“Are You a Good Person?”: The Self-Serving Power of Serving Others [Part 2]

This altruistic perspective that we take on when committing our actions to causes bigger than us is one that makes use of the nobler aspects of our humanity, for the purpose of behavioral change and guaranteed action (on your part, for 'them'). Your self-centered excuses, fears, and perceived limitations quickly crumble at their foundations. They fall to the wayside, because such a service-oriented mindset leverages the values of decency, integrity, and "what's right" that are inherent in most of humanity, to set boundaries in which failure to perform at the level that we expect of ourselves and commit to, now has exponentially higher stakes: our self-respect.

In other words, not only does our failure to follow through now impact other people, but our ability to respect ourself -to be able to say with any sliver of confidence that, "yes, I am a good person"-is now intimately tied to our success at taking the right actions (those of external impact). It's now intricately connected to our effectiveness at generating the desired externally-impactful outputs, at the desired levels. By coupling our self-respect with our faithfulness at serving others, we effectively tap into an incredibly deep well of intrinsic motivation, simultaneously helping others in the process.

As long as we remain stuck in our own universes where everything revolves around us, in our own egos, then the miseries of fear, overthinking, and hesitation will perpetually plague us. It is in living each day for your fellow man and woman that you liberate yourself into the sweet glory of mission, of purpose, into the joyous victory of finally having value-oriented action and self-actualization supersede the self-limiting immature desires and beliefs of the monkey mind.

Now, ask yourself, based on the action you've taken so far this year, the outcomes that action has or hasn't generated, and the external impact of those outcomes, compared to the action you could have taken and the outcomes you could have generated, and the external impact you could have made: are you a good person?

Ignorance Kills

Ignorance cripples and impedes empathy, without which lack of compassion and of kindness to others is an all too easy, if not inevitable fate. As far as consequences go, ignorance is one of the most destructive forces of our time.

Thankfully, so is its antidote: education.

“Are You a Good Person?”: The Self-Serving Power of Selflessly Serving Others [Part 1]

"The art of happiness is to serve all. To be truly happy, we must think not only of how we can help ourselves, but how we can help others." -Anonymous

"When you're selfish, it's a dangerous thing, because...at a certain point in life, we're gonna come up against something that's tougher than us. And if we're always selfish, 9 out of 10 times if the only thing we think about is ourselves, when we hit something that's a lot tougher than us, we won't have a driving force to do what we do -and so it becomes easy for us to just step back, surrender, and say, 'forget it, I'll throw it away'."  -Inky Johnson

Title's a bit verbose, I know. But hear me out....

We all have dreams; if not dreams, goals; if not goals, desires. But counterintuitively, we all likewise tend to be held back by our own vanity and egocentrism. This problem is compounded by the fact that we are internally hardwired to avoid discomfort and uncertainty at all costs, all too often at the detriment of our own progress towards these desires, goals, and dreams. 

So if the things that we do are wholly motivated by self-centeredness, we have little incentive to overcome our inherent self-sabotaging, discomfort- and fear-avoidant human natures; and we have little reason to do the hardwork of bypassing the internal and external hurdles that life throws at us. Extrinsic motivators such as money and external validation can initially be helpful at spurring us into action, but we soon find that, on their own, they are not consistently reliable at motivating us and can quickly become crutches. So what would be a better way to respond to this problem? 

Perhaps the most effective way for us to overpower the self-sabotaging aspects of human nature is by doing what we do, with someone else in mind. When you yearn and hope to help somebody else, something in you, something in your humanity, drives you to passionately do and pursue your work until you've gotten that person the help that they need or could benefit from. One then comes to the realization that, 'it's not about me, it's bigger than me' -a very powerful mindset shift.