I’ve said it many times: having personal benefits deriving from an action (for example more money if we sell a specific product) will drive our actions toward that goal.

That’s what happens because we tend to focus on our short term benefit. To us it seems like a gain, but it doesn’t give us vision.

An example was a person I knew that was given the option to gain a % of money earned through the sales of new software.
Given this option what would you expect the outcome to be? The person did his best to get new customers, he got A LOT of them.

But he didn’t care about their renewals, so the customers he brought were only staying for a year because he’ll disappear from their lives soon thereafter.

I don’t think it was his fault only, but this example clarifies that if we only think about short term benefits, about our goals, we won’t be getting the full vision, the grand scheme of things.

Our benefit will also be our demise.

So what? I think we should care about our surroundings, about the people we have around, about the city we live in, about the local businesses we like.
We should fight for them, care for them. Think about them when making a choice, trading off for them.

We might not see an immediate result, and there’s no recipe for a guaranteed successful outcome, but at the same time we’re enriching our neighborhood, we’re improving the life around us.

Some people get it right away, think about Greta Thunberg.
Others get it while getting old. Maybe it’s fear of death, or maybe they realized that only by leaving the world (our job, our coworkers, our company, our friendships, our relations) a better place we can do something more valuable and meaningful.

Personal benefits are nice, they get you nice cars.
But in the end they won’t last, they won’t give back anything else, they won’t let your surroundings grow.