Selfishness v.s. Taking Care of Yourself

I want to talk a little bit about the difference between being selfish and taking care of yourself. Because I think some of us sometimes have a little bit of difficulty separating the two. What it’s actually like to be selfish versus what it’s like to take care of yourself. So let’s define kind of of the two different things that we’re talking about here. So what does it mean to be selfish? It’s kind of when you’re only thinking of yourself. For example, you might throw a coworker under the bus so that you get the promotion. Or you might, in a more simpler term, you might take that last cookie out of a cookie jar when you know there’s a bunch of other people who want one. You know, those are selfish acts. You’re thinking with your own personal gains, or your own personal self-interests in mind, whether it’s financial gains or personal pleasure, or things like that. Things that you might want to do because it helps you. Those are the selfish things. Now what about taking care of yourself? Taking care of yourself is a little bit different in the sense that it’s doing what’s necessary to be able to do the things that you need to do. So, for example, think about a quarterback in a pro football team who might break their arm. Right? They’re probably going to sit out a few games because, well, their arm is broken, and they can’t throw a football anymore. The rest of the team might look at him and say, “Well, gee, that’s selfish. “We’re out here carrying the whole weight of the team “while you’re sitting on the sidelines “watching us win the games” and everything like that. But at the same time, if the quarterback was to go out on the field and continue playing with that broken arm, they might injure it further, and potentially end their career, or something like that. So they’re sort of yes, they’re being selfish in the sense that they’re looking after themselves or thinking of themselves, but with the bigger picture being that if they rest now and heal their arm now, they’ll be able to come back in the team in a couple of weeks when everything’s all healed and they’re able to play. On the surface, taking care of yourself does seem a little bit like it’s being selfish, but it’s not. In the army, we’re taught this medical training, basic life saving skills, like how to stop bleeding, how to do CPR, clearing an airway, things like that. When we’re deployed, we all were issued first aid kits, every single soldier who was overseas gets their own personal first aid kit. So not only do we have the skills to be able to treat most of these common injuries, we also had the tools available to us right away. We didn’t have to wait for a medic to come around to treat a lot of these more common injuries that we might see. Except for we were also taught that we’re not allowed to really go and treat these wounds until the threat that caused the wounds was eliminated. So, for example, think about a soldier who might be walking along and gets shot by a sniper. Now your first instinct might be “Let’s go run and help him. “Let’s go help fix that injury so he doesn’t bleed out and die or let’s try to get him to safety, or whatever. But if you think about it, that sniper had a clear line of sight to wherever that soldier was, and he probably still has a clear line of sight. So if I was to go run over, and other soldiers, too, run over and try to help them with first aid, or to drag them out of harm’s way, or whatever, we’re putting ourselves in danger of being shot just like that other soldier was. And so, in that point, we wouldn’t really be very useful to that other soldier because there’s still a threat, and then now, the next person who comes over now has two people to deal with or three. It can just continue going on and on, because that sniper is not being taken care of. So our job would be to, first and foremost, create a secure environment. So get rid of that sniper, or those other people who might be shooting at us, or if there’s bombs in the way, or something like, get rid of that dangerous situation first before we go and help out our friend. It sounds selfish but we’re not very useful to them if we’re also shot or also injured. So we kind of have to take care of that situation first. Think about it like this. The last time you got on to an airplane, chances are the flight attendant said before you took off said in the event of the loss of cabin pressure, oxygen masks are going to come down from the ceiling. I’m paraphrasing on that. I wouldn’t make a good flight attendant. Put your oxygen mask on first before helping others. Now as a parent, I know that if I had two children sitting next to me on either side of me, my first instinct would be to get them safe first. I don’t want to see them struggle at all, especially when it comes to things like not being able to breathe properly. Right? So my first instinct would be “Let’s put this mask “on this child and then this child, “and then I’ll worry about myself.” But the problem is I might only have time to put an oxygen mask on one person before I pass out from the lack of oxygen or from this decrease cabin pressure, or whatever the situation might be. So if I put an oxygen mask on one of my children, I may not have time to put my own oxygen mask, which means I won’t be able to help the next child. So it’s important for me to be able to put my own mask on first so then I can quickly help the other two children so that all three of us end up having our oxygen masks on first. It’s the same thing, same concept that I was talking about with the sniper situation where if we just rush out and try to help, we may not be able to help fully. We may not fully be able to stop the bleeding or to get them out of harm’s way because we may also put ourselves in to unnecessary danger. Now, let’s bring this around to business, right? How often are we asked to help other people whether it’s within your own company or other customers, potential customers, things like that. Maybe it’s a side project, maybe you have a full time job and you do a little freelance gig on the side. And it has you have a project coming that someone is asking you to do something for them, But that’s going to take you away from your regular job, right? Your performance might suffer in your regular job. Or it may make it so like, you now no longer have your weekends free to spend time with your family, and things like that. So before you jump to go please other people and help everybody under the sun, even if it’s within your same company, think about the things that you need to do, and if this project or this, ask whatever it is, is going to prevent you from doing the things that you need to do, then you have to think about taking care of yourself first as opposed to that selfishness feeling that a lot of us might get by saying “Well, I probably could help. Let me just do this “because I don’t want to be selfish.” But if you do that, then you’re not really helping yourself at all, and it’s going to cause problems for you down the road which may potentially make it impossible for you to help with any further projects down the line. For example, if you get fired or you end up doing a poor job on the other projects that you need to do, you may not get any future clients, which means you’re not getting the revenue that you need to continue your business. So think about ways that you can help people and support them but also take care of your own needs first.