How do you live?
Podcast.
What would happen in a place,
Imagine you took over a restaurant and you ran it the way you'd like.
So you'd serve a meal,
But at the end of your meal,
Instead of getting a check,
Your tab would say zero.
Your bill is zero because someone before you has paid for you and it's a gift to you.
Now you have an opportunity to pay forward for a person after you,
Whatever you'd like.
What would happen?
Would people all just take?
Or would people pay forward?
Would love beget more love?
Or would people just be selfish and it would degenerate into nothing?
We didn't know,
But we said,
You know,
We believe in love.
Let's do it.
Right?
So we started it,
Like complete.
We just rented out a restaurant one time.
It was just a one time thing.
And we invited the community and people came and people loved it and people paid forward.
And we had enough money to do the next week.
And then we did it again next week and the third week and the fourth week and like that continued for years and years and years.
It's still going on now in 18 places around the world.
And all these researchers started coming in and studying it.
They said,
What's going on?
Like you're trusting people to pay forward.
You are trusting that if you create a strong context,
People will respond with this idea of we,
Right?
That really resonates with them.
And everybody started paying forward.
Everybody started understanding a lot of the nuances of generosity and people started studying it.
And as they studied it,
It just,
You know,
It started to create more and more ripples into society.
So this idea,
This basic unit of a small act of kindness,
We sometimes think,
Wow,
It doesn't really make a difference,
Right?
So small,
Like what impact?
We have so many big problems in the world.
What is this small thing going to do?
But there are multiple ways in which this small act creates change in the world.
First thing it does is it creates a ripple effect on the outside.
A small thing you do touches somebody.
When you pay toll for the car behind you,
That person is going to go home,
Sit on their dining table and share this story with their family.
And what's going to happen with that story when it lands into the hearts of young kids?
We don't know.
But we know that the ripple will carry on.
And so there is an external ripple effect.
But there's also an internal ripple effect.
It changes you.
Many people ask me that before we can give,
First you have to have.
If you don't have anything,
How can you give?
What will you give?
But that's assuming that we are born bankrupt,
Right?
That I was born with nothing and actually what I acquire is what I have to give.
And that's just not true because we can give in so many different ways.
Perhaps just by listening to somebody,
We are giving them a very precious gift.
So how do you start to tap into this idea of multiple forms of wealth,
Multiple forms of capital,
Multiple forms of value?
You can contribute your time.
You can contribute your presence.
You can contribute your compassion.
You can contribute community.
They used to say even attention,
Even a simple thing like paying attention is now a scarce commodity in our world.
It used to be that Goldfish had the shortest attention span of all living things.
And now we have replaced them at the bottom of the run.
We can't pay attention for even nine seconds now.
Our attention span moves in less than nine seconds on average.
And so you look at that and you say,
Wow,
What if I can just listen to you maybe for 18 seconds,
Maybe for a minute,
Maybe even longer?
What if I can listen to you without any judgment?
And if you can just learn to hold space with life in front of you in that way,
With that attention,
With that care,
With that compassion,
If you can start to look at life,
If you can open each door and instead of saying,
What am I going to get,
If we start to say,
What am I going to give,
What can I contribute?
Not just materially,
But personally,
Creatively,
Spiritually,
In so many different ways,
Then that connection is multi-dimensional.
It's no longer singular.
And I think that has immense power.
And I think we have to cultivate that as society.
We live with this myopic lens of value equated to money.
Wealth equals money.
I think wealth is far greater than money.
Sure,
Money is an expression of wealth.
It's not to discount that.
But there are so many different expressions.
A mother's love is an expression of incredible wealth.
A mother's love is an expression of incredible wealth.
That goes way beyond the market economies.
A small act of kindness is an expression of just immense,
Has immense value to a culture,
To the person who is doing it,
And to the person who is receiving it.
So how do we start to create systems and structures around alternative forms of capital is a question that I think we have to hold in society.
I would encourage everybody to go out and do a small act of kindness right now,
Today.
I think we can do it no matter how much.
You can do it in financial ways.
You can do it in non-financial ways.
But we can all do that extra act of kindness.
But the orientation of the act of kindness,
Usually we look for the external impact.
And while that's there,
We can trust in the ripple effect to carry that out.
But I would say do that act with also an inner orientation,
To see what kind of inner transformation occurs when you do this act of kindness.
I remember this beautiful,
After I talked to a bunch of young people,
They gave me a bouquet.
They gave me a couple of bouquets,
In fact.
And what I did was I opened up these bouquets at the end,
And I said,
Okay,
Everybody take a flower,
Go out,
And gift it to somebody you haven't appreciated,
Whether it's the cook in the canteen,
Or whether it's your teacher,
Or whether it's a student.
Just go out and let this ripple out.
And so there was this big queue.
And I was giving out these flowers.
Before I finish all the flowers,
This girl comes back for a second flower.
She has tears in her eyes,
And she looks at me and she says,
Can I get a second flower?
It's so intrinsic.
It's so native.
What impact did that flower have?
Is she going to get a Nobel Prize for that?
Is she going to be in the news for that?
Probably not.
But the transformation that happened in her was real,
Was profound,
And it changed the eyes through which she looked at the world.
And those eyes are going to continue to touch the world for infinity going forward.
And that has a significant value as well.
So I would say go out and do an act of kindness.
