We are all busy. We all have more important things to do or more important places to be. However, none of us are more important than one another. Therefore, if you see another person in need and you can help, then help.

A Little Goes a Long Way

My uncle once told me a story about being a better person. He asked a Daoist teacher how to improve himself, how to become enlightened, etc. The Daoist teacher told him to start with doing 10,000 good deeds.

A good deed can be anything that helps another person. It can be as simple as offering your seat on the subway to as extreme as saving another person’s life. A good deed can take essentially no time or effort, just thought. Or a good deed can take a lot of time and effort to fulfill. A good deed is a good deed regardless of how difficult or easy it is for you to do.

Quantifying the Burden of Helping Someone

Let’s try and quantify being a better person. People tend to see value in monetary terms, but I’ve been learning recently that time is more valuable than money. So this is my attempt at calculating the price an average person pays, in time, to help another person.

There are 525,600 minutes in one year. Let’s assume that we all sleep 8 hours a night, so now we have 350,400 waking minutes in one year. We work another 8 hours, 5 days per week for 50 weeks a year (because…..vacay time) which brings us to 230,400 free minutes a year to do whatever we want (calculation credit goes to Eric McMillin).

On average, we can assume that a good deed takes one minute to complete because offering a seat takes a fraction of a second, but other deeds take more time. So to do 10,000 good deeds in one year, it should take you about 10,000 minutes. 10,000 minutes is 4.3% of the 230,400 free minutes we have each year.

Can We Justify Not Helping Another Person?

Mathematically speaking, no. We cannot justify not helping another person. Why? Because 4.3% is insignificant in terms of free time. On average, people in the USA spend 16.7% of their time looking at their smartphones and we clearly consider this amount of time insignificant because we keep doing it (Hakernoon). So, one-fourth of the amount of insignificant time spent scrolling on Facebook could easily be devoted to lending a helpful hand.

Justification can be done in many ways, but we often think about how much time or money something will cost us before we decide to do anything in life. Being helpful is an insignificant cost for a high reward because of the benefits we gain. We feel good when we help people. Other people feel good when they get help. Finally, bystanders might be inspired to help someone if they witness a good deed. The benefits are many for such a small cost.

If you have the ability to help another person today, I invite you to help. See how it makes you feel. See how people react.