Compounding Generosity

If you’ve read either of my books, How to wake up the-Financial Genius Inside You  or How to Ignite Your Passion for Living, you know how big I am on the concept of compounding. Compounding your investments has to do with keeping the income you make off your investment in the game so that you make new income off the previously created income allowing your revenue to grow exponentially. This concept can actually be applied to many things. If you saw the movie, Pay it Forward, you saw a good deed and the gratitude that came from it compounded. Instead of the one good act being the only good act and the thanks only being returned once, the idea was passed onto multiple people who passed the generosity onto several people each and soon the world was “paying it forward”.

This is the concept behind viral and word of mouth marketing. Tell someone or a group of people and encourage them to share their enthusiasm for your product or service and hopefully the news will continue to spread and grow your market.  We’ve all seen this happen with viral videos. A few people see it, pass it onto a group of friend who pass it onto a group of friends and next thing you know a million people have seen it!

When you give of yourself this season–be it money, time, knowledge or just a kind word–ask yourself if there is any way to compound the gesture. If you give money, it will compound if you give it to a charity that helps poor communities build commerce which will increase the community’s wealth and ability to financially sustain it. If you teach a young person a new skill, like how to invest (see the wonderful email I received and shared in the post last week), encourage them to share what they learned and ask those they teach to share it as well. Then your time with this one person will end up helping maybe dozens or hundreds of people or more.

Of course, if all you can do is give a few more people encouragement and a kind word, the good intentions and good cheer will usually get spread simply because you made someone feel better and that feeling tends to make others want to do the same. Generosity is self-perpetuating. And that, in a nutshell, is true compounding!