Be Useful…..
Has anyone seen the documentary ‘The Arnold Schwarzenegger documentary’ on Netflix? Each episode focuses on a different part of his career, Body Building, Movie star and Politician and what I found interesting are the common threads of motivation and work ethic that run through each of his careers. It was very inspiring and prompted me to buy his book ‘Be Useful – Seven tools for life’ which I read over the Christmas Period. It’s an easy read and very practical, with the book divided into seven sections that focus on different tools/ideals that he applied to his work with examples in his career where these stood out or where particularly useful.
Embarking on my journey with the networking group BNI, I was struck by the similarity between Arnold’s message of be useful and BNI’s concept of Givers Gain, the premise of which is pretty simple, help others. We all got to where we are with a helping hand from someone else and we do work better and stronger together.
I saw a great example of this last Friday, it was very icy in Horsham, West Sussex, where I live and as I walked up my street with the dog at 6am I thought it was curious that someone had left their ice-scraper strategically placed on the windscreen. As I got further down the road I noticed another person had done the same and it took, I’m embarrassed to say the third car before I realized that I had stumbled on a really good advertising technique. Someone had taken advantage of the cold weather and trudged up and down the local roads in the early hours of the morning to place ice-scrapers on the windscreens of all the cars. A great example of being useful and fulfilling a need without any expectation of immediate return.
It made an impression and certainly made several people’s days easier that morning. It also made me hopeful for business, we can make a life for ourselves and build a business and incorporate helping others at same time. I’ll end with the last paragraph from Arnold’s book - Spoiler alert…….
‘It doesn’t matter how young or old you are, how much or how little you have, how much you’ve done or how much you have left to do. In every case, giving more will get you more. Want to help yourself? Help others. Learn to start from that place, and that is how you will become the most useful version of yourself - to your family, to your friends, to your community, to your nation …. and to the world.