Disclaimer

Your life isn’t for you.

Really. It’s not. Your life isn’t for you and my life isn’t for me. The truth is that nature didn’t design us to find fulfillment in living for ourselves. We can achieve the fullest measure of life only by living it for others.

Sucks, doesn’t it?

Well, I think it does. But maybe that’s because I am not what you would call a people person. To be perfectly honest, people annoy me. I would much rather work alone in my garden than spend an hour or two socializing. So in a twist of irony, the philosophy I’m about to describe to you—this idea of living your life for others—is one that goes against the flow of my personality. If I were to have it my way, I never would have written a book like this. In fact, I’d probably be living in a cabin in the middle of the Alaskan wilderness with a pack of domesticated wolves trained to keep the humans away.

But I have learned—through sad and brutal experience—the dangers of taking my preference for solitude to extremes. Instead of my introversion being a healthy need for boundaries and personal reflection, it became an obsessive demand for control and isolation. I began to selfishly live my life purely for myself, and it nearly cost me everything. It was only after I nearly succeeded in taking my life, through an attempted suicide, that I stumbled across this life-giving philosophy about selflessness.

Now I need to pause here and define what being selfless means, because it’s probably conjuring up images of building orphanages, donating your money and possessions to charity, and performing humanitarian efforts under extreme conditions.

But that’s not what being selfless really means—not exactly, anyway. While those things can certainly be selfless actions, they are just that: actions. Actions and behaviors can be mimicked or faked for selfish purposes. A person can travel to another country and do humanitarian work for a photo op or publicity, while others can perform lifesaving services for money, connections, or other ulterior motives.

Honest selflessness is much deeper than our actions—it’s a condition of our heart. Being selfless is about opening yourself up to others and learning how to receive life from them and give life back to them. True selflessness is perhaps one of the most paradoxical things in nature: You don’t lose yourself for being selfless—you find yourself. You don’t lose everything for being selfless—you gain everything. Your life doesn’t diminish as you live it for others—it expands.

In short: to give life is to truly live life. This book offers a philosophy of how that can be done.