After serving my niece her favorite dish, she began to put almost everything on her plate (more than what she could finish), leaving everybody else almost nothing.
She is five.
It seems that selfishness was the default.
But she doesn’t know it. More likely, she doesn’t understand (yet) what it means to share a limited resource with everybody around her. She was simply happy to take everything she could because, as she told me, “she likes it so much she wants to have everything.”
When I asked her more about why she did that, she told me in her childish words that she wanted to have it all because there could be nothing more to come after we ate it all.
A scarcity mindset.
She doesn’t understand yet that she can have the same dish again at another time if she’d only ask.
And do you know what the opposite of selfishness is?
Generosity.
And generosity compounds.
Then perhaps, to put away the selfish child in us, we must learn to be generous and take on a generous heart.
This is what generosity looks like:
jessa 