Live Each Day

by Jim McCarthy

  It’s important to realize that compassion does not always mean you have to try to “fix” everything you encounter today. On the contrary, “Part of compassion is learning to be aware and with the person who is suffering, without going after the urge of wanting to solve the problem,” says Dr. Jinpa, who, in addition to his academic work, is also the longtime translator for the Dalai Lama. 10

  Dr. Jinpa suggests that in anticipation of challenging situations, you visualize what your compassionate behavior would look like. The more vividly you can see this, the more likely your response will be successful.

  For example, if you expect your partner to come home from work today frustrated and complaining about the same thing they’ve complained about every day for the last week, you can picture yourself simply sitting, listening, breathing, and making eye contact — without trying to propose solutions or action plans. You might be amazed that this is the most compassionate response they want from you — whether you think it’s “effective” or not.

  However, there are also times when you want and need to do more than simply empathize, nod, or give a hug.

  Here are just a few examples of compassion in practice:

  •You say, “Thank you.”

  •You hold the elevator door open for others. (It’s true — what’s called “common courtesy” can also be a form of compassion.)

  •Every day, you make it a point to look people in the eye until you can recognize their eye color. If you make eye contact, then you give them a genuine smile. You actually bother to learn the names of the janitor, mail carrier, or barista.

  •You decide that the next time someone cuts you off on the freeway, you will simply slow down, take a deep breath, and assume that this other person might be in a hurry for a legitimate reason.

  •You call a friend just to say “hi” and see how they are.

  •You see yourself being calm, patient, and open-minded as you patch up a disagreement you had with your sister.

  •In advance, you visualize having a tough but constructive talk with your manager, and you come to a positive outcome.

  •You make it a point to remember that your nemesis at work is probably behaving out of fear, pain, hurt, confusion, or ignorance. They must have somehow suffered to end up acting this way. And you realize that sometimes you’re the same way, too, and you would appreciate compassion from others.

  In fact, you have received compassion from others countless times.

  A lot of compassion is simply remembering that all of us are humans who are suffering and struggling to be happy and successful, every day. Compassion is your heartful response as you recognize this.

  Another way you can practice compassion is to perform a daily “five-minute favor.” Tech entrepreneur Adam Rifkin developed this concept after witnessing how some of the most successful people in Silicon Valley spent their precious time helping others. You might not have five hours per week to be taking on additional projects to assist strangers, but five minutes every day is easy to do and could have a big impact on the person you’re helping. Typical quick favors include making introductions, sharing content on social media, giving concise feedback, and writing testimonials. Rifkin has used this method effectively to build an enormous, highly valuable professional and personal network.11

  Now, a lot of us have been taught to “do unto others” for our entire lives. For example, in 1952, Nobel Peace Prize winner Dr. Albert Schweitzer instructed: “I don’t know what your destiny will be, but one thing I know: the only ones among you who will be really happy are those who will have sought and found how to serve.”12

  To me, this sounds noble and benevolent, but also somewhat daunting. Instead, I find it easier to be compassionate when I realize that I am the one who benefits the most from my kindness to others. Indeed, the Dalai Lama has called this approach “selfish altruism.”13

  Ever since I saw Dr. Seligman’s research on kindness, I’ve been more likely to give a dollar to some of the homeless people who are all over San Francisco. I no longer try to judge or figure out whether I’m helping them or not. Instead, I’m giving for the reason that I want to feel better about myself.

  For you to be a bit happier right now, simply do something kind for another. Never mind whether you’re helping the other person (which hopefully you are), but just for your own sake, do something kind.

  Once you begin with small acts of kindness, you can start a virtuous cycle in your own behavior. In The Journal of Happiness Studies, researchers from the University of British Columbia and Harvard Business School provided evidence on how this works: Participants in a study were divided into two groups — those who were asked to recall when they spent money on themselves, and those who were asked to recall when they spent money on others. The group that spent money on others reported greater levels of happiness than the group that spent money on themselves. In turn, that happier group reported that they were more likely to spend money on others in the future. In effect, the more they gave, they more they wanted to give.14

  Is there an ideal approach to giving? The research suggests you may find it better to do your compassion practice in one big chunk, rather than trying to constantly do compassionate things throughout the day, every day. In his bestselling book, Give and Take: A Revolutionary Approach to Success, Adam Grant, a psychology professor at the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania, writes that “selfless givers are more inclined to sprinkle their giving throughout their days, helping whenever people need them. This can become highly distracting and exhausting, robbing selfless givers of their attention and energy necessary to complete their own work.”15 Instead, he suggests doing most of your giving one day per week.

  Volunteer Work as a Compassion Practice

  In early 1992, my biggest goal was to get accepted into a top business school. But it was going to be very hard. I had good grades as an undergrad, but the University of Iowa was not considered an elite school. My work experience could be labelled as “adventuresome,” “bohemian,” or just plain “weird”: English teacher in Germany. Business journalist in Madrid. Struggling phone sales guy in the Bay Area. For me to have any chance at all of getting into a top MBA program, I had to play my hand as well as I could.

  Zane, a friend of mine, told me that business school admissions offices looked favorably on people who had a record of community or volunteer work. Maybe this shows you’re a nice person. Or it’s a great way to develop your leadership skills. Or, perhaps, you even learn how to be around people less fortunate or privileged than you.

  After considerable searching, I chose to volunteer Sundays on the hotline of the San Francisco AIDS Foundation. The HIV/AIDS crisis was raging at the time and had decimated a horrifically large part of the gay community worldwide. Gay, straight, or whatever, millions of people had died from the disease. And millions more were going to.

  Although I’m straight, I had some very close friends who were gay, and I was doing this out of solidarity with them. At least one, Gary, had already died of the disease.

  I may have volunteered with very self-serving intentions, but I was soon caught up in the importance of the work. Because I spoke Spanish, I was trained in Spanish with the Latino volunteers. But when I showed up for my first shift on a Sunday morning, there were really no calls into the Spanish language hotline. Instead, I soon started taking the calls in English, which came in at a steady pace.

  “How does a person get AIDS?”

  “Where can I get tested for HIV?”

  “I just had sex with someone last night. I’m not sure if what I did was risky or not. Can I ask you?”

  “I’m a heroin addict. Can I get AIDS from sharing syringes?”

  “How can I practice safe sex?”

  “My boyfriend just died of AIDS. I feel like killing myself.”

  This was a very different way to spend Sundays than watc
hing pro football. Fortunately, the S.F. AIDS Foundation’s training was excellent. It helped me develop my skills in listening nonjudgmentally. I got quite used to talking with strangers about semen, blood, condoms, dental dams, penetration, death, hospitals, T-cell counts, Kaposi’s sarcoma … and love.

  I was forced to be in the moment, trying to help callers in whatever way they needed. Meeting them wherever they were intellectually, emotionally, or spiritually. Some calls took 45 seconds. My longest call lasted 3 hours, as one heartbroken man recounted the romance, illness, and loss of his loved one. We were crying together.

  But the hotline was not all tears, either. I quickly learned that if you gave yourself permission to cry, you could also give yourself permission to laugh.

  And laugh we did. I met amazing people through my volunteer work on the 11:00 a.m. to 2:00 p.m. Sunday shift: Richard, a retired high school teacher who was part of the Free Speech Movement in Berkeley in the 1960s. He was gay and had been fighting for equal rights his entire life. There was Ray, a middle-aged executive at Wells Fargo Bank. There was Sangeeta, a young India-born engineer who happened to be a lesbian. There was Russell, who was sweet and feminine, enjoying his life in the big city. There was our hotline shift leader, James, who died of AIDS during the course of my time at the hotline.

  Oddly, I don’t really recall the specific reasons why any of them volunteered. We didn’t really talk about it. In a way, it was so obvious that lives were on the line and this work needed to be done. It’s sort of like asking, “Why are you pouring water on that burning building?”

  When it came time to write my applications to Stanford and Northwestern, I was not shy about describing my experience at the San Francisco AIDS Foundation. And yet, perhaps appropriately, my volunteer experience did make me a better leader: I did have a better understanding of people — especially those I would not have come into contact with otherwise. I did sense others’ suffering more acutely. And I learned that in some small way, I could make a positive difference in a community.

  Research supports the feelings of reward and purpose that I personally experienced. According to a 2013 study from United Health Group, 94 percent of those surveyed said that volunteering improved their mood, 96 percent said it enriched their sense of purpose, and 78 percent said it lowered their stress.16 In a separate study, Harvard University researchers found that people who contributed either time or money to a charity were 42 percent more likely to be happy than those who didn’t. And perhaps best of all, research at the National Institutes of Health showed that “the same area of the brain that is activated in response to food or sex (namely, pleasure) lit up when the participants in the study thought about giving money to a charity.”17

  These mental benefits translate to better health. Researchers from the University of California, Berkeley found that people 55 or older who volunteered for two or more organizations during the five-year study period had a 44 percent lower mortality rate than those who did less volunteering.18In effect, the lesson is, “volunteer and live.”

  How Much Volunteer Work Should You Do?

  I was at the AIDS Foundation hotline three hours a week for a couple of years. In another profound but rather different experience, I went door-to-door canvassing for various candidates in U.S. elections. That involved doing nothing for years — then spending 12 hours per day for five consecutive days leading up to election day. Either way, my total involvement amounted to several dozens of hours — not a huge commitment in the grand scheme of things.

  Indeed, as Psychology Professor Adam Grant writes in Give and Take, “One hundred [hours] seems to be a magical number when it comes to giving. In a study of more than two thousand Australian adults in their mid-sixties, those who volunteered between one hundred and eight hundred hours per year were happier and more satisfied with their lives than those who volunteered fewer than one hundred or more than eight hundred hours annually. In another study, American adults who volunteered at least one hundred hours in 1998 were more likely to be alive in 2000. There were no benefits of volunteering more than one hundred hours. This is the 100-hour rule of volunteering. It appears to be the range where giving is maximally energizing and minimally draining.”19

  As such, “give ’til it hurts” may not be the best advice for long-term, sustainable success as a volunteer. Too much volunteering will probably burn you out and frustrate you. But the right amount — roughly just two hours per week — will make you feel great.

  To Live Long … Be Kind

  Would you like to not only be happy, but also live a long life?

  Then consider the findings from research begun in 1921 by psychologist Lewis Terman at Stanford University. The “Terman Study of the Gifted” pioneered the concept of a “longitudinal study,” in which scientists track participants on multiple variables over the course of many years.20

  University of California, Riverside Psychology Professors Howard S. Friedman and Leslie Martin examined the Terman study data and shared their findings in their book, The Longevity Project: “We figured that if a Terman participant sincerely felt that he or she had friends and relatives to count on when having a hard time then that person would be healthier. Those who felt very loved and cared for, we predicted, would live the longest. Surprise: our prediction was wrong … Beyond social network size, the clearest benefit of social relationships came from helping others [emphasis mine]. Those who helped their friends and neighbors, advising and caring for others, tended to live to old age.”21

  What a remarkable insight! Many of us imagine that if Grandma is simply surrounded by siblings, children, grandchildren, and a large community of friends, she’ll live a long time. (It might help if Grandpa is still around, too!) I’m sure those all help. But based on the evidence, these factors are not nearly as important as Grandma believing that she has a purpose for getting out of bed in the morning. She has meaning in her life. People need her. And she can use her lifetime of experience, skills, and wisdom to help others.

  I’ve observed thriving longevity in my own family, too. My paternal grandmother, Leona Kappes McCarthy, lived until age 98. Into her 90s, she volunteered regularly at her church, St. Boniface in Sioux City, Iowa. At this writing, both of my parents are still alive, into their early 80s. Their retirement years have been filled with their church group couples’ bridge league, volunteering to help with various church activities, and saying prayers at the frequent funerals of their friends.

  Do religious people live longer? The authors of The Longevity Project found that the religious women in the study lived longer than those who were not religious. But religiosity did not matter for the men.22 Importantly, they noted that “overall it was not religious involvement per se that was so important to long life, although it helped many women. Rather it was the other characteristics that tended to go along with being religious that explained why these women lived longer. It was not the meditative effect of prayer or the act of regular attendance at religious services that mattered. It was a much broader collection of associated acts and attributes. Those who gradually left their religious involvement were at high risk if they also let their community involvement falter and diminish.”23

  Thus, as long as a person had a community of friends, it did not matter whether that community was based on religion or other common interests.

  That’s good news for “fallen away” Catholics such as myself. Thank God!

  The Wisdom of Age

  Think for a second about the older people you know — whether they’re your parents, neighbors, colleagues, or friends. Are they happy? The evidence suggests that we can learn a lot about happiness from the older members of our communities.

  A massive Gallup Organization telephone survey in the United States sought to understand how respondents’ “global well-being,” or overall appraisal of their life, might vary over time. This encompassed an “overall judgment of one’s life, including
one’s aspirations, achievements, and current circumstances.” Researchers found what is often called a “U-bend” throughout life: Global well-being started very high for the 18- to 21-year-old group, but then continued to drop as life went on, bottoming out at age 50 to 53. (We often label this “midlife crisis.”) From that age onward, however, self-reported global well-being continued to go up. By the time people achieved the oldest age in the survey (82 to 85), their global well-being was almost as high as when they were age 18 to 21.24

  Other research across 72 countries found a similar U-bend of happiness.25

  Thus, from middle-age onwards, people generally get happier. So what can the most experienced humans in our society teach us about happiness, or how to become happier?

  One explanation comes from Psychology Professor Laura Carstensen, who is the founding director of the Stanford Center on Longevity. Interviewed for the “TED Radio Hour from NPR,” she says, “Older people are happy. They are happier than middle-aged people and younger people, certainly. Study after study is coming to the same conclusion.”26

  In her TED Talk, she describes that “As we age, our time horizons grow shorter and our goals change. When we recognize that we don’t have all the time in the world, we see our priorities most clearly; we take less notice of trivial matters; we savor our life; we’re more appreciative; we’re open to reconciliation; we invest in more emotionally important parts of life, and life gets better.”27 This makes sense to me. I recently turned 55, and I still have many exciting hopes, dreams, and plans for the rest of my life. But I no longer expect that someday I’ll be a journalist on TV’s 60 Minutes, the U.S. ambassador to France, or a U.S. Supreme Court justice. Even though I have an MBA degree from Stanford, I will never be the CEO of a Fortune 500 company, a founder of a cutting-edge Silicon Valley start-up, or a billionaire. Believe it or not, I once considered all of these accomplishments as possible goals for myself.