The secret pleasure of a generous act is the great mind’s great bribe.
— John Dryden
LEADERSHIP
WHAT THIS MEANS
Generosity pays the giver, quietly and immediately, in a satisfaction no one else sees. That private return is real and worth admitting rather than dressing the act up as pure selflessness. It also explains why the largest people are often the most generous, since they have found the one payment that does not run out and does not depend on anyone’s thanks. The pleasure is not a flaw in the giving.
Do one useful thing this week that nobody will know you did. Notice what it feels like afterwards, and let that, rather than acknowledgment, be the reason you do it again.
A QUESTION TO SIT WITH
Which kindness of yours paid you back in private satisfaction?
MORE IN INTEGRITY & CHARACTER
- He who would not be frustrate of his hope to write well hereafter in laudable things ought himself to be a true poem.
- Men of most renowned virtue have sometimes by transgressing most truly kept the law.
- Good nature will always supply the absence of beauty; but beauty cannot supply the absence of good nature.
Free, with nothing to buy inside it.