How helping others helps you

A study measured the time it took for children to quickly sift through hundreds of rubber balls to collect the one with their names on them.  The second time around, they were instructed to help one another find the balls with their names on them.  As you’d guess, they achieved the same outcome in less than half the time by helping others reach their goals.

You don’t see many books with titles like ‘The top 10 ways to help others achieve success.”  Perhaps it’s not intuitive, but assisting others in getting what they want is the fastest route to finding the metaphorical rubber ball with your name on it.

Who are you helping today?

When to trust your intuition

Human intuition fails us in areas like statistics, probability theory, and comprehending exponential growth.  Multiple studies – including Nobel-prize winning studies – confirm how poor our intuition is in these areas.  But our intuition serves us very well when it comes to detecting danger.

This makes sense, considering it wasn’t always practical or predictive of success to grasp complex math so we could invest and compound the interest over many years.  But it has always been essential for life to recognize danger, even in ways we don’t consciously understand (microexpressions, eye gaze, body language, etc.).

The moral, and the invitation to improve critical thinking skills, is to drop your ego and your story about how you might be viewed, and obey visceral signals of danger.  When it comes to predicting possible futures, rely on data and not your “rational” intuitions.

What retirement really is

Many cultures value working hard for many years so we can enjoy the payoff when we’re done working.  But there are alternative ways to define work and retirement.

For me, “work” is an investment of energy that comes in multiple forms.  Investing time on income-generating activities or even leisure, serving others, creative endeavors, or human connection. I don’t intend to abandon working on these things the moment I stop trading my time for money.

I view retiring as what happens when you cease sacrificing today for an imaginary, possible future. We don’t know how long we have, but that’s not an excuse to empty your bank account. It’s an inspiration to “retire” a bit each day.