This post is about culture. Not culture in terms of society, but culture as in the culture in which I conduct myself. Did you know that we all have cultural values we live out every day? Our decisions are guided by them. As you live them out, even your impulses become guided by them. When I worked at The Point, we intentionally developed staff cultural values in which our staff and leaders would operate. They transformed the team into who we wanted to be, no matter who we actually were.

That principle isn’t new to me, because Amanda and I decided family cultural values when we first got married. I remember our first one: we were going to respect life; specifically, life that was given for our survival. That cultural value is why we quit eating fast food, namely, McDonalds. We knew that the life that was given to eventually become that eighth-inch patty was not respected or treated with dignity. So we stopped buying it. Even today, we try (as much as we can) to buy our meat either locally, or from grocery stores that we know source their meat from ethical places. And I haven’t had McDonalds in over a decade.

Perhaps the most important cultural value we have is generosity. We want to be generous in all things, and be known for generosity. Since we’ve been married, we have tried to live this value out even when it’s uncomfortable. We have tried to be generous with our time, volunteering for things that we probably could have been paid for. We have tried to be generous with our home, opening it up several times to those in need or in transition. We have tried to be generous with all of our resources, giving where we can and helping when we can.

I had a chance to sit in a small crowd in front of a very successful photographer doing a Q&A a few years ago. I lifted my hand and asked him my burning question: “Do you ever give any of your images away for free?” His answer was simply “Why would I do that?” Everyone softly laughed the conversation moved on. This isn’t a shot at him. Honestly, the night I met him, he was holding the door for everyone to come into where we were eating. And my time around him led me to believe he’s a very good and humble guy. But his answer wasn’t surprising. Generosity is counter-cultural to a business.

As a business owner of this website and my creative services, I’ve really tried to live out generosity. And one of the ways I do that is by giving away what I probably could license - some of my best photography. I give it away freely through Unsplash.

I use Unsplash as a means of living out generosity. It’s certainly not the only means of generosity. Using it doesn’t make you generous in the same way not using it doesn’t make you greedy. Yet as of the time of this writing, my work on Unsplash has been viewed 180K times and freely downloaded 670K times. A quick Google search showed me that an average hi-res image sells for around $25 through most services. If we play this out, I have given away over $16M in revenue. Where’s my tax write-off?! This number is of course hyperbolic, but 670K downloads is no joke. It will likely cross 1M in the not-so-distant future. That will be wild.

The title of this blog is how generosity changed everything. Let me tell you how.

Every large client I have ever worked for found me on Unsplash. Let’s start with the largest, and that’s Target. Yes, the $100B company has an art department that browses Unsplash to find creative content. They found a photo they liked, and rather than just downloading and using it (which according to the Unsplash licensing agreement, they had every right to), they sent me an email. Let me rephrase that… they went to my website and used the Contact form to reach out to me. They were that intentional.

When I first received their email, I thought maybe I was being phished. But it was a legitimate email, that came with a legitimate licensing agreement, which ended with me seeing my photo in every Target across the nation. When I offered this image freely on Unsplash, I never imaged I’d see it framed and behind glass in every Target, and that Target would be sending me a licensing contract and payment. That Target deal became something I would leverage as I sought other clients.

I’ve been on Unsplash for three years. Over those three years, I have uploaded 201 photos (as of this writing). Of those 201 photos, they have featured 112 of them loud and proud on their homepage. Today, I regularly get emails from companies wanting to work with me that discovered me on - you guessed it - Unsplash. I have had licensing deals, for-hire deals, and even ongoing partnerships and retainers. Everyone single one of them found me through Unsplash. Not Instagram. Not any other social media site. All Unsplash. Getty (their parent company) even invited me to become a paid contributor for them because of my Unsplash contributions.

All of this to say - generosity changed everything for me. It’s the reason I actually have a sustainable business now. And while I try to be generous in all things, it doesn’t always mean that I get it right every time. But generosity has been moving from decision to impulse for over a decade now, and I’m excited for the day where it will be my first impulse.

Visit my Unsplash page to see what I have there!

How Generosity Changed Everything

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