Gifts With No Thought Are Worthless
The best gifts are the ones that you’ve thought about, chosen for yourself, and then gave to someone else. They’re also the ones that are designed for the person you’re giving them to. In essence, they are one-of-a-kind. You’ve taken the time to think about that person, figure out what they’d like or appreciate, and then executed them with skill and intention.
The worst gifts are the gifts you buy for someone because you have no idea what to get them. To be blunt, they’re worthless. You give them the gift of thinking “oh, I don’t know what to get her” and end up with a sackful of garbage you deemed “fairly priced” at a chain store. How lame is that? It might not be apparent in the moment, but when you look back on it later, will it be obvious? Probably not.
To be clear, sometimes the best gifts are ones you’ve thought about and chosen for yourself but you’ve given to others. A book I wrote might have been a gift that I thought of myself as giving or giving to others. It is not, however, a “worthless gift” because it was really written for me, a compliment that I was consciously giving to myself. This is true of every such gift: it is one that the giver intended for the recipient.
The best kind of gifts–those I mentioned in previous weeks–are intentional gifts. The intention is that they are meaningful to the recipient. You are creating something with the intention of it being a meaningful, important, or special gift. They might not always be the most practical things in the world, but they’re done for you and done for someone else with purpose and care.
Worthless gifts are those that do not have this kind of intention behind them. I’ve seen this at Christmas time: someone buys a whole bunch of stuff–mostly toys–to give to her children because she doesn’t know what else to get them. The kids get all kinds of crap, some that they want and some that they don’t want, but eventually the stuff ends up in the closet to be forgotten.
The thoughtful gift is always better than the thoughtless one. It is not worth it to get people a lot of worthless crap (even if it’s “fairly priced”) because you have no idea what they want or need. Don’t buy a bagful of things that everyone can use because you think they might like them regardless. Don’t buy a bunch of gifts for someone just because you didn’t know what else to do. Find out what they want or need and get them something useful, useful in their life. Maybe even get them a gift certificate toward a task or activity that they would like to do.
There’s nothing wrong with getting someone a useless gift, but don’t wrap it up as thoughtful. The US is drowning in crap that we don’t need and mostly just clutter our homes. We have enough junk already, so let’s stop creating more of it. If you have no idea what to get someone–especially someone you know well–then don’t buy them anything at all. Give them a hug, tell them you care about them, and leave it at that.
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Title: How Much Is A Gift To You Worth?
Author: Steve Pavlina [ARTICLE START]
I’m a fan of the idea of giving gifts at the holidays. It’s fun to receive something from someone, and it’s nice to have a non-stressful reason to give someone something as well. The problem is that most people don’t know how much of a gift is worth giving.
There’s a great story by Kryder Kryder that illustrates this point perfectly. He won a gift certificate worth $100 at McDonald’s as part of a promotion. As you might expect, he thought this was pretty cool, but then he started to think about the implications of winning something like this:
Winning $100 at McDonald’s isn’t really all that big of a deal. Let’s say I put the money in an interest bearing account and it gains 10% interest over the course of one year. I will have earned $110 in one year. If I put this into mutual funds which earn, say, 10% a year, I can expect to earn $114 in one year. If I get a loan at 6%, I could have earned $120. If I had won a month’s worth of food for me and my wife at McDonald’s for free, that would be worth about $50.
He goes on to list the relative values of all the other prizes he could have won at McDonald’s too. Each prize was just less than the last one, and each one increased it’s value as it came closer to being more useful or meaningful to him. The interesting thing about all of the prizes was that none of them were worth the “contribution to society” that the $100 gift certificate was worth.
All of this got me thinking about how much value we place on gifts. We think that a $10 shirt is more appreciated than a $5 one, but we don’t reflect on how much time it takes to earn that $5 or even whether someone had paid us to do something with our time. We think that a fancy dinner out is better than a nice home-cooked meal, but we don’t consider how much time and effort goes into both.
Conclusion
I think the point is this: gifts are often a reflection of how much someone cares about you, not how much that thing is worth in a monetary sense. I’m not saying that one $10 shirt is the same as another, but we do have to consider the value of what we’re giving and not just how much it costs.
If you take someone out to dinner (which costs $20), chances are they won’t be all that appreciative of your thoughtfulness if all you did was pay for them to go out to dinner.