Do you take more than you give? Thoughts on a net-positive life.

What if your life was a balanced scorecard? In business & our jobs we all understand the value of balancing - balancing cash and debt, investment and profits, build and buy, work and life. But we so easily go on living our lives, not giving a thought to the balance of our actions...the balance between giving and taking.

After we are born, we have to take in order to survive, grow and learn. We take from our parents, we take from our teachers, we take from friends, neighbors - we even take a larger share of natural resources! This is understandable and justifiable, much like a sapling needs external support to become a tree. But unlike a tree, which will then clean the air of one ton of CO2 in its lifetime, humans continue taking without giving balance a thought. Why is that?

Take a moment and think about your own life. Have you led a balanced life? Have you on becoming a productive adult, given as much as you received? I am not talking about money alone here. I am talking about everything you take from other humans, from the earth, from your employer, from social services, from the government, from the rivers, lakes and seas, from the farms that give you food and clothe you. There is no right (or righteous) answer to this. It is just a way to measure your life. Something you have to be okay, or not okay with. But your outlook on balance will decide whether you leave this world in a better condition that you found it, or if you are contributing towards progressive and irreversible damage to it. And that in turn will decide the longevity and success of our species.

If one were to plot the delta of taking and giving on a graph of an ideal human life it will follow a curve that looks like this:

In effect, you have a few productive years in the middle, where you can give more than you take. Like it is after birth, the years before death are also those in which we have no choice but to take more than we give. But in the middle, when you are at your prime, how do you measure your actions? What does your graph look like? Is it a long plateau, which means that you are consistently "net positive" in your living? Or is it mostly under the line, with a few blips into positive territory, whenever you feel the need to be generous with your resources. Does it take a genius to figure out that if most of us just stay below the line, then this earth and its people have no chance to be successful in the long run and that humanity will eventually die from a thousand cuts?

If you look carefully you will see people who live net positive lives. They are the few selfless people who take on the burden of giving. Teachers. (Some) Doctors. First Responders. Red Cross. MSF. Activists. While the rest of us, keep taking and taking. If you measure your life with how much power you have, or how much money you make or which car you drive - then remember that all that is just taking. The true measure is what you do with that money or power. If you measure your life as being the best at your work and having the most amount knowledge and expertise - the remember your learning is taking as well; it is teaching that is giving. If you measure your life as being the exemplary family person, and dedicate your life to your kids and their upbringing and education - think about what is the end result of that. Will they grow up to be "successful" adults who take even more from the world? Make more money and build more houses? Or are you pouring yourself into raising a human being who will give more than he or she will take?

Each of us continues living as if our actions a self-contained. But they aren't. They all go into building this world that we share, and have equal responsibility towards. So our actions alone will build or break this world. It really is as simple as that. If more of us start thinking about the balance in how we spend our time, energy, expertise and money - there will be abundance in this world.

So, are you giving as much as you are taking? Do you have a net-positive life? Think about it. The future of humanity might depend on the answer.