Trying to pour from an empty cup fails at a rate of 100%.
“The human mind is selfish by way of the default setting.
Selflessness, while the desired setting, requires a manual system update.
What they don’t tell you is that selflessness requires selfishness.
If you don’t take care of you, you’ll always be trying to run on empty.”
-Ray Zingler on Twitter
Everybody wants to add value.
Everybody wants to make an impact.
Everybody wants to make a difference, right?
But then why do so few make actual, tangible differences in the lives of others, despite desiring to be selfless and do so?
It’s because most people have good intentions, but don’t understand how to set the table to be able to act on their intentions.
Most think having a good heart for others is enough, but it isn’t.
If you want to make a difference, you have to be wildly intentional about it. Every single day.
You have to live and act in a way that allows you to free up bandwidth to do what we all (all as in people desiring to be upstanding, productive members of society) actually want to do and I learned it requires the exact opposite of what we want to be.
I learned that in order to be selfless, you have to be selfish.
See when I was younger, I had a pure heart that was focused on service.
I said yes to literally everything in my life because I saw the good in it. I saw what my yes “could” do for others.
What I didn’t see was how all of my yes’s could quickly turn into working 7-day work weeks, 80+ hours a week. I worked 355+ days per year with more 14-hour days than I could ever begin to calculate.
I did this for almost 7 years. No vacations. No time away. “No days off” wasn’t a cute hashtag on the internet, it was my life, as I was choking down a Tupperware full of cold chicken & rice during the 180-second window I would sometimes have in between my every hour on the hour clients.
My Jewish kids were down to train on Christmas day, so why not?
As you could probably imagine, I started to feel some of that burn out stuff they talk about.
What I learned is that my unsustainable lifestyle was actually getting in the way of what I really wanted to be, which was selfless.
Once I learned this, I became a bit more selfish, which consequently opened the doors for me to be more of what I really wanted to be: Selfless.
