If we act for the whole, everyone wins and we’ll enjoy more prosperity, more opportunities, more respect, and less chaos.

How can you ensure that things are happening to you and not you are causing them?

From our self-centric perspective, it may be easy to assume that things happen to us because we are the cause, but why if the opposite is true?

What if you’re just a spectator?

You don’t come up with an idea, it comes to you. You don’t write the book, it enters the world through you. You don’t build a business, the problem finds the way to monetization through you and your skills.

But then, who takes the credit? Sometimes you, sometimes no one. Sometimes it’s for the good of the world.

It can be liberating to detach yourself from ideas, work, results, titles, and achievements. These things weigh a lot and automatically carry expectations, and…

Expectations create drama.

That’s friction by default.

Once any of your expectation isn’t met, you feel bad and suffer more than necessary. Your ego takes over and forces you to blindly look for ways to prove yourself. As you already know, it rarely ends up being a good use of time. You feed the ego by burning bridges and acting as there’s no tomorrow.

But then, do we just sit and do nothing because we have no power over the things that happen to us? I don’t think so. There are certain things that you can influence and most of the time it happens when you’re aware.

Human nature is inherently flawed and destructive. It helped our ancestors survive but if we want to build a better future we need to be smarter in ways that we observe ourselves and act in the best interest of the whole, not just the short term personal gain. If we act for the whole, everyone wins and we’ll enjoy more prosperity, more opportunities, more respect, and less chaos.

The next time you’re about to do something, observe yourself, where does it come from? The idea, the feeling, the craving, the desire… If it’s there just to materialize and waste your time feeding your ego, just wait. It will pass. It always does.

Now your job becomes actively filtering what happens through you. Is it causality? It is, partly. You’re now the gatekeeper of what happens through you.

How do you know if something serves only you and not the whole?

Think about it this way, exclude yourself from the whole and see how it feels, if it feels like losing, it might be the right thing to do as your ego is scared to death to be excluded.

To sum up, the idea is not to become an altruist and never think of yourself, the idea is to think of yourself in terms as a whole that exists because there is no other way you exist other than the whole. So instead of depriving the system, do your part so the system flourishes and as a result, you, a small part of the whole will gain more than you would by only serving yourself.