Staying on Top When Your World's Upside Down

“If you want to experience moments of sheer joy and downright fun… there is nothing better for the heart, mind, and soul than to get involved in helping some individual or family less fortunate than yourself.”
Millard Fuller: The Excitement is Building

The late Zig Ziglar often said that he included this line in every book he ever wrote: “You can have everything in life you want if you will just help enough other people get what they want.” That line, in turn, was the inspiration for something I wrote in the book Never Fear, Never Quit, which I now call Rafe’s Law (because it was spoken by a character named Rafe):

Whatever you most need in life, the best way for you to get it is to help someone else get it who needs it more than you do.

When your world turns upside down, you will need something: a new job, more money, moral support, wise counsel, etc. If you need a job, spend four days a week on your own job search and one day a week helping someone else find a job. If you need moral support, join a support group and give moral support back to others. If you need money, increase your giving to those who are even more desperate than you are. This is my guarantee: someday you will look back and say that the time and money you devoted to helping others was far more beneficial to your own success than the time and money you spent directly trying to secure your own.

A Personal Experiment – Extravagant Generosity in Small Ways

You have no doubt heard that it is more blessed than it is to receive, and that as you give so shall you receive. In fact, you might have heard words to the effect that the surest way to receive is to first give. And I suspect that (like I once did) you smiled, said “that’s nice,” and filed the aphorism away with Santa Claus and the other fairy tales of childhood.

If that’s the case – if you would like to believe that giving really is the best way to open the door to receiving, but you really don’t – please try this experiment. It will cost you a bit of money, but nothing more than you can afford, and the results will occur so gradually that it might be quite some time before you recognize in a flash of epiphany that the experiment worked just as I said it would. But the results will occur.

Become an extravagant tipper. Not a generous tipper – an extravagant tipper. If your breakfast bill is six dollars, leave a ten dollar tip. If you hand over a five dollar bill for a cup of coffee, leave whatever change you are due in the tip cup. When you check out of a hotel room, leave a twenty dollar bill on the bed for the housekeeper. For you, this will be a minor expense; for a single mom working two jobs to support her family, it might well be the highlight of her entire day.

I predict with great confidence that three things will happen. First, after the initial twinge of regret at having lightened your wallet, you will feel good about yourself. Second, you will experience this attitude of generosity begin to permeate other areas of your life as you think less about what’s in it for you and more about what you can do for others.

And third, as a direct result of the first two outcomes, in ways that could never be predicted or explained, you will begin to experience greater abundance in your life (including, perhaps, the monetary variety). This will not happen overnight, but if you think of it as a lifetime habit rather than a one-shot experiment, the return on your investment will be extravagant.