Let Me Show You Something Better Than Your Goals
Or a Better Path to Fulfilling Them
The Nursing profession wasn’t always this great.
It was Florence Nightingale that changed the game.
When the Crimean War broke out in 1854, Nightingale was asked to lead a group of nurses to care for British soldiers who were wounded in battle. When she arrived at the military hospital in Scutari, she was shocked by the conditions she found there. The hospital was overcrowded, unsanitary, and poorly managed, and many of the wounded soldiers were dying from infections and other preventable causes.
She got to work immediately, organizing the hospital, training the nurses, and implementing new systems for sanitation and patient care. She’d stayed up all night to tend to the sick and wounded. She had done so much in a few months, the death rate among soldiers dropped significantly.
After the war, she returned to England and continued to advocate for reforms in the field of nursing and healthcare. She wrote extensively on the subject, and her book “Notes on Nursing” became a seminal work in the field. She also founded the Nightingale Training School for Nurses, which set new standards for nursing education and helped to professionalize the field.
Like this, most of what we call breakthroughs in the world today have come because people cared and aspired, and served.
Service scales. And it turns out that we can reach our goals faster and feel a bigger sense of fulfillment when we switch from selfish to selfless. When we switch from ‘me’ to ‘us’ and take on a sense of duty.
Stoics believe that service is an opportunity to practice virtue — the virtues of wisdom, justice, courage, and self-control. They believe that by serving others, we can develop these virtues and cultivate a sense of purpose and meaning in life.
Jesus Christ once said “Whoever wants to be great, must become a servant”
Your goals. Who’s it for? Who’s better? What’s better? Who’s coming along?
I’m cheering you on.
