What is the real purpose of accumulating wealth? Does wealth give us a sense of fulfillment or just a sense of security?
Imagine a perfect scenario where you don’t want for anything. You have all the money you need, and you lack nothing. What then is the money for? Once we hit financial stability, where we can cover all the necessary expenses of life, what do we do with it? If we are honest, most of us just think about ourselves, and it’s not entirely our fault. We are constantly bombarded with how to make more money, enhance our margins, profit more, get the pay raise, the list goes on. Our culture and society send us the message that we are the only ones that matter. How many self-help books do you see on a day-to-day basis? The self-help genre represents one of the world’s largest markets, but how many books do we see about helping others succeed?
Don’t get me wrong; there is nothing wrong with helping and focusing on improving yourself. It is a critical and essential thing that we all go on the journey of self-improvement. The danger of the self-improvement journey is that we get so focused on ourselves that we never look outward. When we forget money is just a tool to accomplish our goals and not the end all be all goal, things get messy. Being truly financially free and having mastery over money gives us the unique opportunity to provide others with value. In this article, we will talk about how to be effective in serving and helping others, why that is important for us, and how serving others is the key to a life of fulfillment.
Key Ideas:
- Looking outside yourself and providing value to others is the key to fulfillment
- Without trust, any effort to provide value to people will fall short of your intention.
- You can’t fake authenticity.
- You need to be trustworthy and have trustworthy people in your life.
- True fulfillment comes from living for more than yourself in all areas of your life.
- Happiness is a constantly fleeing emotion where fullfillment is sustainable.
Why Should We Care?
I have heard many “bumper sticker” theologies that boil down to treating others like you want to be treated. Sure this is nice, but if I am being honest, I often view this as a secondary marker or goal to my own selfish motivations. In other words, I will help someone if I am already taken care of or if it serves me. Living a life centered around yourself constantly requires more effort, stimulus, or the next thing to feel happy or even content. It is a draining way to live life because we deny our natural need for community. If we really want to break the chains that are holding us back, we need to understand the difference between happiness and fulfillment and our nature as social creatures.
Happiness is Fleeting. Fulfillment is Sustainable.
We all want to be happy, but the problem with happiness is it is an emotion and fleeting by nature. It changes with the wind. We can be happy one moment and angry in the next. When we chase happiness as the primary goal, it naturally makes us tired and exhausted and leaves a feeling of defeat in the long term.
Replacing the goal of happiness with the pursuit of fulfillment is where the magic happens. That is the secret sauce to a life of true freedom. Living for yourself can make you feel happy in the short term, but living for others creates fulfillment in the long run.
No matter your background or specific personality breakdown, giving and living for others has a great impact on us. We can see physiological benefits such as lower blood pressure, increased longevity, and improved mental health. (The Science Of Generosity) Human beings are social animals. We are designed to be in community with one another. When we live outside that framework, our fulfillment level goes down, and our anxiety and overall quality of life worsens.
How To Be Effective Helping People:
Unfortunately, just because we are social creatures does not mean living for others is a natural thing for us to do, let alone be effective at. In order to be effective in helping others, we need to cultivate trust. It may seem strange that to help someone, there needs to be an element of trust but let me prove it to you.
Let’s say I am at a restaurant with my wife and young daughter, and my daughter is crying as babies sometimes do. If my wife picks her up and attempts to comfort her, that is a positive gesture that my wife gives, and my daughter (River) and I can receive. River is settled and feels at ease, and I know River is in great hands with my wife.
What if instead of my wife picking her up and comforting her, a stranger comes and picks her up and tries to comfort her. Even if the intent of the stranger was to help a small child and some struggling parents, the gesture completely misses the mark because we don’t know the stranger. Since we don’t trust the stranger, their ability to help is limited.
Unfortunately, we can’t know everything. Trust allows us to make decisions and survive in the world without perfect information. Trust is at the center of the reasons for buying the things we buy, the friends we have, and our interactions with others. If we want to be effective in helping others, we need to master the skill of cultivating trust.
Elements of Trust:
Trust isn’t something you can simply check off a box and have with someone. Our intentions don’t affect whether someone trusts us, it’s something more instinctual. We can have “chemistry” with someone which is a form of trust and then we can immediately distrust another individual. Why? It’s because trust is a very human feeling that supersedes knowledge and experience. We all know people we consider reliable, yet we don’t trust them as far as we can throw them. Conversely, we have friends in our lives that may not appear to be trustworthy to the outside world but we trust them with our lives.
Trust fundamentally requires two things: generosity and authenticity. We like you because you are authentic which is the foundation of trust. We then ultimately trust you because we know who you are (authenticity) and we know you have our back (generous).
The bad news about authenticity is you can’t fake it. There is no shortcut to being more authentic. What’s funny about the world we live in today is, authentic is one of the easiest things to be while simultaneously being one of the rarest qualities we see. Feeling comfortable in your own skin gives others the confidence to do the same. That’s why we all crave authentic people in our lives even if we don’t necessarily agree with them.
The reason generosity is so important is twofold. First people don’t trust takers, they trust givers. The quickest way to build trust is to do something for someone and not expect anything in return. We describe these people as “having our backs”. The second is it cultivates community. When we live generously, we create a community that can lift others up. Generosity breeds generosity. Authenticity breeds authenticity. When you combine authenticity with generosity, I can promise you your life will feel infinitely more fulfilled and your relationships will thank you for it.
At the end of the day, you will value the relationships and people you helped more than the things you bought. It’s up to us to choose generosity daily.
