The Architecture of Generosity

When giving stops being spontaneous and becomes part of how a life is designed

Businesses are fairly clear about what success looks like - there’s a scoreboard, it’s numeric, and we build systems around it so that ‘winning’ is not a fluke but the predictable result of how cash moves through the business. Profit, in that world, is not supposed to be an accidental bi-product; it’s a line item that gets protected on purpose.

Mike Michalowicz’s book Profit First makes this explicit, and he gives businesses the blueprint to get out of the red and into profit. He takes the traditional accounting formula ‘Sales - Expenses = Profit’ and flips it to ‘Sales - Profit = Expenses’. The math doesn’t change, but the order does. Instead of hoping something will be left at the end of the month, business owners skim a small percentage off the top - he recommends just 1% to start - and then you let that constraint shape how everything else gets paid for. If profit isn’t intentional, Mike argues it gets eaten up by expenses that always seem more necessary and more urgent than profit.

What’s striking is not just that this works financially, but that it works behaviourally. It acknowledges a simple truth: if something is treated as optional, it will eventually be squeezed out by things that feel more immediate, more justified, more necessary.

Which raises a slightly uncomfortable question when you move out of business and into the rest of life. If you look at how most of us actually allocate our resources - money, certainly, but also time and attention - we tend to run some version of this (if we’re honest):

Income - bills - lifestyle - savings = whatever is left for other people.

In practice, this means that generosity is contingent. It happens when things are going well, when there’s a temporary surplus, when nothing large and frightening is looming on the horizon. It contracts quickly when there is a wobble in income, a new expense or even just a heightened sense of ambient risk (hello life since covid!).

This would be one thing if most people were openly saying ‘My priority is me and my household and that’s it.” But that’s not what most people believe. Most people have a different self-description - “I am someone who cares about others, who wants to contribute, who believes that being a decent human is helping people beyond my own immediate family.” Yes, if you follow the money, the time, the attention, there is often very little structure that gives that identity a reliable way to show up. It’s not that the intent is missing. It’s that the system is.

A charity donor I recently spoke with talked with me about ‘the tithe’ - the old tradition of many religions to have their followers give the first tenth of their harvest or income to the church. Not off the top, not out of whatever was left. Whether or not you’re religious, there’s something striking about that order of operations. Before you upgraded your house, before you maxed out your TFSA, you marked out a portion that was not for you at all.

The question I keep coming back to is - what would it look like to apply the Profit First business logic to our personal lives - not as a moral test (again, it’s not about intent), but as a design choice?

To take a small enough to be unthreatening, small enough to be really noticeable, portion of income and allocate it outward FIRST, rather than last.

Income - Giving = Lifestyle + Savings

Not ‘Income - Lifestyle - Savings = Maybe Giving if things go well’.

Giving as the portion that come off the top, in a way that’s intentionally small (at first) and consistent. One percent of income. And one percent of time and attention. Not as a grand philanthropic gesture, but as a structural decision: this portion moves beyond my household, every time, and the rest of my life gets built into that fact. Not as an aspirational goal, but as a constraint to work within.

There is a consumer narrative that frames earning as a means to improve our own lives, to upgrade, to experience more, to ‘live the good life’. There is a scarcity narrative that is even more prevalent lately, that suggests that holding onto what we have is the most rational response to an unpredictable future. And there’s a kind of optimization narrative that quietly reassures us that generosity can be deferred - that we will do it more meaningfully later, when we have more time and more money.

Individually, each of these narratives has some validity, but collectively, they create a system in which giving is perpetually delayed. On paper 1% is almost nothing, in the body, in our scarcity-soaked nervous systems, it can feel sharper than it should. Not because of the math, but because of the narratives we spend our lives swimming in - or for many of us, treading water.

For me personally, I spend all my working time (and much of the time I’m not supposed to be working) thinking about charities, so I end up donating very often but not a lot. I am completely in a scarcity mindset. Part of this is being the sole operator of a relatively new small business, and part of this is being the breadwinner for a small family with a fairly unknown financial future - will we have elderly parents with expensive ailments to take care of, will our children live with us forever because of the brutal housing market, will our house crumble to the ground because of some new climate disaster caused by a short-term focused political system and greedy corporate leaders? But all of this is fear-led thinking. It’s scarcity at it’s very best. It’s not helpful, it’s not realistic and it’s not charitable. Does having more money in savings make me feel safer? Would I notice if we had 1% less every year?

The joyous reason it’s so hard to get out of my scarcity mindset

It also makes me think about the ‘monkeysphere’. Am I deeply engaged with all of the organizations I donate to? No. I’m not set up to be. The scale of the world we are now exposed to, the number of causes, crises and needs that cross our paths every single day is beyond what we are evolutionarily equipped to process. There is a concept called “Dunbar’s Number’ from anthropologist Robin Dunbar’s work on social group size (or the ‘monkeysphere’) grounded in the idea that humans can only maintain a finite number of meaningful social relationships (around 150). Beyond that threshold monkeys go from one large group to forming two smaller groups, and people become abstract. Not because we lack empathy, but just because our brains can’t neurologically hold hundreds of people or organizations with the same depth.

Our world, this wild oversharing, social media world, invites us to have extremely light contact with far too many people. People we can’t care about. It changes the dynamics of how we think about other people, and how we think about ourselves. It creates too much self-interest and not enough neighbourly good will.

So instead of asking ourselves to expand our circle of people and organizations we care about, there’s an argument to deliberately define a smaller circle where our 1% - of money, time and attention - are really impactful to us, and make a difference in our sense of accomplishment and engagement.

However, most charities are going after supporters of other charities, people who are deemed ‘charitable’ and not necessary the people who care the most about X issue. This makes sense because it’s only a fraction of people donate to charitable organizations. The 2025 Generosity Index from the Fraser Institute shows Canadians donating to charity fell from 21.9% in 2023 to 16.8% in 2023. And the percentage of aggregate income donated to charity as fell from 0.55% in 2013 to 0.52% in 2023.

There is scale to this of course - for someone earning $40k a year, that 1% is not abstract. You feel that. It’s groceries, transit, a prescription that’s not covered, an overdue bill. It should not be on people who are already stretched to the edge to shoulder the burden of sustaining the nonprofit sector. (And yet, it’s always the people who are the worst off who give the most). And by the way, for full-time workers, 30% earned less than $50k in 2023. The median after-tax income was $70,500 for Canadians.

There is a justice dimension here. As income rises and particularly as assets accumulate, the percentage that is available - and arguably ought to move outward, can rise with it. A person with significant wealth giving 1% is not in the same ethical situation as a person on a precarious income giving 1%. If anything, the logic runs in the opposite direction: the higher your income, the more room there is for that percentage to climb, when you are talking about net worth, not just salary, that proportion could reasonably be much higher again.

So when I talk about 1% here, I don’t mean that as a universal standard. I mean it as the starting point that should be read differently at different income and wealth levels: for some, it’s an ambitious stretch, for others embarrassingly low. The question is less ‘what number is right?’ and more ‘what structure makes sense, given what you actually have and what you believe about fairness”.

But I think we do need a jumping off point and I think 1% makes sense because it’s big enough to be impactful over time, but small enough to not be painfully noticeable (as it is in the Profit First corporate world).

When you connect your 1% to the giving circle - what sits inside your monkeysphere: what/who you care about most- somethings shift. First, the act of giving isn’t adhoc but it represents specific commitments - how you show up. Second, you are more willing to engage in the feedback loop. I will open that monthly newsletter from this charity because it is MY charity. It begins to take a higher importance than the stack of never ending incoming emails.

Money is the obvious lever in this, and rightfully so, it keeps roofs over our heads and organizations running. But for many people, especially in certain season of life, money is not the scarcest resource - time is, focus is, emotional energy is.

If you extend the Profit First logic into those dimensions, the picture gets more honest. One percent of your week is just under two hours. It’s not huge, but it’s not nothing. You could spend it doomscrolling, or you could spend it inside your monkeysphere with those people and organizations outside of your immediate family who can get value from your time and energy.

It’s the same as money - if generosity of time doesn’t show up on your calendar, it will not be prioritized. Carving off one immovable block of time per week is possibly the time version of ‘Income - Profit = Expenses’.

However, if you’re like me, finding one more block of time in the week feels damn near impossible. Can you spend 15 minutes once a week reading the emails from your favourite charities? I guarantee you, you will feel more connected to the causes you support by catching up on their projects, their impact, their work, once a quarter.

The more dramatic the change is to your life, the less likely it is to happen, or to last. The point is to make it easier for the generous person you are, to actually come to the forefront with the tools you set up for yourself.

For example, you could try these steps:

1. Define what ‘profit’ means to you personally - the portion of money, time and/or attention that moves beyond my household and supports my chosen circle.

2. Select your giving circle - write down the organizations you will contribute to. Keep the list short enough that you can stay emotionally connected to each one.

3. Choose a percentage that feels survivable and honest - Money might not be the entry point if you don’t have it. If you’re in a higher-income or high-asset position, it might mean 1% is your minimum, not your ceiling. If you are in a high-asset position, talk to your wealth advisor to find out the most tax-efficient way to make your wealth work. It may well be that you can (and should for tax purposes!) commit to a higher percentage than you think.

4. Automate it - monthly donations are the easiest way to set this up. Charities are set up for it, and it’s better for you to not notice the 1% coming out, and for the organization to have stable income they can rely on. Better yet, see if your employer will match your donation. Or, pre-tax season, make your donations.

   For time, recurring calendar invites are the thing. Put the link to to your selected charities blog or Instagram or however you keep up with them so it’s one less step. Make it during a time when you’re already on your own. Make it as easy to do as possible.

5. Adjust the percentage - when you stop noticing it, reassess. Has your lifestyle really taken a hit? Is it possible to bump it up a quarter of a percentage? Did you get a new lower rate mortgage? Did your kids start driving themselves to school so you have more time? Be intentional about it.

None of this is about martyrdom or proving you’re a ‘good person’ by emptying yourself out. It’s about alignment, and underneath that, how we willing we are to loosen our grip when we have more than we need.

A single percentage point, consistently, can reshape expectations over time. It creates a pattern that can be adjusted gradually, without requiring a dramatic shift in identity or lifestyle. And perhaps more importantly, it changes what we pay attention to.

Right now, for many of us, including myself, there’s a gap between what we say we value and what our calendars and bank statements reveal. This is one way - a small and practical way - of narrowing that gap. Over time, if you keep doing it, your personal profit column looks less like a number on a spreadsheet and more like a list of organizations you are deeply committed to. The relationships you have invested in, the organizations you have helped stay afloat, projects you helped nudge into existence, systems changes you advocated for, people who are standing a little more steadily because you were there.

It’s a different kind of wealth. It’s quieter and harder to measure but it allows you to see and feel a real difference in the lives of others beyond your doorstep. It brings us closer to what ‘rich’ really means - strong relationships, fulfilment and purpose.