Helpful.

I didn’t get here by myself, not by a long shot. You didn’t either. We all got a lot of help along the way. And we need to help others. We might think we have a choice in it, but we probably don’t. It might be that the only choice we have is whether to be more or less helpful, but our society is built on helping one another.

You could choose not to help your friends, and you’ll find that soon you won’t have any friends.

You could choose not to help your customers, and soon you’ll find you don’t have any customers.

You could choose not to help your colleagues, and soon you’ll find you don’t have a job.

Choosing to be helpful helps you too. The person who is truly helpful, that person is missed when they’re not around, that person is the one-and-only, “who you gonna call?”

Reassurance.

When we’re looking for reassurance, we’re not being helpful, we’re being selfish. Reassurance is what we want when we aren’t trying to serve our customer, our colleagues, our friends. “If I do this, perhaps John will like me” doesn’t always line up with, “If I do this, John will be better off”.

And then, if it doesn’t make John better off, you don’t take it personally because it wasn’t a hustle. When we’re looking for reassurance, the outcome affects us. When we’re looking to be helpful, the outcome is apart from us.

The end goal.

For most people, when you boil it right down, the end goal is to live a good life. What that word ‘good’ consists in of the subject for future writing, but it seems to me that some good component of it must consist in being helpful.