Monte Wood
speaker
192 appearances
6 recordings
1 series
first heard Jan 2025
last heard May 2025
Monte Wood’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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Appearances
You can research the science of generosity and how it returns, how it affects you positively. But there is a tremendous return on investment. So the answer is it's not intuitive, right? Because you're right. You don't expect anything from whom you are generous with. But You do know that by being generous, it's going to come back to you in exponential form.
There's a couple that are really important. The first one is that generosity is about giving money. Gabe, giving money is a very minor component of generosity. I sat in a room with a Buddhist, a Tibetan Buddhist monk last week, and I was listening to him talk about the wisdom of the monks. And one of the things he said just absolutely blew my mind.
He stopped and then he looked at the room and he said, even the smallest act of generosity... when done with the right intent, can be tremendously powerful. And I thought, how cool is that?
It reminded me of a story that I read in the New York Times about a police officer in San Francisco whose sole job was following up on suicides off of the Golden Gate Bridge, people who jumped off the Golden Gate Bridge. He went to the bedroom of a young man, 26 years old, and on his dresser, there was a suicide note. And basically the note said, nobody cares about me. Nobody sees me.
I won't be missed. I'm going to go into the Golden Gate Bridge and I'm going to jump. But it's a five mile walk. And if one person smiles at me or talks to me, In this five mile walk, I won't jump. The sad part of that Vince is the young man jumped. One smile could have saved his life. I will tell you that we live in a world where there's so much loneliness. There's an epidemic of loneliness.
There's an epidemic of depression. And generosity is an antidote to those things. And a smile, a sincere smile is one of the easiest things to give and literally can change somebody's chemistry. You can change the chemistry in somebody's body by looking at them intently and giving them a meaningful smile. That is generosity. You may walk right by that person, but you left them with something.
You may never see them again. You have no expectation, but you may have changed their lives. And I see it all the time. How many people do you know that actually walk into a public restroom and leave it cleaner than when they went in? My wife does that. She does it because she wants it to be better for the next person that goes in. I also do that.
It's such a beautiful thing, and you don't consider that generosity, but it is. You'll never know the people that benefited from you doing that. but you're doing something and they may learn from it and pass it on. That's how we change the world. I like to say, and this is a little bit far-reaching, but I like to say that generosity is a form of consciousness.
And not generous acts, but being a fully generous person. Walking around with the intent of being generous, you have to actually be aware of what's going on around you to be effectively generous. And if you are that aware, you're more conscious. And if you are more conscious, all of the studies show that you are going to be a happier, more joyous person.
So even that form of generosity comes back to you. Karma is real. Karma has been written about for 2,000 years. So karma is something that is not a new concept. And generosity has been written about. You can't pick up any, you can't pick up the Bible, the Koran, the Jewish Bible, the Book of Mormon. They all talk about the importance of generosity.
Almost every philosopher has talked about how important being considerate and caring about others is for your own well-being. So philosophers have talked about it for years. I don't know why in society today we seem to ignore this tremendous power, this opportunity to be happy and conscious and successful ourselves. by helping others, by helping the world.
It's such a powerful opportunity that if I could stand on the highest mountain and scream, please understand this, for your benefit,
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