One of my core philosophies is to lead with the giving hand. To give freely without expectation of return. It’s the best way to avoid disappointment, create amazing relationships and just feel good about yourself.
Everything we do is ultimately selfish but that’s fine, it’s just choosing the selfish pleasures that benefit everyone involved rather the ones that only benefit you that make the difference.
It’s a philosophy I first heard from Eben Pagan but it’s been one I’ve always practiced. Either because it’s my personality type or because I find it hard to say no to requests for help (working on it).
Long term the benefit is you get a reputation and create goodwill that leads to others helping you when you need it. It’s almost mystical how this works out but the reality is that it’s simply the product of consistency and time.
It’s a bit similar to Karma but I don’t believe in Karma per sei. Karma is a the lazy way people explain “Compact Chaos” which comes from Chaos Theory which I studied at uni.
I couldn’t find a good article on compact chaos to link to when I Googled it so I’ll give a quick run-down here. The way I understand it (and if memory holds) is that you have to imagine you’re hitting golf balls at a driving range.
Let’s imagine your goal is to get one ball to end up within one metre of any other ball you hit. It won’t take very long for this to happen. That’s compact chaos.
What we have in this situation is a serious of events that are sensitively dependent on the starting conditions (wind, air, swing, friction, heat, etc…) and we also have a defined, constrained environment.
You’re hitting similar balls with the same club in the one direction with an action you’re trying to make identical (that’s the ideal, anyway).
So what does this have in common with Karma?
It’s simple, the world is chaotic but it’s also structured. People tend to have habitual behavior patterns and tend to go to the same places and mix in set social circles.
We organise around interests, ambition, hierachy and status. Random events happen, we meet new and interesting people from all over the place but there’s a lot of predictability about how people act and organised based on geography, background and past behavior.
To put the two together the world is like the golf course – especially cities. There’s a lot of possible outcomes if you go out in the city.
Many places you can go, people you can talk to, interections you can have. But the interactions people tend to have are built on patterns. Eventually you run into the same people in one place that you did in another because you have the same interests and are involved in the same organisations. It’s a cycle that feeds of itself, as we all know.
So, to pull Karma in, if you act like a dick then that’s one golf ball on the driving range that represents a negative interaction.
The more of those balls you send out there, the more likely two golf balls will land near each other. That represents where two people you burned talk to each other.
To extend the analogy, imagine if all the golf balls (who are networked with each other) start talking asking around about you. So now you got a bad rep and your ability to have positive connections is compromised.
The reverse is true about positive interactions. You get a good rep and people go out of their way to interact with you.
The thing is, not all of us can see this network in action as it’s hard to track every interaction in a network of people. It’s beyond the power of a computer program to quantify, assess and visualise let alone a the average person.
When most people sense patterns they logically can’t explain they invoke a simpler, less thoughtful way of explaining it. Faith, spirituality and religion occupies this space.
So yes, Karma exists but not in the way people think it does.
If you walk around acting like an idiot it will bite you in the backside most of the time but not because of some mystical, inexplicable force that makes sure everything adds up but because running the same event multiple times will eventually lead to all possible outcomes being fulfilled.
Incidentally, if you do this in a work/academic sense this will lead to mastery.
So I lead with the giving hand. In the end it’s because I feel good when I help others and it’s the most genuine way to build a network. Nobody achieves anything alone and never has.
At some point you need other people to work with you at the right time. When starting out you often have little to offer except time but by helping other people most will gladly turn around and give you a hand up.
Some won’t, so be it. Helping others alone feels good and you must do it freely, without strings attached or hidden expectations. But if you’re the cold and calculating type then lead with the giving hand because, long term, it will work out way better for you.
But given my personality type I would literally lose sleep if I felt I hadn’t done the right thing by someone according to my values which makes it hard to reconcile with my human tendency to make mistakes.
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