HumanKind: Changing the World One Small Act At a Time – Episode 593

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[00:01] Welcome to the Prosperity Podcast. Prosperity thinkers, on this episode of the podcast, we’re going to be talking about a book called Humankind. And it is, I believe the subtitle is what, changing the world one small at a time. Kim, not often, just so the audience knows and so you as a listener know, Kim takes the book and puts it in front of the camera and says, have you read this book? It’s got to be good. So tell us why this book is great, and then we’re going to extract some pieces for the audience. I love it. Well, for those that are watching on YouTube, here is the title and the picture and the author, Brad Aaronson. And I just love the cover, the circular, ever-expanding nature of the cover, that

[00:51] ongoing circle that’s occurring there is so evident of what the author talks about, which is those one small acts of kindness. So I love to listen or read Good News Network material, and about every three or four days they come out with an email with two or three things that people have done that are really beneficial to their community. Could be online, could be national, international, doesn’t really matter. Well, Humankind is an entire book full of them. I powered through it in a weekend, absolutely loved it, and I’ve got a couple specific examples to share. Though, as you stated, we are coming up on the end of the year, and one of the things that young families struggle with their children is the issue of Santa Claus.

[01:38] And when the children start to get old enough and this is, you know, could be four years old, could be seven years old, eight years old, it really depends on the family and the kids’ friends and the circumstances that they’re surrounding themselves with, but there starts to become a disbelief or a question around Santa Claus. And is it real? And so he suggests a specific grandpa did this, but it could be a parent taking the child aside and letting them know that it’s now their turn to be Santa Claus. So what does that mean? Well, it means that instead of being overtly focused on receiving, which is what typical Santa Claus space is, right? We go and we sit on his lap or we write a letter and we ask for things that

[02:32] we want to shift the focus to being the giver. And so for the child that gets to be Santa Claus, they get to be the giver. And as the parent or grandparent, you want to help facilitate opportunities to do this. So it could be as simple as sweeping the neighbor’s porch. It could be taking flowers to somebody that’s maybe in a hospital. It could be visiting a soup kitchen and just spreading the love or serving the soup, whatever it is that child wants to do to focus on giving and being Santa Claus and, you know, dress included or not, doesn’t really matter. And the shift in focus enables them to acknowledge that Santa Claus is in endless forms. I mean, not only when we’re walking around the town, do we see a whole

[03:29] bunch of literal Santa Clauses in the Salvation Army bell ringer space or, you know, the man that’s or woman sitting at the thing at the mall or, you know, fill in the blank where you see them physically. But we can start to look for others that are giving. And I just thought it was a brilliant example of a way to shift the child’s focus as well as help them with a potentially challenging, you know, one could even say sort of scary transition that a child needs to make from thinking that Santa Claus is a real thing to realizing that Santa Claus exists every single day and is all in the act of giving. Oh, I think that’s valuable for all of our listeners because it’s flipping and any one of us can handle that so we can look and be

[04:22] teaching our kids, our spouses, ourselves, maybe when we’re like, Oh, I need this. Wait, hold on. Maybe I get this. Yeah. It’s pretty good. So in the book, there’s another story about a mentor who impacted a child’s life with shoelaces. Tell us the shoelace story. Why that was so valuable. Absolutely. So there was a young child that was born with only one hand. And when all the kids put on tennis to go out at recess, he was unable to tie his shoelaces and the teacher always had to do it and that became very problematic. It really caused the child to feel completely disconnected from his friends and his abilities and have real struggle in his self-confidence. And this teacher went home one weekend and practiced and figured out how

[05:25] to tie a shoe with just one hand and came to the child on Monday, taught him how to tie the shoe with just one hand. I can’t even fathom doing that. And the transformation and the self-confidence of that child and the ability to now go play with his friends quickly, it was very of course, impacted every single aspect of that child’s life so much so that many decades later he’s remembering it and sharing the story and the ability that it gave him in terms of freedom and capacity to go play. Ooh, I love it. All right. We’re going to use that example and we’re going to unpack it. So I’m making a broad assumption with this and it’s not true, but we’re going to use a broad assumption, which is often we live in a society

[06:29] where if someone has a challenge using the shoe challenge, one hand, what would happen now is they’d say, well, we’re going to get you Velcro shoes, or you’re going to wear slip-ons. This is, I mean, that’s kind of how it feels like a lot now. That didn’t happen. So now we’re going to flip this and say, okay, Kim, in your career and the work that you do with helping people, where are you applying the one-handed technique, meaning you found problems, you went through with those problems, you figured out how to solve them. Where are you applying the one-handed technique and helping out? Well, there are two places without a doubt. And the first is our current structure, C-U-R-E-N-C-E. This is the app plus account that drives savings behavior and

[07:26] disconnects our income from our checking accounts. And there’s absolutely people that can do this on their own, but for 80% of America, a structure is so valuable because then it happens automatically. And we are seeing the bulk of the people, there’s about 6,000 some people in current now. I’m very connected with the owners of the platform. So I’m aware of people beyond my own organization and their average savings rate is 38%. 38% of their income is being saved because of the structure. So it’s a very simple thing to install. And yet we have had numerous clients opt out of it just because they didn’t give it the time. And so this is the second thing that I’m going to share is a long-term perspective.

[08:23] It is so difficult. And this is true with currents. This is true with life insurance. This is true with those mortgage payments we’ve been talking about earlier, episodes, that it is a long-term perspective that we must adopt and that is so difficult in today’s fast food world. Yet we know this, we know we can’t just go to the gym one time. We know that while we can get away with eating fast food one time, we can’t do it every single day, or we’re not going to have healthy insides and our brain is not going to be sharp. We know that we must bring batteries included and brain on to our tasks at hand, or we will not get the full effectiveness of our work. And yet sometimes we don’t. And so those 1%ers that we’ve talked about, those A-listers, those people

[09:16] that everybody wants to be around, they find a way to do that. They find a way to be batteries included, brain on, game ready, no matter how they may be feeling or whether or not they had their second cup of coffee in the morning or a good night’s sleep the night before, I mean, fill in the blank. There are so many things that we can as human beings work around or through or overcome that let us really contribute at the top of our game when the game is on. And then yes, of course we have times when we’re down on purpose. And if we schedule our lives that way so that we’re rested and refreshed and ready to go, then we do. Yes, absolutely. So going back to currents, you know, you said the people that

[10:11] are doing it are having a 38%. I wrote that down because like that’s shocking. That’s, depending on standards, I mean, I don’t know the number, but I think that’s almost triple, like the average, isn’t that about right? I think America’s savings rate is down in the 4% range, but it was up in the 20% range during 2020. We can do it. Yeah, they were capable of it. So going full circle back to humankind and then pulling in the shoelace story, did he get it? The shoelace tied perfectly his first time? No, like that’s not how it works. Did the mentor have to learn for an entire weekend? Yeah. When we go and approach our finances, which is, I would say probably a little bit more complicated than a shoelace, like do we really expect

[11:03] it to get perfect the first time? Yeah, that’s a challenge. It is. So for you, how are you incorporating, let’s take the humankind element, which is these small acts, we’ve got currents, small act, and so it’s really, it’s a behavior. So how are you incorporating the behavior? I mean, I guess these episodes, you know, we’re like inspiring, we’re like, come on, get that 38% plus savings and those habits. What is the Kim on top of the mountain just climbed it and says, Kim’s humankind comment today, what would that be? Well, I think because we’ve watched people with their personal finances for over 30 years, I say we, so myself, my husband who has the software that helps other advisors. So I get to see other advisors clients also.

[11:49] So I have a much broader view than just my own clientele, which is still a pretty large number in and of itself, it’s amazing. The small little things that can make such a huge impact. And that’s really what the humankind message is, is you can hold a door open, smile at somebody, use somebody’s name when they have it plastered on their uniform at the coffee station or whatever you’re doing in the morning. There, the list is just endless. I love the book because at the end of each chapter, it specifically says here’s what you can do. And at the end of the whole book, there’s just a long list of resources that you can turn to for giving. And it doesn’t always take money. Sometimes it’s time. Sometimes it’s attention.

[12:39] Sometimes it’s just really being conscious of the people around you that are human and that we can treat as humans and really enable your sense of time to shift because a very natural reaction, I have it myself is I don’t have time. And so he encouraged the use of the word yet. I don’t have time yet. I haven’t found my job yet. I don’t have the great relationship yet to train your brain, to start looking for it. If you don’t have it yet, then that means you keep looking. So I thought that was a neat little aspect of a storyline in the book as well, to get our minds and our brains focused on what we can do. And the amazing amount of capability that can be brought forth with just a little bit of time and sometimes not any money, sometimes money

[13:41] involved in making a difference for others and how good it makes us feel, which then just enables us to go do it again and again. I love it. That’s awesome. We’ll make sure to put a link to the book. Kim, thank you for sharing the insights. And I would say through this episode, you’ve made someone’s life a little bit better. So thanks for sharing. Thank you for listening to the Prosperity Podcast. To take control of your money and have it work for you, visit ProsperityThinkers.com.