9.
Generosity: Your candle loses
nothing when it lights another
Elisabeth Elliot
and her husband were part of a group of missionaries who tried to make contact
with the Auca Indians in Ecuador in the 1950s.
Five of the men (including Elliot’s husband) who went to befriend the
Aucans were killed by Aucan spears. Instead
of returning home, Elliot chose to remain in Ecuador and finally converted the
Aucans. To improve one’s generosity,
Maxwell gave three tips: give something away, put your money to work and find
someone to mentor.
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Webster’s
definition
the
quality or fact of being generous
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My thoughts
The choice of
Elliot as a model of generosity irks me.
Missionaries are convinced that they are helping people by converting
them. I used to believe that
missionaries were noble to give up their creature comforts in exchange for the
unknowns in places like Africa and South America, until Chinua Achebe’s Things
Fall Apart became a compulsory text in English class. The pain of a man whose traditions were
slowly decimated by the missionaries and their converts struck me in
surprise. Here was the first time I read
about the impact of conversions from the perspective of people who were deemed
less civilized than the missionaries.
Maxwell’s tip on mentoring someone is very good advice for readers in
senior management. Very often, they
would be busy with their responsibilities and ensuring that KPIs are met or
even exceeded. However, from an entity’s
perspective, mentoring within the entity creates the foundations of succession
planning within the entity. Of course
the board always has its rationale when a new CEO is appointed from outside the
entity, but it is also often reported in the media that C-level personals and
VPs suddenly also find the overwhelming urge to develop their personal
interests months and even weeks after a new leader helms an entity.
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