Giving and helping others are wonderful things. We are appreciated when we give to others through charity, volunteer work, or other acts of kindness; and rightly so. When we can help another person in some way, it creates a spirit of goodwill, and it’s one of the single most important acts we can do for our own happiness.
What’s often overlooked though is how much consciousness, caring, time, money, and energy each one of us already puts into significantly helping other people every day – through the work we do.
Every hour we’ve spent in a classroom, in an internship, and at work is an hour we’ve spent honing and perfecting our skills. Every dollar we’ve spent for tuition, books, seminars, travel – and of course those most expensive of seminars, the cost of failure or loss that have added to our wisdom – is a dollar we’ve spent investing in our ability to do our work well.
And every ounce of energy we’ve spent thinking about, worrying over, creating ideas for, and sweating through hard work and difficult times is an ounce of energy that increases our ability to provide some kind of product or service to another human being.
It’s popular these days to dismiss all this because we’re doing it for the money; as though earning money cheapens our efforts, makes our efforts base, selfish, or materialistic.
But earning a living from what we do makes it possible and reasonable for us to do it. When demagogues lecture young college graduates to forego making money, and instead to do something else that helps people, they are telling them that what we do to make money does not help people.
This, of course, is exactly the opposite of the truth.
Money is the great measure of value. That some people get money through deceit or fraud or through the use of political power or manipulation does not negate the fact that most of us make our livings doing something that is of value to other people – and to enough other people that the aggregate of what they pay allows for us to afford those things we need and want.
The contractor we hired to remodel our house some years ago was not simply willing to hammer some nails to help out in our time of need. He makes his living doing what he does. We paid him a lot of money, and in return we got all the skill, experience, and knowledge, familiarity with the sub-contractors, and accountability that led to the finished product we were happy with. The work he did then continues to add to our quality of life every single day.
He didn’t do this as a sacrifice; it was the most moral and benevolent of human interactions: it was an exchange.
Think of the work you do. How many hundreds or thousands of hours have you invested in learning the skills you use? How many years have you spent practicing those skills to earn the level of competence you bring to your work today?
This is what you give back to the world each and every day, without even thinking about it.
If you run a business, you provide the goods or services people want. Whether that’s manufacturing vitamins or tool making equipment, teaching, mining minerals, drilling for oil, or selling real estate, you bring something into the world that wouldn’t otherwise be there.
If you work as a software engineer, a roofing contractor, or a salesman, you are doing something that adds to the problem-solving capacity of your community.
If you work in marketing, music, medicine, or manufacturing, you’re adding to the quality of life of other people every single day you work.
For some of us, work is more of a job – something we do primarily because it pays the bills. For others, it’s something we get absorbed in, and we enjoy using the skills we’ve honed. For others, work is a genuine calling – something we must do, something we feel a profound sense of meaning and purpose in doing.
This last scenario is a wonderful thing. It allows us to bring everything we have to the work we do, and to feel deeply satisfied in the process.
But whether our work is a calling or whether it’s mainly a paycheck, it’s still what we spend a lot of our waking life engaged in, and that’s a level of practice and commitment that’s hard to equal in terms of charity or volunteer work.
As I drive by businesses in town, I pay attention to those that are closed. Whether they’re businesses I’ve used or not, I feel a sense of loss. There’s one more possibility that doesn’t exist.
My profession of psychotherapy and life coaching is considered a “helping” profession. I love what I do, and I’m proud of the work I do. But I’ve got news for anybody who sorts work out in such terms: every profession is a helping profession.
In the market, the mundane, self-interested market, if you’re not helping somebody do something they want or need to do, then you won’t make a living.
If you want to feel how much good there is in the world through people’s day to day work, just imagine any of your favorite businesses… gone.
Imagine your favorite grocery store closed. Imagine that pizza place that you take for granted shut down. Imagine your doctor has closed his or her practice. Imagine no new computer when yours finally crashes, no good place to take your car for repairs, nothing interesting on radio or TV, no gas for your car, no fruit or vegetables or meat for your meals.
Then you can begin to appreciate how much good is brought to us each and every day by people doing nothing more altruistic than their own self-interested pursuit of a good living.
Help people. Be kind, empathetic and generous in your life. Such an attitude is heartful; it brings a deeply meaningful spirit to ourselves and the people around us, and is central to our human connections. Kindness and empathy are core virtues, and they create an essential benevolent cycle.
But never lose sight of the incalculable good we are already bringing, and that others are bringing to us, through what we do regularly to earn money. Kindness, empathy, and generosity are qualities that good work asks of us; and this built-in benevolence is part of the joy we get to rightfully feel at work.
PS: I’m currently expanding my life coaching practice. Go to my website to sign up for a free 30-minute initial conversation.
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