Why the most egoistic thing you can do is help another person

In May 2018 we got an invitation to pitch at the London Block Show startup competition. It was rather spontaneous but we won. Our prize was the pitching spot at the Block Show Europe grand finale in Berlin. I've put a nice presentation together and gave a 3 minutes presentation which was then evaluated by the jury.

Although we didn't win we got the biggest round of applause from the crowd and got a lot of confidence and taps on the back for sharing our story and what it is that we want to do. After the presentation I was approached by a Spanish guy named Alex Casas who said he wanted to invite me to give a talk at the conference he was organizing in Leon, Spain. Naturally I could not say no!

The only problem I had was that my presentation was supposed to last about 40 minutes and the maximum to which I could stretch my pitch deck was probably around 15 minutes. So I decided to change the topic of my presentation and tell why helping other people was the most egoistic thing a person can do. I called it The formula for happiness.

I started my presentation by couple of assumptions related to the fact that we can categorize all the things in our lives into those which we can control and those which we cannot. The second assumption was the we need to recognize that the world is built on dualities - things that are GOOD or BAD - like HEALTH vs SICKNESS, RELAX vs STRESS, WISDOM vs STUPIDITY, GENEROSITY vs GREED, etc... I called them POSITIVES vs NEGATIVES. From the reaction of the crowd I could see they got what I was talking about.

That was all I needed to draft the simple formula showing that our happiness is A1 (all the good things you do to others) - A2 (all the bad things you do to others) + B1 (all the good things that happen to you) - B2 (all the bad things that happen to you).

The more points you get in the end - the happier you are. Naturally we can only control what we do to others so to be happy we need to ensure we are helping people because this is the one variable that we can level up by making a compliment, helping someone we don't necessarily need to know, being someone's angel and making someone's dream come true. Alternatively we could also #GiveALittleByteOfLove.

This was NonCentralConf - probably the most friendly conference I've been to so far. Because it's a NonConf. Make sure you come there next time.