Can you shift your orientation in life from what would be good for you to what would be good for the generation who'll come after you, and the generation after that?It's not an easy question to address.For a start, you own immediate needs are always right before you. And then there is the matter of your own likes and dislikes, the preferences you've built up over time which quietly influence your decisions, with you perhaps hardly noticing. And there's the matter of prediction - you might hardly be able to tell how your actions are going to turn out in your own life over the next week or two let alone across decades.So it's far from a trivial matter to respond to a multi-generational responsibility towards your life or in your work.But I think there are places you can start, and one of them is tracking the effect you have on the people around you who will, of course, go on to affect others. It's one of the ways our own contribution, of whatever sort, ripples out across time.Some questions you could take up in exploring this topic:
What kind of interactions did you have with each person you met - your colleagues, your customers, your friends, your family - today?
Did your speech, and how you made contact, have you and the other person feel more or less human? More or less dignified? More or less resourceful? More or less grateful? More or less generous? More or less alive?
How do you think the way you've left them will have them affect others they meet - straight after you, or later, when they go home?
Are you a force for dignity or diminishment in your interactions?
For the cultivation of life, or a chain of tiny deaths?
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Declaration: a part of speech where things change simply because something has been said.
When you start to see how your moods are purposeful, rather than experiences that just happen to you, you can open up new worlds of possibility.For example: can you tell what resentment does for you?Or, better said, what are you doing for yourself when you keep resentment going?This can be a fruitful exploration because, on the face of it, the poisonous part of resentment is much more obvious than its benefits. But look more closely for a while: when you are sure that you've been wronged, particularly if you don't feel you have much direct possibility for redress, resentment is actually a quite effective way of maintaining your self-esteem. It casts you in a superior position to your opponent, and moves you (at least in your own experience) from powerless victim to vengeful justice-seeker.Many moods have a similar purpose - maintaining self-esteem or protecting something that matters to you.Take anger, which keeps what you most care about hot and fiery and central in your attention, making sure you and others do not forget it.Or resignation, which has at its heart a conviction that what you want to happen cannot be made to come about, however hard you might try - perhaps a preferable story to the alternative in which your inability to change things is because of a fault or deficiency on your part.When you see that every mood has its own intelligence, its own set of priorities, and a particular something that it's working on bringing about, you can start to ask yourself
I think a lot.It's usually what I do first when I'm in difficulty, frightened, or unsure.Think think think think think.But I'm discovering that so much of my thinking isn't really thinking at all. At least, not the kind of thinking that can be trusted for its accuracy, or its insightfulness.Here's how it goes:
Waiting until you know for sure what's going to happen - where people are involved - means waiting for ever.With machines, it's easy. With sufficient understanding of mechanics you can often predict exactly what's going to happen. Cause and effect, straightforward to establish.But human situations are nothing like that, even though we pretend to ourselves that they might be.Take a meeting, for example.Should you speak up about what's on your mind? Now? Later? What effect will it have on your colleagues? On the decision to be made?You cannot know for sure.Whatever insight you have about the situation can only ever be partial. You can't know what's going on for others. You can't know what they are thinking of saying. And you can't know - even if you know them well - how they will respond to your speaking.You have to act knowing that you're speaking into an unknowable situation. And that speaking up will, in all likelihood, change something, at the very least for you.But staying quiet is an act too, changing things no less than speaking up. So you have no choice but to be an actor, whatever you do, and however much you pretend it is not the case.We get ourselves into trouble when we forget all of this. We imagine that we can only act when we are able to predict the outcomes of our actions. Or we blame and judge ourselves and others when things don't turn out the way we expected.And all the while we're holding back our contribution, our insight, our knowledge, our creativity, our unique perspective because we've set ourselves standards of understanding that were never - could never be - reached.
We have a difficult time with choice (or, at least, with choosing) because we have a difficult time with death.Choosing always involves the death of what is not chosen. The death of a possibility. The death of a particular future that will, now, not be.And because choosing requires us to face death, many of us would rather not choose at all.And then we can only live a life that is never quite our own, because in the absence of our own choice everything is effectively being chosen for us. There's no less death here - we've simply turned our face away from it.But there is much less dignity, and much less responsibility.Stepping into our lives means, inevitably, that we step also into the death of things.
What is the world to you?
I have been reading Seth Godin's work for about five years. His book 
What's your understanding about what other people are?