"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.
