Follow Your Passions

If you light a lamp for somebody, it will also brighten your path. - Buddhist saying

If you want happiness for an hour, take a nap. If you want happiness for a day, go fishing. If you want happiness for a year, inherit a fortune. If you want happiness for a lifetime, help somebody. - Chinese Proverb

How wonderful it is that nobody need wait a single moment before starting to improve the world. - Anne Frank

Our friends should be companions who inspire us, who help us rise to our best. - Joseph B. Wirthlin

Listen to people as they talk to you through out your day, and you will quickly find that they all have problems. Colleagues who keep complaining about the way something never works right, or how a process doesn’t make any sense. Friends who are trying to improve their careers, or go back to school. In fact, you don’t have to listen to them to find out something is amiss - just watch your manager’s body language, or note a family member’s mood being unusually negative. Someone who is normally talkative and outgoing being reserved and quiet instead.

The signs are all around us, and where there are signs, there are opportunities to help. Of course, the person has to want the help or you can’t get very far in your efforts. But I have found that once I changed my approach and thought process when it comes to acting on opportunities to assist others, people were generally not only open to having my help but were very grateful for it.

My natural tendency used to be that I was being respectful by just butting out of issues people were facing. If I met a coworker for lunch, and she told me about something she just couldn’t find the answer to, or a project she didn’t know how to take the next step with, I would listen with a caring ear and process what she had said, but then drop it there and move on. It occured to be at some point, though, that some of the times people were telling me these things, they were either consciously or unconsciously asking for help to get past their problems. So I’d get back to the office, pop onto Google or some internal resource, and look up the answer to what they were looking for. If someone was trying to figure out the next step to a project, maybe I know someone who would be good to point them in the right direction and make that connection for them.

These are both small gestures, don’t take much time or effort, but could make a huge difference to someone’s day. Expand this to a way of thinking, of viewing the world, and suddenly you are helping lots of people every day, in both small and big ways. You may be thinking that this sounds like you’d spend a lot of your time helping others and not be able to get your own work done in the process. Allow me to suggest that you will find you can get more of your own work done by doing more for others. By helping others, you are building connections, and those people you are connecting with and helping have skills and contacts that can likewise help you get your projects done and your questions answered. Ever hear the phrase “it’s not what you know, but rather who you know”? This is how to really put that quote into action in a huge way.

Keep the circle going. Help others, and when others help you thank them for it. Heck, send them a little thank you card just for something small someone did for you every once in a while. Think how you would feel if someone took the time to do that for you, how great it would be to find that in your mailbox. Actually hand-write it yourself on real paper rather than an e-mail (e-mail is fine but lacks the feel of that personal touch for most people still).

You’ll be astounded at how enriched your own life quickly becomes if you have a small filter in the back of your mind constantly sifting interactions with other as they occur and looking for the gems of opportunity to show themselves.