Don't know what gift to give? Here is the answer

Few months ago I made a present to my wife – I ordered a bouquet of flowers for her with the delivery to her office. I’ve made the gift message: “for the most charming girl in her company name”. But the main point was in the fact that it was an anonymous delivery. I just wanted to entertain her. Right after she received the bouquet she contacted me and asked if it was me who sent the flowers. I not just told her that it wasn’t me but I even played the scene of jealousy.

I asked her to tell me with whom does she flirt at work. The working process of her department stopped that day. Her colleagues were trying to guess who was a mysterious admirer. My wife became the hero of the day. 

At the evening at home I confessed that it was me who sent the flowers. After it there followed a hurricane of positive emotions of such strength that I thought I would burst at the seams during the hugs. That day was very shiny and pleasant.

I desire to give to the people who are important to me gifts which would make them delighted or at least which they would like. But every time when some holyday eve comes the following thought attacks me: “Oh, dear! I need to get some presents for those and those people and wishfully such presents that they would like and not beyond the budget”.  Usually I don’t know where to start and any ideas which come first completely don’t suit me.  Has anybody ever had the same experience?    

I became tired to run across wall each time and decided to search the web to find some kind of algorithm for gifts ideas inventing. And how do you think how much of such algorithms are in the internet? I’ve found none. I believed that right after I press “Go” at the search engine there would be heap of different algorithms and systems which help with the gift ideas. But only disillusionment was waiting for me. I haven’t found anything interesting and a thought occurred to me: “Why shouldn’t I create my own system of gift ideas inventing which will help to invent more variants of interesting gifts and will help to get rid of painful ignorance of where to start looking”. Finally I’ve made it and want to share it with you.  

The system is simple. It consists of three parts:

1. You should define the most burning unmet needs of the donee.

To get help with this task I used Maslow's Hierarchy of Needs. We would need one of the core ideas of this hierarchy – all human needs can be divided into 5 groups: Physiological needs, Safety needs, Social needs, Esteem needs and Self-actualization needs.

Inside each group we should write down the specific needs of our donee (as much as possible).

2. We should invent as much as possible of different variants of most burning and unmet needs satisfaction and write them down in columns which are in front of the need’s rows.

3. Finally we should choose the optimal variant of the need satisfaction.

You can ask why should I complicate this matter with tables and dividing needs into groups? And how do I know that it really helps?

• First of all a gift that highly pleases a person always meets the most burning needs. This system helps                         you to stay focused on the main goal of a gift – to meet person’s needs. It helps you not to be distracted by   the secondary stuff.

• Secondly why should we divide the needs into groups such as physiological needs, safety needs etc?               People have thousands of different needs. Here is a melon.

                            

Imagine that each molecule of it is a person’s need.  We can turn it around and see all molecules (i.e. needs) which lie on the surface. But this is what everybody can see. We can see nothing new by using this method.

But if we divide the melon into separate pieces (i.e. groups) we can see many new molecules (i.e. needs) that we couldn’t see before (and something interesting is usually kept inside). 

Thereby we need to divide the needs into groups to find needs that are not immediately catch the eye. This helps to find original custom solutions.

• Thirdly you always know where to start from.

• Fourthly if you would keep structured information somewhere the next time you would like to think out a gift for the same person you would already have a pretty good basement to do it.

Try to use this system. Here is the Excel file with the description of the steps that should be taken for gift ideas creating. There is also needs and gift variants examples. “So all you have to do is to fill in the tables” – I wish I can say so but the main instrument is your brains. Nothing really interesting would happen without using your own brains. This system is not the wand but it is a good instrument for using your brains.

“Small gifts keep friendship, large – love” - Janina Ipohorska (Polish authoress)

Try to make good presents to people who matters to you.