ADHD: What One Anonymous Good Deed Does Every Day
I’ve found that helping others gives me the inner strength to push through just about any sort of adversity.
Remember the old Boy Scout motto, “Do a good deed every day”? Turns out it’s not only good and moral advice for living your life well, it’s also therapeutic!
This is from a former Dale Carnegie Course instructor in the midwest:
Most people know the Boy Scout’s saying about doing a good deed every day.
What most people don’t know, however, is that many years ago that saying was slightly different, and, I believe, the older way was the more powerful way.
The old adage said to do a good deed every day in a way that the recipient of it didn’t know you were the deed-doer.
This was based on that part from the Sermon on the Mount about not letting your left hand know what your right hand is doing when you do good. We do it for God rather than for the thanks that we might get for doing something good.
I’ve found that this is a way of bringing power into my life. I don’t know what to call this power other than, perhaps, spiritual power. (I imagine the Indians had a word for it.)
Whatever it is, I know that when I do good for other people and they don’t know that who brought it about, I get a feeling of empowerment that’s almost euphoric. Not just the rest of my day goes well-the rest of my week or month goes well.
Think back: when was the last time you went out of your way for somebody in a way that they’d never be able to thank you for or even know that it was you who helped? This is a very rare experience, because you have to work at finding the opportunities.
Sometimes they’re right in front of you: the person who left his lights on in the parking lot, for example, with the doors unlocked. Other times it takes some creativity. I was once visiting a family that was having a hard time, as the husband had been recently laid off from work.
When they were out of the room, I slipped a $ 100 bill into their family Bible, where they’d probably find it in the next few weeks but have no idea how it got there. And I called a few people who I thought might be good job prospects for the husband out of work. I convinced one of them to call him in for an interview, on the condition that my name not be used.
So many of us with ADHD find that life can be a struggle. We forget things, we misplace things, and we generally have a harder time in this world than our Farmer counterparts. This can be very disempowering and demoralizing
But I’ve found that helping others gives me the inner strength to push through just about any sort of adversity.
And I agree with the founders of the Boy Scouts that if everybody would do one anonymous good deed every day, the world would be a very different, and much more pleasant, place to live.