Help yourself, help others

Is it possible to be generous to a fault?

I think so.

Throughout my life I’ve helped a lot of people. Yet, of all these people I could recall no more than three or four  who successfully had been helped by me. Actually, I can’t take credit for these three or four people at all because, in retrospect, I did not do very much to help them. I simply provided a spark and they did all the work for themselves.

It’s really not possible to help an able-bodied person who is unwilling to help himself. To be sure, there are those who cannot help themselves and legitimately need the help of others. These include infants, children, the disabled, and the elderly. These people belong in a different category; I’ll limit this discussion to those people who can walk, talk and use their heads and hands like the rest of us.

As the saying goes, you must help yourself before helping others. In fact, helping oneself is the first step to helping others because being self-sufficient means you won’t be a burden to others, including (and especially) your loved ones. If everyone is willing and able to help himself or herself, then no one should be dependent upon others. So, focus on pulling your own weight.  If you can pull your own weight, you’ve already done your part.

What happens when you try to help someone who is unwilling to help himself? He becomes lazy and dependent. He does not bother to develop the necessary skills and personal qualities to make it on his own. You are creating an artificial disability in an otherwise able-bodied person, eventually enslaving yourself to his dependency and ill-conceived sense of entitlement. However well-intentioned you may be, this is not helping at all.

What does it mean to help yourself? Helping yourself means getting an education, securing a good job, taking advantage of opportunities, and providing for your family. It also means taking good care of your health, planning ahead, and constantly doing “what if” exercises in your head so that you do not become a burden to others in the future.

What does it mean to take advantage of an opportunity? Here in Cambodia there are so many people in desperate situations because they do not have the opportunities to improve their lives.  If you offer assistance to ten needy people, maybe one or two of them will take advantage of the opportunity you give them in a healthy and constructive way.  The rest will try to take advantage of you!  To get to the one or two worthy people, you may have to deal with a lot of leeches and parasites along the way.  This is true of people in any country, not just Cambodia. A person who is really serious about helping himself will  take advantage of the opportunity he gets, not the people who give it to him.

If the first step to helping others is to help oneself, I think the next step is to avoid hurting others while helping oneself. Actually, these really aren’t steps to be followed in chronological succession; they are to be carried out simultaneously. Some folks end up with huge fortunes after making a life of unfair and exploitative business practices. One day they wake up and decide to give much of their wealth to charity. Although giving to charity is better than not giving, all the donations they “give back to the community” may not be enough to compensate for the sufferings they’ve caused along the way. So, it’s better to be mindful of one’s actions (so as not to hurt others) than to mindlessly gain at others’ expenses and give back after all the destruction has been wreaked.