Freedom leads to Generosity

This afternoon our daughter was entertaining herself by writing poems. It was so much fun to watch her get so much joy out of the fun little poems she was crafting. Then she looked over at me and said, "You have freedom when you write poems!"

What an amazing statement from a young learning mind!

What was she saying? She was recognizing that with freedom come ideas. When we feel free, we are released to dream, imagine and think new thoughts. In contrast, when we are captive our creativity and thinking are held back and controlled by others.

Freedom creates the environment for new ideas. And the result of a free mind is that it is open to sharing its ideas with others because others have allowed it the freedom to think.

Freedom thus predisposes its beneficiary to be a Generous Mind. A natural response to our freedom is to be free with what our freedom has produced.

Are you free today? Do you feel empowered to think and create or are there forces in your life holding you captive. Only a soul that is free to think will be a generous soul.

Generous Input

One of the things we love about the Internet and the crowdsourcing it has empowered are the small but significant ways you can be generous with your input. Because of the dynamic and growing networks of people around the world, you can now share your input into decisions that have a real impact on organizations and individuals that you care about.

One example that you can join today is Brigada's crowdsourced logo project. They used a logo tournament site to get over one hundred potential logos and have now narrowed it down to 8 possibilities. Now it's your turn to help this great missions resource site pick a logo that you feel represents its ministry. Take a moment to view the top 8 logos and rate/comment on them by clicking here.

Then look for ways that you can give those within your network a chance to be generous with their input!

A Generous Colab

It was a blessing to be at the Colab 2013 event in Chicago last week. I will be sharing more from my notes in the coming days. The event was a small, invite only collaboration event designed to create opportunities for connection and engagement. There were some great donors, organizations and churches there.

Here is the Storify story of the event with quite a few contributions from the Generous Mind team:

Generosity or Manipulation

Have you ever tried to control the outcome of something you cared about? Maybe you try and control your children’s behavior or you try and exert control over a big project at work. If you strive to do it in your own strength, your main weapon is almost certainly manipulation. But the minute manipulation is inserted into your arsenal your efforts are no longer aligned with the Kingdom. They are now your own efforts to control your world for your personal benefit.

You cannot be a Generous Mind and rely on manipulation to influence the world. A Generous Mind gives freely from their ideas without trying to control them. That doesn’t mean that those ideas don’t end up in products and services that can produce a return for you. However it does mean that a Generous Mind does not invest time in manipulating the way the ideas are used for their personal benefit.

The line between a productive idea and a manipulative idea is fine and fuzzy. That is because it mostly has to do with motivations of the heart rather than a list of “do’s or don’ts.”

If you release an idea productively, you make it available in ways that are focused on your readers and will be useful to them. For example, a Generous Mind who came up with a new cookbook for children might realize that a DVD product to accompany the book would be an excellent way for the children to interact with the cooking process and get a sense for how to participate with their mom or dad. The desire is to see the idea used more fully and the result is a new product that adds value to the customer and is sustainable for the author.

But if you are releasing an idea in manipulative ways, that is different on many levels.  One example of a manipulative mind is the contract that governs how your ideas are released. Many of these contracts are written to confuse and discourage your audience rather than to empower them with the idea you have brought to life. The way your contracts are written is an important indicator of your desire to be generous.

As I continue to process Tim Jore’s book “The Christian Commons,” one of the things that has jumped out at me is the manipulation that often exists in the contractual process. Tim describes one of the main advantages of a Creative Commons license as follows, “Every Creative Commons license includes a human-readable summary of the license. In a few clear paragraphs, the license summary explains exactly what the legal code (the actual license) does, in terms that do not require a degree in copyright law to understand.” (pg. 233)

This “human-readable summary” is an effort by the group behind the Creative Commons to be clear and open with what the rights and restrictions are. This makes the contract an open document rather than an effort to manipulate the audience through smoke and mirrors.

As you share your ideas with the world, are your motives focused on generosity or manipulation?

Generosity with Your Intellectual Property

In an age where information is currency, Intellectual Property is critical to so many aspects of our careers and businesses. We spend significant time protecting, managing and turning our ideas into products . . . and there is nothing wrong with that. It is how we can sustain our creative energies.

But is our model for protecting and managing IP a Kingdom model? That is what Tim Jore explores in The Christian Commons: ending the spiritual famine of the Global Church. This well-researched book asks us to think through how traditional copyright protections limit the ability of the Global Church to resource the believers where the church is growing the most.

While the book focuses on moving from a traditional copyright model to the Creative Commons standard which is much more open, I appreciated that Tim did not minimize people's ownership of their content or the rights that they are allowed to exert over that content. Instead he focused on challenging people to select a Creative Commons approach to protecting their content out of a motivation of generosity.

By taking that approach to the issue, Tim affirmed people's hard work, rights and the value of being rewarded for their efforts. At the same time, he challenged those people to generously give of their content to those who can most use it.

I would have liked to see more in the book about encouraging the more open model among Majority World authors and publishers rather than the focus on Western resources being translated or modified for use in the Majority World. We have exported many of our models to the Global South and shackled our partners with many of the problems that were inherent in those models.

The best parts of the book are the last few chapters that make a very clear and easy-to-read case for the need for new paradigms in managing Intellectual Property. I loved Tim's integration of Scripture to help think through the Kingdom response to content.

I hope this book will start a healthy discussion about more sustainable models of managing IP within the Kingdom. We desperately need to unleash the ideas God has given us!

Why Do You Publish?

The word publish used to have a very narrow meaning. But today...

Everyone is publishing all the time. You publish pithy quotes to Twitter, updates to facebook, photos to Instagram and soapbox speeches to your blog.

Everyone is publishing all the time. So the question "Why do you publish?" is a very important one. As we talk with thought leaders, usually there are a few potential reasons why someone is driven to publish:

They want to be known and respected.
They have something to share with the world.
They want to connect with others and share experiences.
They seek to use content as a tool to build an enterprise.

Each of these motivations are different and come out clearly in what you publish. It only takes about 10 minutes reviewing a person's social media, blog and web site to get a clear idea of what drives their publishing. Try it, the exercise can be very enlightening and also very helpful as you consider your own answer to that question.

But why does it matter? Some might say, "As long as I'm publishing good stuff, who cares why!" But it does matter. In the end the "Why" impacts the "What."

So how would you answer that question?

Will They Rise to the Challenge?

One of the things that I know tugs at the hearts of thought leaders who are seeking to be Generous Minds, is the question, "Will the people I give my ideas to respond with equal generosity?"

That is a valid question. In so many situations, we see people give of themselves only to have the recipients squander the gift. It's one thing if it is money but when it is a cherished idea, the squandering seems so much more personal.

So as we stand on the verge of sharing our next thought, we ask the question and consider whether our audience is worthy of our generosity.

But that is the wrong consideration. It is not about whether the audience is worthy of the idea we are about to share. Instead, we should consider whether we are ready to share it. In the end, we can only have control over our own actions and motivations. So asking if the audience will rise to the challenge goes beyond our sphere of influence.

The bigger question, as I stated above, is whether our hearts are ready to be generous no matter what the outcome is. That is when we know it is time to share the idea in front of us.

Are you paralyzed by your desire to see your ideas take off or are you focused on the right spirit of motivation in your generosity? The second is a much more worthy and attainable effort.