Your friend is an incredible writer or painter, or a musician, or maybe she’s just good fixing things.
You’ve asked her if she would be so kind to give you a poem, or she offered you to fix your bike. When you see the gift, you start seeing all the new possibilities. ‘This could be improved, expanded with just little effort.’ Change the typography, have it framed, how about the front break that isn’t working either… then the present becomes a project and that may as well be fine.
When your vendor give you an unexpected little something that wasn’t in the contract, when an artist is so kind to transfer the ownership of something they created to you, here are some ways to multiply it and yet conserve (and augment) its gift qualities:
Share it: show it to everybody, show it to your boss, tweet it and write about it on LinkedIn.
Steal it: take the poem and transform it, draw it with oil, create an essay out of it, borrow its structure for your next project.
Apply it: ride the bike, secretly use the gift, and come back to your friend and her boss with the impact it made.