Successful people are often called go-getters, yet getting is not the path to lasting success. Getting as a means to fulfillment is self-serving and emptiness-bound; it entails using other people as stepping-stones, disingenuously engaging them in a relationship that is selfish to the core albeit attractive at the surface. Such relationships are characteristically short-term, skin-deep, hit-and-run, and, then on to the next rung of the corporate ladder that rests a drywall that easily shatters
From rung to rung the go-getter squashes people’s hearts and dreams with his greedy hands and fine-leather-bound feet until he gets to the rung that leads to the culprit of a success that is rife with loneliness. And there, at the top, he gets it: that getting without giving is not truly succeeding – - it’s just giving up on living. Looking down he sees the hearts, now lifeless, that he used as stones to step-on and move-on. Now, though wanting to give he only gets, gets-and-gets tons of shame, remorse and regrets. Living in a big house made of precious stones built at the expense of the hearts he used as stepping-stones, he longs to make amends. But today is, perhaps, a little too late for that.
Tireless as he was in his pursuit of an ill-conceived happiness that has turned his world into a chasm of suffocating emptiness, he has now grown old and tired; mired with problems money can’t solve as death approaches with increasing resolve.
Giving is the path to truly succeeding; it is the means thereto and the end in itself. The go-giver goes there and hither not as the receiver, but as the provider; giving is his chief motivation driver.
Sympathizing beyond the skin, he builds relationships that are all but razor-thin; they go pass the dermis and the epidermis; they are more than subcutaneous; they are brain-deep, heart-deep, altogether life-deep.
At all stages he engages rich, poor, black, white, republican and democrat; believers, non-believers, the homeless that give jitters and to all that need a helping hand he gives and serves in full command. And as he runs the race of life with dreams bursting at the seams of a mortal, sometimes borrowed, timeframe, he realizes that running is oft lame and walking has its place at each and every stage specially as one comes of age.
Rather than by running, his greatest opportunities to serve were found as he was crawling into places where the disdainful go-getter would not enter; where all, not the sole self, were set to gain not by confrontation, but via harmonious cooperation. Selfless as he’s been in giving unto others happiness, he has found his own not alone, but in the company of many and with plenty to keep on giving even after his life stops existing.
By all means, I, therefore, stand to say that between getting and giving, giving is the way; giving wins the fray.