THE VIRTUE OF SELF-INTERESTED WORK
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 has 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.
She’s the Scrappy-Doo of corporate mascots — a cloying, cringeworthy new character that repulses the target audience.
“There are certain social principles in human nature, from which we may draw the most solid conclusions with respect to the conduct of individuals and of communities.” —
Durk’s fierce interest in the extension of life, not only in years but in vitality right to the end, was, one might say, ageless. [Don’t blame that dad-joke on Michelle, it was all me. But still true.] Durk wasn’t interested in a dwindling but long old age. His goal was vibrant good health right up until one was used up.
This is one of the magical places we experience on our Himalaya Helicopter Expeditions. An independent kingdom for 650 years in the remote Mustang region of Nepal, it is one of the last places of traditional Tibetan culture on earth, unchanged for centuries. There are sky-caves here – apartment complexes carved out of vertical cliffs 2,000 years ago – Drok-pa nomads in the high pastures, spectacular sacred ceremonies, all in a mysteriously beautiful setting where the Himalayas meet the Tibetan Plateau. (Glimpses of Our Breathtaking World #86 Photo ©Jack Wheeler)
