To Serve First Thrive

Put on your oxygen mask first is the instruction to parents when being given a safety briefing on a plane before the flight begins. The reason is that if you are unconscious, you can not help your child.

Equally, in day to day life, if you spend your time helping others and not looking after yourself, then you will become depleted, and your metaphorical cup will be empty. If you fill up your cup, then you have more to give.

In order to serve, you must first thrive yourself. To give you must first have plenty. This applies to your health, both mental and physical. To help others, you need to thrive so that the energy you give to others leaves you with energy to take care of yourself, too.

You also see the world and other people through the prism of yourself. You see things as you are, not how they are.

The Law Of Compensation

The second Law of Stratospheric Success for the book The Go-Giver is The Law of Compensation.

“Your income is determined by how many people you serve and how well you serve them.”

The Go-Giver

When you have a customer facing job you get paid a certain amount of money, as you help one customer at a time. The higher up the chain you go the more money you get paid. With this comes more responsibility for serving more people, as your decisions affect more people. However, it also matters how well you serve people.

Service is not doing the bidding of others, it is giving people what they need. Great service is this and improving other people’s lives. Service with a smile brightens someone’s day. Having a conversation while serving someone makes them feel seen and heard.

When not customer facing, making big decisions through compassion and a moral compass means that people’s lives are improved and not negatively impacted. A CEO can take care of their employees. In fact I would say that this is the CEO’s primary role. If a CEO takes care of their employees then the employees will take care of the customers and the customers will be loyal and in turn take care of the business.

Serving Others Better

One of the principles I try to live by is ‘own your journey’ and another is ‘serve others,’ and to me these are very much linked. If we have our own issues with our health, relationships, work, etc that we leave unresolved, because we don’t want to deal with them, we are not in a good position to serve others. Therefore, in order to serve others well we need to make sure we are in a good place.

The way we make sure we are in a good place is to take ownership of our problems and find solutions for them. Anyone who has reached advanced stages of a spiritual practice will be effective in serving others, because they have put in the work of resoling their problems. Whether you are spiritual or not, you still have to do the work.

Imagine having such peace of mind and clarity that you help to solve the problems of others effectively. If more people took ownership of their lives the world would be a better place. Let’s do the work and make it better together.