"In life you can have whatever you want if you just help enough other people get what they want"
-Zig Ziglar
Your success is determined by the success of the people around you. This is the hallmark of every leader. This is the hallmark of every great man who has ever lived on this planet.
If you’re paying attention, there is a noticeable effect each time you help someone else win. Every time you help others to develop their skills and become winners, their skills become part of you. The more people you help, the stronger you become.
Don’t believe me? Look at Gandhi. Or Mother Teresa, the greatest example of leadership in the twentieth century. Perhaps she had no material value, but she did manage and control enormous wealth, leading an army of thousands of employees without even meaning to. All simply because she had helped others. Using this rule, from nothing, from a band of poor and dying, she created perhaps the biggest congregation that the Catholic Church has ever been able to create over the past centuries.
WHENEVER YOU HELP SOMEONE ELSE, YOU BECOME STRONGER YOURSELF.
The phrase above is certainly true, because the person you have helped now will become part of your network of alliances and as such "conspire" with you to help you succeed. However this is just one side of it.
There is also a psychological effect. Think about the last time you've really helped someone. How did you feel afterwards? Energized, happy, inspired. In fact, when you help someone to succeed in a business, a kind of transfer occurs and you in turn become more proficient in the same business you just helped with. If you are teaching a plumber apprentice the ropes, you too will become a better plumber.
Whenever I teach a business course, for example on the concept of ethics, if I succeed in giving an effective lesson to those present, something extraordinary happens to me: I, myself, feel that I have improved a bit more on the subject. It’s fascinating, by giving to someone else, you’re actually giving to yourself.
The world is based on a balance of give and take. You can never pull out of this world more than you have put in to it. If you want something, you in your turn have to give something. If you want to succeed, you have to give success. If you want to earn money, you have to give money, if you want to be loved, you must give love.
It may seem crazy, but if you can give success to someone else you will get success for yourself. You have money problems? Strive to make sure your employees and customers are earning money, and you'll see that, almost magically, you too are now earning money. Whenever you impress someone with excellent service, a small but important transformation takes place in your personality: you become stronger.
Every day I see entrepreneurs or managers who have built companies formed by people who are afraid or weak. Every day I see people who, despite having achieved economic success, have personnel around them who still haven’t prospered.
And the more I look, even accepting the rules of the free market and capitalist initiative, the more I realize that their "success" wouldn’t be enough for me. I can’t do without what is perhaps the most important rule: real success, is the success of the people around you. This does not mean that we have to fall back on a socialist mentality or create a large cooperative status. That’s already been tried and it didn’t work. Instead, we must realize the great mission that has been entrusted to each of us. Each of us has something to give this world. Each of us must contribute our piece of the puzzle in building a new world, maybe not utopian, but definitely better. And to do that, we must for a moment forget about OUR needs and look a bit more to those of our neighbor.
The world is waiting for your piece of the puzzle.
Paolo Ruggeri
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