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
If you read up, if you pick up any book on success, there's a number of things they'll tell you that are going to lead to success. At the top of the list is always relationships. Close in relationships. Harvard just published their study, their 50-year study. And the most important aspect of happiness is for individuals out of their study was relationships, connected, close relationships.
Now the self-help books are going to tell you confidence. Then they're going to say mindset. And then they're going to say trust. And then they're going to say your own emotional well-being. And I believe that being a generous person leads to all of those. So being a generous person leads to success. If you know that, then you have a North Star. You have something that you can focus on every day.
You can attract success versus desperately pursuing it. And I think attracting it by being a generous person is a much more rewarding way of going through life. So let's break that down a little bit. Relationships. Everybody knows that generous people develop relationships faster and more meaningful. Courage. Let's talk about confidence and courage.
Most studies will tell you that it takes courage, it takes confidence to be successful. generous. To do generous acts takes a certain degree of confidence. So you're actually practicing how to be courageous and how to be confident by being generous.
Mindset, let me ask you, do you think you will feel like you're more deserving of success if you're helping other people or if you're cheating other people in life? Of course, it's the former. Right. So you're going to feel like you're more deserving of life. So your mindset is better.
trust if you are really an authentically generous person with yourself with others with the world do you think people will trust you more and of course that's a rhetorical question the answer is yes right but the other thing is that your own emotional well-being when you do generous it'd be interesting if you ask chat gpt what are the scientific benefits Of being generous.
They'll show you all of these studies and all of these benefits. And listen, it's beautiful. But they're actually your body. The hormone levels change. The dopamine levels change. Oxycodone is released in the body when you're generous. So you actually are healthier now. when you're a generous person. So all of these things lead you to being a more generous person by helping others.
And knowing that is just a wise thing. It's not a selfish thing. I see generosity as a win. When you're authentically generous with somebody with no expectations from them, they win. There's no doubt about that. That's simple. But There are many studies that say when you're generous with somebody like that, they're much more likely to be generous with other people. It creates a ripple effect.
So the world is actually a better place when you're generous with somebody. If all of these things add up to you being more generous, then it's a win. The person you're giving to wins, the world wins, and you win. And that's why I believe it's a superpower. That's why I believe that generosity wins. And I'll tell you another thing.
There's nothing as beautiful as going through life and creating success for yourself by helping others with no expectation, because in the end, You look back and you're just as proud. You're proud of what you did, but you're even more proud of how you did it. And there's a great happiness. There's a great joy that comes from being proud of how you lived.
This goes back to our discussion about, is it selfish to be generous to create your success? And I will tell you that I believe there is a tremendous return on generosity. The ROI, the return on investment for generosity, may be higher than any other human behavior that you can put in place. Now, you do not expect return from who you're being generous with, right?
No exchange or return from who you're being generous with, or the group that you're being generous with, or the bathroom that you cleaned when you walked out. There is no return from the individual, but life gives you a tremendous return on your investment of generosity. There's a lot of philosophers that will talk about it. You can do research on karma.
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. 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 is 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.
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