Simon Sinek argues that helping others, not individual achievement, drives real success and wellbeing. He points to Olympic athletes who sacrifice for their teams and Alcoholics Anonymous, where sponsoring someone in recovery strengthens your own sobriety. Service, he says, should be the foundation of how we build wellness.
Chapters
We have forgotten the value of service as a nation. We over indexed on rugged individualism, Marlboro man type of stuff, right? We celebrated the individual. We made heroes out of CEOs.
And we forgot about the team and the group and the company and the fact that it's always a team effort because human beings are social animals. We're not that good by ourselves. And no one on the planet has achieved anything alone. It all became. Somebody took a bet on us, somebody believed in us, somebody was there with us late at night, somebody gave us a shoulder to cry on. And so, you know, there's a great irony in personal achievement, which is you can't do it alone. It's just not. You don't have the. Nobody's got the stomach for it. And if you look at the highest performing, quote, unquote individuals on the planet, individual athletes are terrible gauges because they organize their whole lives around me. And so, like, I have a friend who's, she's an Olympic medalist and on an individual sport, an ice skater. And she'll freely admit that she missed birthdays, she missed Thanksgiving, she missed Christmases because she had to be as they, as all Olympians say, I have to win the Olympics as if there's one winner. Right? And the even thicker irony is.
She won a silver medal at the Olympics.
The gold medalist fell in her routine. My friend fell twice. So you're not the best in the world, you're just better that day than one other person. Right?
Anyway, my point is.
I like it when people commit to helping each other. In Alcoholics Anonymous, I was gonna make a joke. Any Alcoholics Anonymous.
Don'T raise your hand.
In Alcoholics Anonymous, we know there's a 12 step program, right? And most of us are familiar with the first step. Admit you have a problem.
And Alcoholics Anonymous knows that if you master 11 steps, but not the 12th, you're probably going to still succumb to the disease. But if you master the 12th step, you will more likely overcome the disease. The 12th step is to help another alcoholic service. And so when we say you have to be healthy, you have to protect your health, you have to exercise, you have to eat right. It's so much stress. And except for the few people who are that disciplined, those disciplined people make the rest of us feel insecure.
Really, the best way to get yourself healthy and get yourself well is to help somebody else who's struggling with the same thing. If somebody's struggling with their weight. If you're struggling with your weight, help somebody else who's struggling with their weight. If you don't have the discipline to exercise, help somebody else who's struggling to have the discipline to exercise. And when we commit to helping somebody else overcome the problems that we're struggling with, it is amazing how much we overcome those problems ourselves. And we get the intense, intense oxytocin joy of helping someone else, which, as we said, is infinite minded. It's helping your children as opposed to just helping yourself. So I love wellness programs, especially when those wellness programs are organized to help us not only get healthy and take care of ourselves, but to have the incredible joy of serving those who are struggling with the same things.
