technique you know to someone who wants it. Use your own general knowledge, allow them to decline and leave room for their way of doing it.

Questions worth returning to

• Is this useful to them or chiefly pleasing for me to give?
• What would I still expect after calling it a gift?

Keep the practice proportionate

Quotations and further reading

Seven readings, one for each day. All remain available here. Historical arguments and fictional dialogue are identified in their source notes.

1. He has the power to render us happy or unhappy; to make our service light or burdensome; a pleasure or a toil.

   Charles Dickens · A Christmas Carol
   Stave II, The First of the Three Spirits; paragraph beginning ““It isn’t that,” said Scrooge, heated by the remark, and speaking unconsciously like his f…”
   Scrooge on Fezziwig, in Charles Dickens’s A Christmas Carol · Project Gutenberg #46, with original 1843 John Leech illustrations and December 1843 preface; exact underlying text imprint not specified.

   Remembering Fezziwig, Scrooge recognizes how an employer affects the experience of work beyond the wage. The departing-worker scene likewise asks what useful help an employer can freely offer. The speaker and Fezziwig antecedent must accompany display.

2. When we ask a service of any man, he may either give it us freely, or demand payment for it. Respecting free gift of service, there is no question at present, that being a matter of affection—not of traffic.

   John Ruskin · Unto This Last and Other Essays on Political Economy
   UNTO THIS LAST: / ESSAY III. / "QUI JUDICATIS TERRAM."; paragraph beginning “When we ask a service of any man, he may either give it us freely, or demand payment for i…”
   John Ruskin · Ward, Lock & Co., London, Melbourne and Toronto, 1912; Project Gutenberg #36541.

   Ruskin distinguishes freely given service from an exchange requiring just payment. This supports the page’s separation of a genuine teaching gift from wages, training or documents already owed.

3. Not only his own thoughts, but the thoughts of the men of past ages guide his hands; and, as a part of the human race, he creates.

   William Morris · Signs of Change
   SIGNS OF CHANGE / p. 141USEFUL WORK VERSUS USELESS TOIL.; paragraph beginning “The hope of pleasure in the work itself: how strange that hope must seem to some of my rea…”
   William Morris · Longmans, Green & Co., London, New York and Bombay, 1896; Project Gutenberg #3053 transcriber identifies this edition.

   Morris presents making as work supported by inherited knowledge. The employer shares a method within that continuing exchange, without presenting every useful technique as an exclusively private achievement.

4. The friend drew $500, the sum needed, from his private deposit and handed it to Mr. Berry, telling him to take it and use it without interest until he could repay it.

   Booker T. Washington · The Negro in Business
   Printed p. 66, account of Edward C. Berry; PDF page index 74
   Booker T. Washington · Hertel, Jenkins & Co., 1907; Internet Archive scan negroinbusiness00washgoog.

   Washington describes concrete help when a hotelier cannot obtain a bank loan. The gift is the use of money without interest, not an unmentioned cancellation of debt. The employer similarly identifies useful help that leaves another enterprise able to act.

5. Gov’r. Thomas was so pleas’d with the construction of this stove, as described in it, that he offered to give me a patent for the sole vending of them for a term of years; but I declin’d it from a principle which has ever weighed with me on such occasions, viz., That, as we enjoy great advantages from the inventions of others, we should be glad of an opportunity to serve others by any invention of ours; and this we should do freely and generously.

   Benjamin Franklin · Autobiography
   Autobiography — Pennsylvania fireplace invention and declined patent; paragraph beginning “In order of time, I should have mentioned before”; paragraph beginning “In order of time, I should have mentioned before, that having, in 1742, invented an open s…”
   Benjamin Franklin · Harvard Classics, edited by Charles W. Eliot; P. F. Collier & Son, New York, 1909; Project Gutenberg #148.

   Franklin presents his voluntary choice to share an invention as a response to benefits received from others. It closely fits the employer’s freely shared method without making patent refusal a universal requirement.

6. Not appropriation but contribution is the law of growth. What our special contribution is, it is for us to discover.

   Mary Parker Follett · The New State
   THE NEW STATE / Part I THE GROUP PRINCIPLE / VII THE INDIVIDUAL; paragraph beginning “First, the individual, biology tells us, is never complete, completeness spells death; soc…”
   Mary Parker Follett · Longmans, Green & Co., 1918; Project Gutenberg #73755.

   Follett connects development to what a person contributes. The employer identifies a teachable method that will remain useful in the departing worker’s own enterprise. The excerpt is a social philosophy, not a promise of financial return for generosity.

7. Give your difference, welcome my difference, unify all difference in the larger whole—such is the law of growth.

   Mary Parker Follett · The New State
   THE NEW STATE / Part I THE GROUP PRINCIPLE / III THE GROUP PROCESS: THE COLLECTIVE IDEA (CONTINUED); paragraph beginning “Give your difference, welcome my difference, unify all difference in the larger whole—such…”
   Mary Parker Follett · Longmans, Green & Co., 1918; Project Gutenberg #73755.

   Follett joins contribution to receptiveness. In teaching the layout method, the employer leaves room for the departing colleague to make independent use of it and even improve it; help does not require a copy of the giver’s enterprise.

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