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This is the 10% happier podcast. I'm Dan Harris. Hello my fellow suffering beings how we doing today one of the quickest and easiest ways to get happier is to be generous.

And to be clear, I'm not just talking about money here, it can be holding the door open for

somebody, calling a friend who's struggling giving a compliment you get the idea

there is an enormous amount of scientific research to suggest that being

generous financially or otherwise has significant psychological and physiological benefits.

Not for nothing, the Buddha often instructed his followers to train in generosity

before he had them do any meditation.

So the case for generosity is pretty damn strong. That said,

there are a ton of thorny questions that arise out of this simple proposition.

If giving is so obviously helpful, why does so many of us struggle with it?

And why is the subject often so boring?

How do you give wisely and effectively?

How do you make sure it's not going to waste?

How do you get past the stinginess and second thoughts that many of us experience immediately following an impulse to give?

And here's a sticky one.

If you're being generous in part to make yourself happier is the presence of that self-interest a corruption of your generosity

Chris Anderson has spent a lot of time thinking about this he's the curator of Ted

Basically the guy who came up with the idea to make Ted Talks free and widely available and subsequently a huge cultural phenomenon, a story

that quite obviously links to the subject of generosity by the way.

Chris has a new book called Infectious Generosity the goal of which is in his

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