Zen College Life

If you're new here, you may want to subscribe to my RSS feed. Thanks for visiting!

Selfishness is the act of giving priority of thought or deed to the self. It is placing one’s own interests over the needs or desires or others. Selfishness is often thought to be the opposite of altruism. Altruism is the selfless concern for the welfare of others. Altruism is considered a virtue, while selfishness is considered a vice. Here at Zen College Life, I am going to explain to you how selfishness in itself can be a virtue, as well as why and how you should practice selfishness in your everyday life.

Selfishness in itself is not a virtue. Making choices, decisions, and practices based on your own self interest is not virtuous by any means. But being selfish with the intention of doing more than you could do by generosity alone is the virtue that you should be driving for.

Let’s take a look at this simple case:

You earn 100 dollars at your job. At this point the most you could possibly do, generosity-wise, is give 100 dollars. But if you were selfish with your 100 dollars, with the intention of creating the ability to be more generous, you could do more than your 100 dollars alone could ever do. What could you do with 100 dollars to be more generous than your 100 dollars could be? Here’s a couple of crazy ideas that just may express my point (many of which are investments in yourself that would make you worth more than the 100 dollars could ever be):

Spend the 100 dollars on a first aid certification course: Developing the ability to act in the event of an emergency is worth more than 100 dollars, and the fact that you could potentially save a life makes it priceless.

Take a class to learn something new: Anything that you learn, especially anything that you could teach someone else, has the endless potential for generosity. Not only that , but it could benefit you in that you learned something useful for yourself. An excellent example of being selfish so that you can be more generous.

Invest in Fitness: There is no one greater investment that you can make for yourself. But this investment isn’t just for you. Being physically fit will allow you more energy throughout the day, which will in turn allow you to do more, focus better, and invest more in everything you do. Working out a couple of times a week could change your entire perspective on each day.

And one that I constantly try to be more selfish about…

Spending more time learning, instead of just ‘hanging out’: This one is a no brainer. Most of us don’t really accomplish anything more than having fun. If every once in a while, we invested more time to learning a new skill instead of hanging out, not only would we be much more educated, but we could do and teach more to our friends and family.

There are a million more reasons why being selfish for generosity is better than just being generous. We should all strive to be more selfish in the cause of generosity. Without our altruism, the world will not be any better than the generations before us has left it.

Have any ideas on selfish acts that could lead to greater generosity? Maybe we could use them. Leave a comment and let us know!

If you enjoyed this post, make sure you subscribe to my RSS feed!