Make Somebody's Day

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To basketball coach John Wooden, making each day your masterpiece was not just about selfish personal achievement. In his autobiography, They Call Me Coach, he mentions an element vital to creating each day.

"You cannot live a perfect day," he said, "without doing something for someone who will never be able to repay you."

I agree with that. But there's a way to make sure you can't be repaid-and that's doing something for someone who won't even know who did it. This gets into a theory I've had all my life, that you can create luck in your life. Not from the idea that luck is needed for success, because it isn't. But from the idea that luck can be a welcome addition to your life. You can create luck for yourself by creating it for someone else. If you know about someone who is hurting financially, you arrange for a few hundred dollars to arrive at their home, and they don't even know who you are, then you've made them lucky. By making someone lucky, something will then happen in your own life that also feels like pure luck. (I can't explain why this happens, and I have no scientific basis for it, so all I can say is try it a few times and see if you aren't as startled as I have been at the results...it doesn't have to be money, either. We have a lot of other things to give, always.)

When you get lucky, you'll get more motivated, because you feel like the universe is more on your side. Experiment with this a little. Don't be imprisoned by cynicism posing as rationality on this subject. See what happens to you when you make other people get lucky.

 Have you ever made other people get lucky? Let me know in the comment section below.

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