Doing Good

Sarah and I have been being sloths. It isn’t entirely our fault, we blame numb3rs and netflix. We started watching numb3rs from season one and it has been a lot of fun but it has stopped us from doing a lot of other things, like yoga. On the plus side it has given me time to think about life.

So much of life is spent approaching hurdles. Graduating from high school, college, finding a job and being happy. What is funny is that so many these hurdles are put there by ourselves and when you don’t get over one you get stuck. While I do agree that graduating from high school is a great thing to do I think that there is some argument for alternative high school systems(which is a whole other post).

Graduating from college is one of the first obstacles that you encounter as a young person that is put in place by society. As an 18 year old person you feel as if you have to graduate from college in order to be successful. I know that this is true because I have though much about how my lack of a college degree has held me back from being successful.

The problem with the term “successful” is that it is subjective. One person success is another persons failure. I feel that I have had a very successful life, though in comparison with other people’s lives it may seem less so. But it all depends on how you are measuring success.

If you measure success based on money or prestige, you are missing out. What is more important is doing good. No matter how much money you have or how awesome your job sounds, if you aren’t trying to do good you aren’t actually successful. I want to do good.

The hardest thing is finding a job that allows you to do good, either because of the job or because you have time and energy after your done working to do good. This is hard to work out because doing good doesn’t pay very well. Which, since society puts so much importance on money, makes it hard to view time spent helping people as time well spent.

So what do you do? Stop worrying about how much money you make or how much prestige your job gives you and start thinking about how you can help other people.