Love does.
That’s the premise of Bob Goff’s book by the same title (on Amazon here). For Bob, love isn’t something to feel or say. It’s a verb…an action word.
Bob’s exuberance and passion for life and loving people well is contagious. It’s almost enough to give the book its own heartbeat. At a minimum, it drips off the pages and soaks you.
Instinctively, we all know Bob is right: we feel most loved when people act out their love for us. Words of affirmation are wonderful too, but we’ve all experienced the wave of love that washes over us when someone does something for us.
For me, the challenging part of Bob’s book came when I realized that it works the other way, too. If I feel most loved when other people do things for me, doesn’t it follow that the best way for me to show love to others is to do things for them? I know that’s not rocket science, but I can be really dense and even more selfish.
So I tried it. For the past two weeks I’ve tried to act out my love for people in my life in tangible ways. I know I’ve missed opportunities and blown others, but I’ve made a great effort to keep my eyes open for the small opportunities I used to brush aside.
The funny part is, I used not to do things for others because it would take time away from what I wanted to be doing. But when I told that selfishness to get lost and not come back, and when I started making my love for others a love that does, I made a startling discovery: I haven’t missed those minutes I gave up. Not because I became some kind of world-class time manager overnight, or because I stayed up late to do what I wanted to do after I’d done for others all day.
But because I didn’t really give up anything.
I used to view active love as elementary addition and subtraction: when I lost something, the other person gained. But now I know it’s elementary multiplication; the more I give, the higher the factors of the equation, and the greater the product…for everyone.
And just like that, I discovered my secretly incredible life.