Helping Others While Trying to Make the World Better a Place.
Sounds clichéd I know, but it’s true - please hear me out and read the rest of my series and my earlier blogs. You should find a recurring theme revolving around ’love and truth’ resonating throughout my posts. They are intertwined - when I say truth I also mean love. When you love, you tell the truth - even when it is unpopular to do so.
How you deliver love/truth, who you deliver it to, when you deliver it, how much you deliver and what is true or false are different topics that I will cover in due course - but telling my version of the truth and helping others (especially the less fortunate) is crucially important to me and it is the number one reason that I am on Steemit.
While it may not always come across this way - I have a very deep empathy for people and I learned it from my Mom. She is dead now, but she genuinely cared for others as few people ever do - she always had time for others and she would go out of her way to connect with them on a very personal and meaningful level, she always had time for others and often to her own detriment but she never complained. She wasn’t perfect - but she genuinely cared for others and she did her best (as she saw it) in any given situation and that is all that anyone can do. Your best is your best, period.
Sometimes I am pleased with my thoughts, words and actions, while at other times I am embarrassed by them. Learn from the experience and be better next time I keep telling myself.
What if there isn’t a next time? We are all going to die one day - it’s just a matter of time until we do. Our time is finite, we only get one shot and we need to make every second count.
It’s critically important that we spend our lives doing the things that we love - helping other people sits at the top of my life goals and while I’m still refining the most effective ways to achieve that goal - and get to where I want to be - I know where I am going and why I am here and that includes Steemit.
My mistakes and learnings have been many throughout my short life - more recently it was the death of my Mom in late August 2015 that had the most profound impact on my life. I will probably write a separate blog about this another day but I will give you the short version now.
I had re-located to Hong Kong just 10 months before she died. I was opening a new office and settling in to my new life. 3 months after my arrival I learned that my Mom had 4 months to live. Upon hearing this news I flew back to Australia and I lived with her and cared for her until she died. I was sleeping on a couch next to her bed the night that she died. I wanted to be close to her. We had moved a hospital bed into the lounge room earlier that day. My brother and I carried her to it, laid her down and got her comfortable.
She died in the family home while her husband (my father) was asleep in their marital bed nearby. I woke up at 05.23AM and instinctively turned to my side to check in on her. I saw her sleeping beside me just 2 feet away - she was taking her final, very shallow breaths. I held her hand, kissed her and told her how much I loved her - she died 60 seconds later. I didn’t call anyone to give them the news as it was very early in the morning and we all knew that she wouldn’t last more than a day or two. I didn’t see the point in waking them up and macabre as it may sound - I cherished the 90 minutes that we had together alone that morning before my Dad awoke.
When I moved to Hong Kong (10 months earlier) I had a fair bit of money, my own company and big dreams for the future. My business partner had a net worth of $100 million (self-made in tech) while in his mid-twenties.
I’d privately met a Prime Minister in his office, rubbed shoulders with a few elites and partied with the best of them. In many people’s eyes I had a good life - truth be told, I wasn’t happy and importantly, I knew it.
When my Mom got sick I walked away from my business and I have not worked since - that was 3.5 years ago. The two most important goals that I had at the time was to:
- Care for my Mom
- Find the Truth
I achieved both of those goals and after 3.5 years of not working. The journey for truth is an on-going on and it is impossible for any of us to know all truth but I’ve devoted thousands of hours in research. I am now just beginning to back to work. My savings have been significantly eroded during this time but that’s ok - caring for my Mom and finding the truth was priceless to me.
This time around I am a building a business that is congruent with my lifestyle, values and long-term goals. My goal used to be to become super-wealthy - I’ve had a taste of that lifestyle but I’ve never been wealthy and from what I saw and experienced it did not make me happy, nor many of the people that I used to call my friends. I am now building a business that will only require a handful of staff to operate while providing me with a significant and on-going passive income that I intend to give away and use to help others.
I intend to buy a yacht in the next year or two and spend the rest of my life sailing to 3rd world countries and using the money that I make to help the less fortunate. It is not about me, it is about others and when more people embrace and accept this fact the closer we will be to resolving the myriad of problems that we see in the world today.
These problems can be fixed - but it will require many people to use their varying skillsets and drive to solve them. I intend to do my little bit before I die and blogging on steemit is part and parcel of that. I can’t think of anything better to do my life than to help others and to discover truth.
If a man has $1,000 and is happy he is rich. If a man has $1 billion and is unhappy he is poor.
My truth may not be your truth, that’s ok. I am merely sharing my truth with you and I welcome hearing yours.
This post is part of an on-going effort to ‘introduce myself’ to you - I will reveal more during the course of the series and in future posts.
I hope that it was a blessing to you!
Till next time…
Related Posts:
Charles Feeney - The Man that Gave Away His Entire $8 Billion Fortune While He Was Alive
It’s Time to Build a Society that Benefits Everyone - Not Just the Privileged Few!