Five Great Ways to Achieve Happiness Through Serving Others

From Zen Habits
I worked in the “Happiness” business. For a long time I worked in the Hospitality industry, restaurants and hotels, where I have been a busboy, host, waiter, bartender and manager. For 12 years I spent most evenings and weekends, and every holiday, taking care of people who were going out to dinner or attending an event like a wedding or prom.

I truly enjoyed this work as it was emotionally fulfilling and financially rewarding, not to mention just plain fun a lot of the time.

There are those who would disparage a career path like this as demeaning and servile, yet the call to serve others is the source of my own greatest happiness.

Coffee Kids and the Man Behind It All

By Bill Fishbein
Just before I went off to college, my dad pulled me aside to give me some words of advice. He told me that he had once read in the Talmud that, “If you change one person, you change the world”. While I knew and appreciated that he was trying to share something of profound value to me, I thought it was the most ridiculous thing I’d ever heard. There are billions of people in the world. And, changing one of them wasn’t going to make one hill of beans worth of difference. Anyway, I went off to college.

In college, while other kids were drinking beer and falling in love, I was falling in love with coffee. I studied late with friends from Venezuela who brewed the most delicious coffee. I should have been as passionate about my studies as I was about the coffee. But, I graduated just the same.

Shortly after college, I returned to Providence, to help my mom and dad in their restaurant equipment business. It was a small business, but we had big dreams. Still, I envied the coffee supplier. We both entered restaurants from the back door, but he had the life! He sold coffee!

The gospel according to Adam Smith – Spiritual Capitalism

Is doing good compatible with making money? It is if you practise spiritual capitalism. Art DeLorenzo and I were having a hard time connecting. He’s a 67-year-old retired financial adviser in the New York City area whose budding consulting practice keeps him from settling into an easy chair. I’m a journalist in San Francisco, perpetually on deadline. Several appointments we set were moved or missed, but we kept trying. Late one evening, as we seemed finally to settle on yet another date for our interview, DeLorenzo threw out a comment that would prove as valuable as anything he said in our hour-long phone call days later.

“Wait a moment.” DeLorenzo paused. “I could say 3 p.m., but the group I’ll be meeting with before you, they tend to run over. It’s just their habit, but I know this. So I’d rather not book you right up against them. I don’t want to compromise the integrity of my commitment to them.”

The details of one man’s business schedule might not seem meaningful at first. But in that moment I realized DeLorenzo’s deliberate emphasis on a few choice words—“the integrity of my commitment”—was a straightforward yet eloquent statement of a still-fuzzy but increasingly important trend: spiritual capitalism.

Chimps Calm Each Other with Hugs, Kisses

For most folks, a nice hug and some sympathy can help a bit after we get pushed around. Turns out, chimpanzees use hugs and kisses the same way. And it works. Researchers studying people’s closest genetic relatives found that stress was reduced in chimps that were victims of aggression if a third chimp stepped in to offer consolation.

”Consolation usually took the form of a kiss or embrace,” said Dr. Orlaith N. Fraser of the Research Center in Evolutionary Anthropology and Paleoecology at Liverpool John Moores University in England.

”This is particularly interesting,” she said, because this behavior is rarely seen other than after a conflict.

”If a kiss was used, the consoler would press his or her open mouth against the recipient’s body, usually on the top of the head or their back. An embrace consisted of the consoler wrapping one or both arms around the recipient.”

Dr. Farmer’s Remedy For World Health

The great innovators of our time are said to be the titans of technology – the inventors of the microchip, the founders of Microsoft, the guys behind Google. But far from Silicon Valley another great thinker and innovator is changing the world with far less fanfare. His name is Dr. Paul Farmer.

As Byron Pitts reports, more than 20 years ago Dr. Farmer and a few other great minds created a charity called “Partners In Health.” In the years since, they revolutionized the delivery of healthcare worldwide, saving millions of lives in places where no one thought there was any reason for hope.

“The idea that because you’re born in Haiti you could die having a child. The idea that because you’re born in you know Malawi your children may go to bed hungry. We want to take some of the chance out of that,” Farmer tells Pitts.

Utahns give new smiles to children in Mexico

June 16th, 2008
A group of Utahns just returned from a humanitarian mission to Mexico with the charity Operation Smile. The charity sponsors cleft lip and cleft palate surgeries for children throughout the world.

Many Utahns have been involved for more than 25 years, and that volunteer list is growing as more groups travel to see for themselves how lives are changed.

Hundreds of children wait in line, their parents hope and wonder will our child be chosen? During one week this June, more than 130 children’s faces changed. Cleft lips and palates were fixed.

Each Operation Smile mission costs hundreds of thousands of dollars to transport people and equipment to foreign countries. That’s where corporate sponsors come in.

Joe Morton and his brother, Gordon, commit a portion of XanGo’s profits to children’s’ charities, like Operation Smile.