How Can You Have Fun And Help Others At The Same Time?

Life is full of trade offs, and we need to be really thoughtful about choosing what we want among the options that exist. And even though that’s a reality we must navigate, we also underestimate how we can creatively arrive at solutions that give us a little more of everything than is immediately apparent.

Ray Dalio, an incredible business mind and one of the wealthiest people in the world, built his career on this every idea. He says "Rather than seeing things as a ‘this or that’, how do we get as much of both as possible”? I want to apply this same concept to enjoying our lives and maximizing our contribution to the world, which led me to asking myself the question “How can I have fun and help others at the same time?”

They don’t need to be mutually exclusive. From the infinite amount of possibilities that exist in the world, there has to be one that is both fun and impactful. It’s just a matter of figuring out what that might be. 

In order to do that, first you need to be self-aware of what you enjoy doing. What activities pull you into flow and make you lose track of time? What things make your heart purr? Then with that awareness, how can you do that thing and also be helpful to others? What you enjoy doing can also be of service.

To show how doable this is, let me share a few examples:

If you have fun playing pickleball, what if you organized a fundraiser pickleball tournament to support a local nonprofit?

If you like knitting, what if you tell friends and family that you’ll help patch their clothes for them?

If you like riding dirt bikes, what if you made a community group for people to connect, or join one and give product recommendations to help people just getting started?

The more we can lean into doing things we enjoy, the better. And the more we can integrate ways to make a difference into our lives, the more fulfilled we’ll feel.

Good questions make you come up with good answers. We can control the direction of our thinking by controlling the inputs that our mind is tasked to think about. So have fun with it, make the space for creativity to come out, and don't’ accept things for how they are because you’re one idea away from having your cake and eating it too!