How to Immediately Improve Your Life (Hint: It Starts With Improving the Lives of Others)

by Arianna Huffington

Last week a few HuffPost editors and I were treated to a visit by Bill Drayton and Mary Gordon. Bill Drayton is the founder of Ashoka and a longtime champion of social entrepreneurship, a term that he coined and that has now spread across the world. Mary Gordon is a former kindergarten teacher who founded Roots of Empathy, an organization dedicated to teaching emotional literacy and promoting empathy in children. She was also one of the first Ashoka fellows. Our visit started with talk of the newborn recently welcomed by one of our editors, Gregory Beyer, whereupon Mary presented him with a onesie with "Empathy Teacher" emblazoned on the front. But as Mary -- a great empathy teacher herself -- told us, it's a two-way street, and empathy is best nurtured by example. "Love grows brains," she told us. "We need to show children a picture of love as we raise them."

And giving not only nurtures empathy; it's an outgrowth of our innate capacity for empathy. It's also one of the key components of HuffPost's Third Metric initiative to redefine success beyond the first two metrics of money and power to include well-being, wisdom, and our ability to wonder and to give -- all of which are boosted when we give our time and effort to something other than ourselves.

Philosophers have known this for centuries. "No one can live happily who has regard for himself alone and transforms everything into a question of his own utility," wrote the first-century Stoic philosopher Seneca in his Moral Letters to Lucilius. And in practically every religious tradition and practice, giving of oneself is a key step on the path to spiritual fulfillment. Or, as Einstein put it, "only a life lived for others is a life worthwhile."

Since Einstein, scientists have been trying to come up with the "theory of everything," which would explain our entire physical world by reconciling general relativity with quantum physics. In the study of our emotional world, there's no analogous theory of everything, but if there were, empathy and giving would be at the center of it. And modern science has overwhelmingly confirmed the wisdom of those early philosophers and religious traditions.
Empathy, compassion, and giving -- which is simply empathy and compassion in action -- are the building blocks of our being. With them we flourish; without them we perish.

In his book The Happiness Hypothesis: Finding Modern Truth in Ancient Wisdom, Jonathan Haidt writes that "caring for others is often more beneficial than receiving help. We need to interact and intertwine with others; we need the give and take; we need to belong."

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