There are quite a few endeavors that you can power through with sheer guts and determination. People do this all the time at work, gritting their teeth and surpassing goals. You may hate your job, your boss, or both – but you have to earn a living, so you power through.
You can spend your whole life pursuing individual success, and you can accomplish it. You can make a lot of money, live in a big house, and take extravagant vacations.
Not to be insulting, but this is fleeting success. It’s not the sort of success that comes when compassion guides your life, and when you open your eyes and your heart wide enough that you not only see what is happening to the people around you, but you also do something to link their success to yours.
This is lasting success. Why? Because when you help change the lives of people around you for the better, the success you spawn will continue to grow and thrive long after you are gone. If you don’t believe me, invest a few hundred dollars sending antibiotics to Zambia or to buy books for girls in Ghana who lack them.
It always takes tenacity to succeed, but lasting success requires the added element of compassion.
Can mere tenacity enable you to set a goal and achieve it? Yes.
Can mere tenacity bring lasting success to your life, and to the lives of others? No way. The higher you aim, the more important compassion becomes.
In business and society, the lack of compassion sinks many ventures. This lack makes employees realize that management could not care less about them. It makes team members lose interest in acting like a team. It makes entire countries rise up against their leaders.
But when compassion guides, the world shifts just a bit in a different, more positive direction.
Take, for example, Mama Zara of Tanzania, otherwise known as Mrs. Zainab Ansell. In 1987, she started ZARA Tours and began organizing tours to Mt. Kilimanjaro and Mt. Meru.
Today, Mama employs about 1,500 porters and 88 registered guides. Being a porter is a very basic, entry-level job. You carry supplies up and down Kilimanjaro.
Mama could spend the minimum for porters, and simply forget about them once climbing season is over. But that’s not what she does. Instead, she sets up a personal bank account for each porter. Bear in mind, many of these people have never even seen a bank. But she feels that if you pay them on the spot, the money is soon gone and nothing changes in their
lives. In her mind, she is setting them up for the future.
It’s not clear that a single porter has ever quit Mama’s company to go work for one of her competitors.
Every year, Mama selects about ten porters to join her apprentice guide program. This benefits her, because it builds her ranks of guides, but it also gives porters a means to advance. She and her husband own four different hotels for mountain climbers. As guides get older, she starts to move them into a hospitality management program, so that they can work in her hotels.
Mama has found the intersection between compassion and self-interest. Her programs benefit her community, her company, and her clients.
This article was adapted from a free eGuide I wrote with Luis Benitez. It is embedded below, and you can read it by maximizing the image. To save it for later, click the Slideshare logo at the bottom left; you will go to the Slideshare site, and then you can click “Save” in the bar just over the eGuide.