Chapter 201

“This is what I believe we should all aim for: to make contributions to others’ lives that will grow infinitely in our absence.” - Rath

There are two critical pieces here to unpack; making contributions to other people’s lives and sustainability. Helping other people, and by contributions I don’t mean money, investing your time and energy into their needs situations and lives, appears to not even register on most people’s minds. Or if it does, it only takes up a fraction of 1% of their time talent and treasure. A fraction! Like 0.00123 fractions. I meet thousands of people each year as I travel and if I meet one or two world changers out of those thousands it is good. I so wish I was stretching the truth here, but everyone is pretty much 100% focused on themselves and their stuff and their issues, not helping someone else.

So as I travel I try to turn this fraction into a much larger number, making people aware of the scale and number of world challenges facing us as humans, and as stewards of the planet. I keep thinking that if 10% of us would sacrifice to make other people’s lives better, that would be a huge world changing number of helpers. But I am not gaining much traction. I mean it seems like I am, when I have the platform and am speaking and people are asking questions, but when the meeting is finished its allotted hour, all the conversations go back to their small miserable mundane trivial boundaries of work weather politics and TV.

That is the 99.99987 of the population. However there is that fractional group though, and they are the opposite. They live to help. In fact they are helping so much it hurts the people they say they have come to help. I so admire their energy and passion and generosity and selflessness! But they help in ways that hurt often and there is little to no thought of sustainability. 

Both sides could benefit from reading “When Helping Hurts” and then applying those points to their lives. 

We want to help. And the help to continue long after we do.