How to be 10x more interesting.
For many of us, as we move into the second half of life (age 35 and older), we start to discover that the bill of goods we were sold isn’t everything it was cracked up to be.
Climbing the career ladder, making more money, buying nicer clothes, getting a bigger house/faster car, etc, isn’t what we’d hoped it would do for us.
Some of us have had the opportunity to be of service to others in our youth. Like maybe a mission trip or something similar where we get to help someone do something they couldn’t do on their own.
When we get to do an activity like this, we feel something in us shift. We recognize that being of service is something that feels really good, and we often want more of it but can’t figure out how to fit it into our busy lives of working and making more money.
Eventually, over time, if we’re intentional, we seek out and find ourselves in situations where we have a service commitment. This is a service opportunity that we commit to doing regularly. Like weekly or monthly, at the least.
This affords us a consistent opportunity to do something for someone else, which allows us to stop thinking about ourselves for just a little bit.
It’s like an intervention in the never-ending self-obsessed thought loops we usually spend all of our time in. Like creating a practice of anti-self-centeredness.
“Am I doing ok? How can I do better? Does she like me? Do they like me? Does my boss think I’m amazing? Etc, etc.”
Thinking about ourselves non-stop and being constantly self-referential is exhausting…not to mention vapid and counter-productive.
Thinking about and being of service to others gives us a break from this endless loop of “me, me, me,” AND it has the added benefit of making us much more interesting to everyone around us. Think about how no one wants to go to a party, and hear someone drone on and on about themselves. We all want to be asked how we’re doing or what we’re working on. We want to know that others care about us.
And the most refreshing way to let others know you care about them is to stop talking about yourself and all your problems and ask them how they’re doing. Ask if you can do something for them.
Find a service commitment that allows you to think about someone else for an hour or a day or a week. Do it regularly. Create a practice of being other-centered, and see if you don’t start to feel the fulfillment and contentment that you were looking for in money/bonuses/cars/crap/etc.
