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This Is Why You Should Pay It Forward — 7 Life-Changing Reasons
The idea of paying it forward, for millennials like me, was brought to the spotlight in a movie with the same name that starred Haley Joel Osment. The movie came out in the year 2000 and after watching it, it’s message was lost on me. It was a feel-good movie and at the end of it, well, I felt good.
More than a decade passed since watching this movie and I started to get introduced to the idea of paying it forward once again. I heard story after story of why it was such a powerful idea and more than an idea that an overly optimistic leader would come up with.
Paying it forward is real.
Tim Ferriss further opened my eyes when he introduced an experiment where you buy coffees for the people behind you in the queue at your local cafe. The idea was that you paid for their coffees but ensured they didn’t know it was you. This key point of difference was designed to remove your ego from the equation and avoid being given a thank you.
Paying it forward is not about who does what, or any one individual, but it’s about a philosophy that goes much deeper than that. I’ve tested this idea of paying it forward and it has given me immense happiness, a bunch of peculiar life lessons to live by, and in some people’s eyes, an overgrown amount of good karma.
