I like the concept of good karma as a guiding principle and it does make a certain logical sense. If you do good things for other people then you build a reputation for trustworthiness and dependability, which is generally a very good thing to have. Through behaving this way you will eventually meet other people who respond in a similar way and you might benefit from mutual reciprocity. If you get enough of these people into your life and socialize and do business mostly with these people then you can cut out a lot of problems in life by only dealing with the best sort of people, by and large.

The actual guarantee that good karma brings rewards is a belief and on the whole cannot be proven as a predictable outcome. I adopt the idea as much, if not more, because doing good for others makes me feel good rather than for other possible rewards. This principle works well until I come up against a certain kind of person, which is when it seems that no good deed goes unpunished.

I find that people who insist upon depending upon other people for results and consequently refuse to take on the responsibility of learning and solving problems alone, cause me to feel that doing good by them leaves me feeling punished. There are some people who just land upon you in a helpless state, desperate for a solution to their immediate needs. Since I have compassion and a lot of ability to solve problems then I can often get people out of desperate straits but sometimes these people keep repeating the creation of such circumstances and keep coming back to me to sort things out. After a while it becomes a major distraction and even worse it becomes an obligation, which leaves me feeling very sour very quickly.

With such people I have found it necessary to draw limits otherwise I become enslaved to them and their problems. Many years ago I read a management book that took a more skeptically humorous approach to management. I remember only two things from that book. The first was a quotation from Eisenhower who said, “If you took all the managers in the world and laid them end to end, they’d reach the wrong decision.” (something nice to remember when you’re having a bad day at work). The second was another much more useful quotation from Joseph Stalin, “First time tell the man. Second time tell the man. Third time tell the new man.” A little abrupt perhaps but it does underline the point that some people don’t have the sense to learn from their mistakes and so you must replace them or move on from them.

I have taken this principle for use in teaching/instructing/training needy people. I’ll help them out once and then if they come to me again with the same kind of problem then I’ll help them out and then instruct them on how they can solve the problem alone the next time. If it happens a third time then again I’ll help them out and again instruct them on how they can solve the problem alone the next time.

If it happens a fourth time then clearly they haven’t learnt anything much so far. In this case I tell them to prepare the first step and if necessary instruct them on how to finish it off. I’ll repeat this so that they prepare and complete each step and will I refrain from doing any of the actual work myself. Eventually they finish and they have done it alone. If it happens a fifth time then I tell them to do what they did last time and to come to me only if they get really stuck. If it happens a sixth time the I’ll say that I have come to the end of my willingness to help out because it is no longer help, it’s now an obligation to do work that I didn’t ask for.

This is a tough approach (although I’m a little bit more generous than Joseph Stalin) and you might have to have more tolerance for close family members or people that you must exist with for a long time. In that situation it might take far more than five or six times but persist with balancing how much help you will give according to how much preparation they do without your help. Train them so that eventually they can do it alone.

Freely given help and advice is often worth nothing to some people because they didn’t have to work or suffer to get it. If those people are allowed to become dependent upon you then you can end up suffering from the obligation to keep delivering for them. A gradual process of making them do the work until they have learnt the process can ween them off of dependency from you. For some people this never works and in my opinion it’s okay to stop helping someone who just won’t learn and who just won’t take personal responsibility. I’m referring here to the people who could improve but won’t improve. That person deserves the limits that come as a consequence of not learning from someone who can instruct on how to solve the problem and of not taking personal responsibility. It’s a different story for people who can never improve due to limitations beyond their control and if you have the power to stick by such people and help them out then I admire your compassion and your loyalty.

I see it as an unspoken responsibility for competent problem solvers to help and instruct others but I do draw limits. For me there is a difference between helping someone and working for them. Those people that won’t learn or make the effort to help themselves take on a parasitical nature of feeding off of other people with the strength and ability to cope for other people as well as their own needs. If you have taken the pains to get to that level in life then you really don’t need that kind of reward and this is where good karma can fall flat. Good karma needs to be applied with a bit of practical wisdom from time to time.

If you have enjoyed this article then please comment or recommend it to one of the social bookmarking sites below. To ensure that you receive all future posts please subscribe to the RSS feed (use the button in the header bar above)

[Photo by Jurvetson]