The Desert of Arizona
Cloudy 40 Degrees – 7:27 a.m.
“If the work you are doing is that important for people, you should be doing it for free.”
Ahhh… don’t you love getting people in your sphere with ideas like this? It’s a recurring theme in the world. Hopelessly confused individuals who think their opinions should affect your behavior.
Free isn’t free. There’s always a price.
When someone who COULD do for themselves chooses NOT to do and then asks someone ELSE to DO for them, they might get a “free” thing out of the deal. But the price they pay is head and shoulders higher than if they had just paid their own way.
They pay in the hit to the respect others have for them. They pay in the perception shift that is created when their actions clearly show them to be a “taker.” And ultimately, they pay in the damage done to their own internal self-image. They’re probably not even aware of that, but it is baggage that can get pretty heavy if you ignore it.
When you gift something to someone who never asks for anything, however, it often makes them uncomfortable. You could say they have issues “receiving,” but that might not be the issue. The issue might simply be the dissonance they feel with an exchange where half of it is missing.
For people who have no sense of their own value, things are very different. You offer them something for free and they ask for more! And then, they often complain.
It’s actually comical if you can stand back far enough to see the joke.
The challenge in business is that this second group of people is often the noisiest group. So it’s not hard to find yourself catering to folks like this simply because they are the loudest voices. They drown everyone else out.
Life is too short for this.
I have a simple way to deal with FREE. If I can serve 1 person as easily as 1,000 with a product/service/idea, I don’t mind offering things for free when I choose.
But if I offer something that takes my life force and directs it at an individual, then I am far more reticent to flirt with free. Because you can really hurt someone that way.
Ultimately, you can really damage someone by heaping a pile of free on their head. The damage comes from you helping to perpetuate a world view that is destructive to their inner belief in their own value.
People who truly value themselves do not act this way.
How do you want to deal with “free” in your world? Get your answer, stick to it, make no apologies.