A progressive society
I recently made a tweet thanking my younger self for making all the decisions that has made me who I am today. One of the things I (younger self) learned was that helping people makes you successful. I can’t clearly remember what books, articles, podcasts or videos in particular but the people I looked up to always seemed to use the same language of “helping people”. I subscribed to that idea!
This way of thinking/being has become an integral part of me that it’s not immediately obvious what drives me. I was only reminded of this again when I was presented a video at random by Youtube last week. In this video, Goobie shares his reasons for becoming a neurosurgeon and his journey so far.
The idea of living a life or choosing a career of helping people is not a familiar concept or conversation had in this part of the world or at least the communities or circles I’ve been in. Help in this part of the world is the occasional event of doing good to someone without expecting anything in return. A decision you have to take once in a while at your convenience. So if you ever have to use the phrase “help people”, people intrinsically back off because a lot them don’t think they are in position to do any form of helping.
That is one form of helping but that’s not what I’m talking about in this post. Before we continue, I’d like to make my point clear so that the rest of the post resonates clearly:
For any progressive society, a few people should feel responsible for the welfare and success of others.
People
When Fritz Haber developed the method to manufacture artificial fertilizer, Germany’s population was growing rapidly and there was urgent need to be able to supplement natural sources of nitrogen [for plant growth]. This discovery has eventually become impactful on global scale and even eradicated the idea of drought; something I (at least) may never know what it really feels like. This obviously made Fritz successful. Maybe not a billionaire but definitely well respected, could afford whatever he wanted and also work on things he loved.
In developing the PC, Bill Gates believed computers should be accessible to the masses. Steve Jobs also thought along those lines: technology should be accessible. Evan You thought build times could be faster to save time and built Vite. 3B1B among others think lecturers don’t do justice to subjects and aim to provide more examples and visualizations to make things easier for students.
All these are examples of people who took on the responsibility to ensure the progress of humanity. They were not asked or voted into these positions. It was partly wanting to help and partly other reasons (like ambitions).
Not free
One misconception I’ve seen people have with the idea of “helping people” is that it always has to be free. But this is wrong. Helping people doesn’t have to be free. Let me explain:
In a simple society, the majority may not know how to get an entertainment system like a TV into their homes. Being a supplier of this means you’re helping them. They don’t have to worry where TVs are manufactured or sold in wholesale. They don’t have to figure out how to get it transported to their houses. But you wouldn’t take care of these for free, would you?
I once mentioned in an argument that one way to help the people of Ghana is to build a very good electrical engineering vocational instituition to teach people how to make things. Because right now, if you wanted your son/daughter to learn this, it’s almost impossible to find a place. Well, I don’t! The ball-roll effect is that when it comes the time when someone wants to build an electronics factory in Ghana, they can find indigenes to employ. But right now, this will be impossible — even though we have degree holders.
You don’t have to set up this institution for free. And yes, people will pay to enrol. People already pay to enrol in software training. All-in-all, this counts as helping people.
An immediate example is Ashesi University. Patrick Awuah was concerned about the future generations of Africa. Is Ashesi free to enrol? No. But it is achieving its purpose.
Making things accessible and possible for people so they don’t have to worry about the complexities is helping (aka unburdening). Millions of people don’t know how Microsoft Word works but life-changing stories, textbooks, etc. have been written in it.
Scale & Purpose
Yes, not everyone can/should help everyone. This post is just like an ember of thought, hopefully to ignite some purpose within some few people that read. So not everyone is going to have a global impact but choosing to help people means you’ve chosen a purpose. It could be on the scale of your family, your town or country but can eventually have an exploding effect luckily in your lifetime like in the case of Fritz — he always put his country first.
This can also be done by proxy. For example, you could choose to help an organization or person who helps the multitude.
No matter how small, this influences a lot of things about your lifestyle. For example, having this responsibility, will also require you to learn and know a lot of things. Personally, this way of thinking has led me to be more sensitive to problems, explore their root causes and hypothesize on different cause of actions. I am actually very pragmatic.
Not to be naive: some reasons/desire to help people are (or can be) secondary. And that is fine. But without wanting to help people factor, the experience can sometimes be dire. And this is evident in so many aspects of the Ghanaian society.
Let’s take restaurants for example. Yes, the first requirement is to make profits — it’s not a charity. For a restaurant business that only cares about that, customer service is a whole story. Delivery will take hours to arrive. Food taste will be inconsistent. On the other hand, for a business that thinks it also exists to feed people: opening very early, closing strategically late, serving on time with consistent taste will be a requirement.
So what?
If this resonates in any way and are interested in what it means for you, here you go:
For everything you get involved in, always think of how people can benefit from it. And if you can monetize it, great! But never take people out of the equation. Find it as your responsibility to change people’s lives even slightly with your touch. Even if it’s a smile. And I tell you, success is almost guaranteed.