Living a Life of Service

Share your gifts, make a difference

What is a life of service anyway?

I like to use the life of a shepherd to further explain my understanding of this hypothetical question.  Following is how Church of Christ described a shepherd in one of its online articles.  “A shepherd is one who tends, protects and feeds a flock of sheep. He spends his time and energy ensuring that the sheep of his flock will not stray into danger, that they will find adequate food and water and that they will be protected from predators and thieves.”   His entire life is wrapped around his service. It is his life.

WHAT’S YOUR SERVICE?

“Only a life lived in the service of others is worth living.”

…Albert Einstein

Everyone has a chance to leave their footprints on the sands of time, but most people are just too busy doing nothing, or they are simply tiptoeing through life hoping to safely make it to their graves.  For some strange reasons, most of us simply specialize in making a million excuses from every opportunity of service we encounter rather than making a million dollars as a result of being excellent in the services we provide.

The life of a shepherd- as primitive or obsolete as it may appear to most people is a profound example of a life of service.  Such state of mind and attitude is what inspired Steve Scott, author of the Greatest Man Who Ever Lived, to say, “I can’t change the world economy, but I can help individual women and men to radically change their personal economies.”

Below are highlights of some of our heroes and trailblazers who started from scratch to build a global movement of entrepreneurs and change makers – a life of service.

• Bill Drayton, founder of Ashoka International is a genius. He is living a life of service.

Bill Drayton founded Ashoka – the “Everyone a Changemaker Movement” in 1980 based on the simple idea that the most powerful force for good in the world is a social entrepreneur: a person driven by an innovative idea that can help correct an entrenched global problem.  According to several reports on the internet, he was convinced that the world’s leading social entrepreneurs pursue system-change solutions that permanently alter existing pattern of activity.  Based on this conviction, beginning in India in 1981, Ashoka launched a global hunt for and started supporting – financially and technically- the world’s leading social entrepreneurs who have ideas for far-reaching social change.  Today, Ashoka Fellowship of over 3500 social entrepreneurs – the world’s first professional association of leading social entrepreneurs- are leading change in more than 90 countries on every continent.

• Professor Muhammad Yunus was recipient of the 2006 Nobel Peace Prize. He is living a life of service.

An economics teacher with an uncommon ambition, Professor Yunus had a burning desire and a mission to make economics and banking work for everyone, especially poor women.  Following failed attempts to persuade banks to provide soft loans to rural women who formed the bulk of micro entrepreneurs in Bangladesh, he founded Gramen Bank – a movement to empower millions of women to lift themselves and their families out of poverty.  From its origins as an action-research project in 1976, Gramen Bank has grown to provide collateral-free loans to over 7.5million clients in more than 82,072 villages in Bangladesh and over 97% of whom are women. According to its record published online, the bank has loaned out over 6.5 billion dollars to the poorest of the poor, while maintaining a repayment rate consistently above 98%.

• Bob Proctor is living a life service.

Even at 87, Bob Proctor, Chairman/Co-Founder of Proctor Gallagher Institute (PGI) has remained unstoppable.  He has spent over 60 years teaching people all over the world how to get what they want and how to create their own economies by changing their paradigms.  There is probably no one else in the world with the kind of zeal, expertise, depth of knowledge, humility, and the eloquence he shares on the subjects of paradigms, the mind, and human potential.

In his words, a paradigm is a multitude of habits which has almost exclusive control over our habitual behavior.  And he always quickly adds that most of our behaviors are habitual.  At 87 years old, he is the oldest publicly acknowledged Apostle and Chief Advocate of Napoleon Hill’s classic, “Think and Grow Rich.   Today, his institute, PGI, operates all over the world – a goal he set in the 1960s when he was a struggling young man with limited education, zero life skills, and no business exposure or experience.  According to Serena B. Miller, “Living a life of service to others is the most powerful sermon of all, don’t you think.”