Choose to Take the Journey

In interacting with other people, you can either focus on giving value or taking value.  Giving value involves adding something of value to someone’s life, leaving them better off than how you found them.  Taking value involves stealing someone’s time, energy, or resources for your own benefit.

Giving value can be a scary experience.  There’s always the chance you don’t get anything back in return.  Or worse, your actions go unappreciated.  When someone doesn’t appreciate what we do, what we give, or even what we say, we may feel as if our generosity is misdirected.  It’s easier to be a taker, to only do what’s in your own best interests.  By constantly asking, “What’s in it for me?” you might maximize your returns from this world.  However, this strategy only works in the short term.

In the long term, being a taker undermines your psychological well-being, and ultimately your level of success.  Forget about morality, karma, or social convention.  Speaking from a purely functional point of view, taking value leads to psychological poverty.  If you focus on taking, you imply to your subconscious mind that your value as a person is a limited resource.  And that if you continue to give it away, you will run out.  This is a major cause of neediness.  The reason is because if we feel as if we are taking value from someone else without giving anything in return, we become afraid.  Afraid they will leave us.  Afraid they will remove their value from our lives.  This is an attitude of scarcity.

If instead we focus on giving value, we stop feeling needy.  We know that we make other people’s lives better and therefore there is less fear of losing them.  Your potential to generate value in other people’s lives and in your own is never-ending.  Your value is limitless.  You will not run out.  So be generous with your life.  Live as if you have everything you already need, and you will.

//What’s something you can do today to add value to someone else’s life?  Share your experience below and inspire others to do the same.