The Value of Thinking of Others Before Yourself

Jake Boucher
3 min readFeb 6, 2018
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The key to winning any kind of business is the amount of value you provide that particular business.

You always have to think in terms of how you can help the other person(s). People won’t want to work with you if you’re mindset is to better yourself instead of the other party.

If you can master the art of helping others in life, then helping others in business should come easy.

I used to always think in terms of myself. I didn’t really think in terms of the others around me. This is true for the vast majority of the world as well.

I am still a college student, and I am currently taking a Literature class. One of my assignments that we have to do is read a story called This is Water by David Foster Wallace. The whole premise of the story is how individuals nowadays think in terms of themselves, and that the universe revolves around them.

This is a huge mistake that I quickly learned. If you can break away from the rest of the pack, and not think in terms of yourself, then you are way ahead of everybody else.

What I did

I sat down in a chair for 20 minutes one day, and I thought what am I doing wrong? How can I fix it?

The answer was quite simple —I had to provide value for others and shift my focus to how I can improve their business. Don’t think about yourself when you’re trying to win the business of someone. Just remember, always put it in terms of how you can better them or their business. The success will follow.

If you can take this and implement it into your life, you will be much better off. What’s better than helping improve the lives of others? An internal happiness will overcome you.

Good karma always comes back in a big way. The more you help people or their business, the more good karma you get in return.

In those 20 minutes in that chair, I came to a revelation. In my young entrepreneurial life, I put too much pressure on myself. I always thought there was no tomorrow if I didn’t get a client. If I don’t get a client, then it’s on to the next one. Or if I don’t write a good story on Medium, then it’s on to the next one. And it goes on and on and on…