Thrive, page 21
Therefore everyone who hears these words of mine and puts them into practice is like a wise man who built his house on the rock. The rain came down, the streams rose, and the winds blew and beat against that house; yet it did not fall, because it had its foundation on the rock. But everyone who hears these words of mine and does not put them into practice is like a foolish man who built his house on sand. The rain came down, the streams rose, and the winds blew and beat against that house, and it fell with a great crash.
Building our home upon a rock is about much more than protecting us from devastating storms; it’s about building and maintaining our spiritual infrastructure and resilience every day. And to keep our inner world strong it’s essential that we reach out to our outer world through compassion and giving.
Watching Oprah Winfrey interview Diana Nyad on Super Soul Sunday, I was struck by a story the distance swimmer told about community. A man on the street where she lives lost his wife, and was left to both earn a living and take care of his young family. Another neighbor, who already worked two jobs, took it upon herself to organize everyone in the neighborhood to rally around and help. So Diana got a note that said, “Diana, you’ve got to deliver dinner to that guy every other Wednesday night. If you can’t do it, get somebody else to do it. You’ve got—we’ve got—to help.”
What I love about that story is that it exemplifies making our giving instinct a part of our everyday lives. So often we think of giving as donating time or money to relief efforts for catastrophes in faraway places, helping people who have nothing. And that’s obviously critical to do when disaster strikes. But we forget that every day we are surrounded by opportunities to act on that same instinct for giving. These chances are always “under foot.” As the nineteenth-century naturalist John Burroughs put it, “The great opportunity is where you are. Do not despise your own place and hour. Every place is under the stars, every place is the center of the world.”
On the question of his own enlightenment the Master always remained reticent, even though the disciples tried every means to get him to talk. All the information they had on this subject was what the Master once said to his youngest son, who wanted to know what his father felt when he became enlightened. The answer was, “A fool.”
When the boy asked why, the Master had replied, “Well, son, it was like going to great pains to break into a house by climbing a ladder and smashing a window—and realizing later that the door of the house was open.”
—ANTHONY DE MELLO
And every place is full of openings to make a real difference in the life of another human being. There are millions of small missed opportunities at home, in our offices, on the subway, on the street where we live, in the grocery store—what David Foster Wallace called “being able truly to care about other people … over and over in myriad petty, unsexy ways, every day.” When we flex our giving muscles every day, the process begins to transform our own lives. Because however successful we are, when we go out in the world to “get things,” when we strive to achieve a goal, we are operating from a perceived deficit, focused on what we don’t have and are trying to obtain—until the goal is achieved. And then we go after the next goal. But when we give however little or much we have we are tapping into our sense of abundance and overflow.
When I was growing up in Athens, we lived in a one-bedroom apartment and had little money. But my mother was a magical improviser. She was always able to conjure up what we needed, including a good education and healthy food. She only owned two dresses and never spent anything on herself. I remember her selling her last pair of little gold earrings. She borrowed from anyone she could so that her two daughters could go to college, and no matter how little we had she never failed to give to others with even less, and to make us feel that we were bigger than our circumstances.
It may be somewhat counterintuitive, but it is gravity that enables us to stand tall—that which seems to pull us down to earth and limit us actually enables us to expand upward. In the same way, it is when we give that we feel most abundant. Giving sends a message to the universe that we have all we need. We become virtuous by the practice of virtue, responsible by the practice of responsibility, generous by the practice of generosity, compassionate by the practice of compassion. And we become abundant by giving to others.
Giving and service mark the path to a world in which we are no longer strangers and alone, but members of a vast yet tightly knit family. “From everyone to whom much is given, much shall be required” is the biblical admonition at the heart of the good life. The Bible goes even further and tells us that we’ll be judged by what we do for the least among us.
The Bhagavad Gita draws attention to three different kinds of life: a life of inertia and dullness with no goals and achievement; a life full of action, busyness, and desire; and a life of goodness, which is not just about ourselves but about others. “ ‘Through selfless service, you will always be fruitful and find the fulfillment of your desires’: this is the promise of the Creator,” according to the Gita. The second life—which is how we have been defining success—is obviously a big improvement on the first, but by itself it becomes driven by a hunger for “more” that’s never satisfied, and we become disconnected from who we truly are, and the riches inside us.
What living the third kind of life and making a difference in the life of even one other human being means is perfectly expressed in this story by Rabbi David Wolpe:
My paternal grandfather died when my father was eleven years old. His mother was a widow at 34, and he—an only child—bore much of his grief alone. In accordance with traditional Jewish practice, he began to walk very early to synagogue each morning to say prayers in his father’s memory, a practice lasting for a year after a parent’s death. At the end of his first week, he noticed that the ritual director of the synagogue, Mr. Einstein, walked past his home just as he left to walk to synagogue. Mr. Einstein, already advanced in years, explained, “Your home is on the way to the synagogue. I thought it might be fun to have some company. That way, I don’t have to walk alone.” For a year my father and Mr. Einstein walked through the New England seasons, the humidity of summer and the snow of winter. They talked about life and loss, and for a while my father was not so alone.
After my parents married and my oldest brother was born my father called Mr. Einstein, now well into his 90s, and asked if he could meet my father’s new wife and child. Mr. Einstein agreed, but said that in view of his age, my father would have to come to him. My father writes: “The journey was long and complicated. His home, by car, was fully twenty minutes away. I drove in tears as I realized what he had done. He had walked for an hour to my home so that I would not have to be alone each morning.… By the simplest of gestures, the act of caring, he took a frightened child and he led him with confidence and with faith back into life.”
Go-Getters Are Good; Go-Givers Are Better
Imagine how our culture, how our lives, will change when we begin valuing go-givers as much as we value go-getters. Social entrepreneurs are classic go-givers. They build their work on a foundation of adding value to people’s lives.
Bill Drayton coined the term “social entrepreneur” to describe individuals who combine the practical gifts of a business entrepreneur with the compassionate goals of a social reformer. He came up with the term as a college student after taking a trip to India to witness a man named Vinoba Bhave lead the effort to peacefully redistribute seven million acres of land across India to his most destitute compatriots. Today Drayton leads Ashoka, the largest network of social entrepreneurs worldwide. Sally Osberg, CEO of the Skoll Foundation, is at the forefront both of investing in some of the most game-changing social entrepreneurs across the globe, and of rethinking “how we carry out business, construct and hold our governments accountable, tap and replenish natural resources—how we survive and thrive, together.”
At The Huffington Post we are collaborating with the Skoll Foundation to create a new model for giving in the digital era, based on our belief that media organizations have a responsibility to spotlight the work of social entrepreneurs and nonprofits so that we can accelerate scaling and replicating what is working. In 2013, we launched three projects together—Job Raising, RaiseForWomen, and the Social Entrepreneurs Challenge—that raised more than $6 million and empowered our readers to donate to specific causes, as well as to blog about the stories of the people being helped and those giving.
Even in everyday business dealings, giving is becoming an increasingly valuable coin. As author and entrepreneur Seth Godin put it:
The irony of “getting in return for giving” is that it doesn’t work nearly as well as merely giving.… Bloggers who measure the return on investment of every word, twitterers who view the platform as a self-promotional tool instead of a help-others tool, and those that won’t contribute to Wikipedia and other projects because there’s no upside … these folks are all missing the point.… It’s not that difficult to figure out who’s part of the online community for the right reasons. We can see it in your writing and in your actions. And those are the people we listen to and trust. Which, of course, paradoxically, means that these are the people we’ll choose to do business with.
Philosophers have long known that our well-being is deeply connected to our compassion and giving. “No one can live happily who has regard for himself alone and transforms everything into a question of his own utility,” wrote Seneca in AD 63. As a more modern-day philosopher, David Letterman, said in AD 2013, “I have found that the only thing that does bring you happiness is doing something good for somebody who is incapable of doing it for themselves.”
In practically every religious tradition and practice, giving of oneself is a key step on the path to spiritual fulfillment. Or, as Einstein put it, “only a life lived for others is the life worth while.”
Since Einstein, theoretical physicists have been trying to come up with a “theory of everything” that would explain our entire physical world by reconciling general relativity with quantum physics. If there were an analogous theory of everything in the study of our emotional universe, empathy and giving would be at the center of it. Modern science has overwhelmingly confirmed the wisdom of those early philosophers and religious traditions. Empathy, compassion, and giving—which is simply empathy and compassion in action—are the molecular building blocks of our being. With them we expand and thrive; without them we wither.
Science has, in fact, broken this down on the biological level. A crucial component is the hormone oxytocin. It is known as the “love hormone,” and is released naturally in our bodies during experiences such as childbirth, falling in love, and sex. Researchers have found that giving people oxytocin can lower their anxiety and mitigate shyness. In a study by neuroscientist Paul Zak, a squirt of oxytocin into the nose increased the amount of money participants offered one another. “Oxytocin, in particular,” Zak said, “promotes empathy, and when the chemical is inhibited in someone, they become more prone to sinful, or selfish, behavior.”
Oxytocin, the “love hormone,” is in a constant battle in our bodies with cortisol, the “stress hormone.” Of course, we can never completely eliminate stress from our lives. But nurturing our natural empathy is a great way to reduce it and protect ourselves from its effects.
Of course, there are different kinds of empathy and compassion, and some are more beneficial to us than others. As professor of psychiatry Richard Davidson told me, “Oxytocin increases the compassion towards one’s family and the groups one identifies with, as opposed to the higher level of universal compassion.” And psychologist Paul Ekman has identified three kinds of empathy: first, there’s “cognitive empathy,” which is knowing how someone else is feeling or thinking. But simply understanding another’s position doesn’t mean we’ve internalized what they’re feeling. So there’s also “emotional empathy,” in which we actually feel what another person is feeling. This is triggered by so-called mirror neurons. Given the amount of suffering we’re so frequently exposed to, it would be too draining to live in a constant state of emotional empathy. “This can make emotional empathy seem futile,” writes Daniel Goleman, author of Emotional Intelligence. But there’s a third type, “compassionate empathy,” in which we know how a person is feeling, we can feel their feelings along with them, and we’re moved to act. Compassionate empathy is a skill we can nurture, and one that leads to action.
And this is the kind of empathy we’re fueled by when we’re giving back. But even the term “giving back” can be misleading. It implies that service and volunteering are important only in terms of what they do for the recipient or the community. Just as important is what they do for the giver or volunteer, and the science on this is unambiguous. Essentially, giving is a miracle drug (with no side effects) for health and well-being.
One study demonstrated that volunteering at least once a week yields improvements to well-being tantamount to your salary increasing from $20,000 to $75,000. A Harvard Business School study showed that “donating to charity has a similar relationship to subjective well-being as a doubling of household income.” This is the case in poor countries and rich countries alike. And the same study found that students who were told to spend a small amount of money on someone else were happier than students who were told to spend it on themselves.
Indeed, we’re so wired to give that our genes reward us for giving—and punish us when we don’t. A study by scientists from the University of North Carolina and UCLA found that participants whose happiness was mostly hedonic (i.e., focused on self-gratification) had high levels of biological markers that promote inflammation, which is in turn linked to diabetes, cancer, and other conditions. Those whose happiness included service to others had health profiles showing reduced levels of these markers. Of course, we all experience a mixture of both kinds of happiness, but our bodies’ internal systems are subtly pushing for us to augment the kind based on giving. Our bodies know what we need to do to make us healthy and happy, even if our minds don’t always hear the message.
If you bring forth what is within you,
what you bring forth will save you.
If you do not bring forth what is within you,
what you do not bring forth will destroy you.
—THE GOSPEL OF THOMAS
Many other studies show the positive health boost provided by giving. A 2013 study led by Dr. Suzanne Richards of the University of Exeter Medical School found that volunteering was connected to lower rates of depression, higher reports of well-being, and a significant reduction in mortality risk. And a 2005 Stanford study found that those who volunteer live longer than those who don’t.
Science Proves: Love Grows Brains
The effects of giving as we age are especially dramatic: A study from Duke University and the University of Texas at Austin found that senior citizens who volunteered had significantly lower rates of depression than nonvolunteers. And a Johns Hopkins study found that volunteering seniors were more likely to engage in brain-building activities that lower the risk of Alzheimer’s disease. Those who have suffered the loss of their defining roles as parents or wage earners were able to regain a sense of purpose in their lives.
Studies of the effects of giving in the workplace are equally dramatic and show the impact of volunteering on creating a healthier, more creative, and collaborative workforce. At AOL and The Huffington Post, we offer our employees three paid volunteer days each year to serve in their communities and we match up to $250 a year of charitable contributions per employee. A 2013 study by UnitedHealth Group found that employee volunteer programs increased engagement and productivity. Among the study’s other findings:
• More than 75 percent of the employees who had volunteered said they felt healthier.
• More than 90 percent said volunteering had put them in a better mood.
• More than 75 percent reported experiencing less stress.
• More than 95 percent said that volunteering enriched their sense of purpose in life (which, in turn, has been found to strengthen immune function).
• Employees who volunteered reported improved time-management skills and enhanced ability to connect with peers.
Another 2013 study, this one by researchers at the University of Wisconsin, found that employees who give back are more likely to assist their colleagues, more committed to their work, and less likely to quit. “Our findings make a simple but profound point about altruism: helping others makes us happier,” says Donald Moynihan, one of the study’s authors. “Altruism is not a form of martyrdom, but operates for many as part of a healthy psychological reward system.”
It is a reward system that should be incorporated into how we think about health care. “If you want to live a longer, happier, and healthier life, take all the usual precautions that your doctor recommends,” says Sara Konrath of the University of Michigan, “and then … get out there and share your time with those who need it. That’s the caring cure.”
Givers also end up getting ahead at work. (Nice guys don’t finish last!) In his best-selling book Give and Take, Wharton professor Adam Grant cites studies that show that those who give their time and effort to others end up achieving more success than those who don’t. Salespeople with the highest annual revenue are those who are the most motivated to help their customers and coworkers; the engineers with the highest productivity and fewest errors are those who do more favors for colleagues than they receive. The highest achieving negotiators are those who focus not only on their own goals, but also on helping their counterparts succeed. Grant also cites research indicating that companies led by CEOs who are “takers” end up having more fluctuating, volatile returns.
