Enlightened Resource Management

The long line of experiments is piling up and Help Day was unpredictable, painfully awkward, rewarding, and revealing.

Without it I would never have known that my house was featured in a Toro snow blower commercial years ago. Or that explaining the concept of Help Day to a seven-year-old girl would be harder than explaining quantum physics to my eighteen-month-old son Grant.

Folks who have been following along here will remember the 72 hour continuous creation challenge and how much fun that was.

Help Day had a smaller impact but the upside is it’s more repeatable, accessible, and potentially valuable experience to everyone else.

So here are the notes, stats, lessons learned and the big takeaway. You’ll also learn what not to do on your own Help Day. If you need a hand making that happen let me know.

I’ll be happy to help.

The Experience

The first six hours of the day were spent going door to door in my neighborhood giving this (rough) intro to anyone answering the doorbell:

“Good morning/afternoon neighbor! My name’s Joel and I live at 7124 Heatherton Trail. I know this sounds strange but I’m on a quest today to help as many people as possible in ways large and small. No strings attached. Is there something I can help you with today?”

I’m used to people looking at me like I have a third eye growing out of my face but the expression on some of my neighbor’s faces…goodness gracious!

And if people got past being cynical or stunned that I wanted to genuinely help them with anything they could think of, no strings attached, I got some weird responses. One woman told me, “Come back after June 9^th after my daughter’s wedding. My brain’s too fried right now to think.”

One man, after laughing in my face and then realizing this wasn’t a prank, invited me into his house. He proceeded to tell me about his multiple sclerosis, that he’s in a “complicated” relationship with the woman he lives with, and revealed the warm person behind the skeptic from a moment earlier.

But five people actually took me up on my offer to help. So I ended up:

1 )Walking a dog

2) Emailing contact information of people on my block

3) Lending out a sprinkler

4) Cleaning gutters

5) Digging holes in a garden to plant flowers

I was hoping to do some technology troubleshooting but nobody wanted me to crack open their computer or program their universal remote.

In between helping I experienced people talking to me through doors and systems set up to eliminate the chance for spontaneous help.

I waltzed into these three institutions and each gave me a similar explanation for why I couldn’t just be handed something to do.

· The local grade school

· The nearby senior living community

· The public library

I get that they want to protect the safety of the school children. I understand that I need to contact the volunteer coordinator first. I also grasp that I need to be registered and trained before I can volunteer. After all, I used to work in a highly structured work place with our own set of rigid policies and procedures.

What I couldn’t get them to understand was that I didn’t want to volunteer. I just wanted to help.

After six hours of walking around the neighborhood – picking up trash along the way – I decided it was time for some virtual helping. Ringing 32 doorbells after lunch and getting to help 0 people convinced me it was time for a switch.

The great news?

People online are much more receptive to unsolicited or unexpected help.

The rest of Help Day was spent in online forums and communities of people eager and much more prepared to be helped. The curious and almost laughable stats definitely reflect that.

Stats

I thought I would try a spreadsheet to give the overview of the Help Day stats. If you’d like a different format in the future or know someone who loves doing free infographics drop me a note.

Overall, I’m not seeing anything remarkable here. If anything, the stats hide the true impact of Help Day. As much as I love numbers I don’t think any of them do the experience justice.

The Biggest Obstacles

I believe that most people are conditioned to expect a negative or worthless interaction with someone who rings their doorbell (at least in the U.S.). No amount of context, logic, or appealing to emotions will change that any time soon.

It’s just plain hard for many people to believe that someone wants to genuinely help them without expectation or “owing you one” in the future.

I also didn’t do myself any favors by having Help Day on a week day. Many people were at work so I spent a lot of time waiting for doorbells that nobody was going to answer. And a number of the people who did answer were working from home and not in a position to be helped at the moment.

If you want to help in person you also have to be conscious of interrupting a meal, catching someone before they’re dressed, or finding someone already mentally checked out for the day.

But the biggest obstacle of all was also the biggest takeaway of all.

The Big Takeaway

The world is not set up or prepared to be spontaneously helped.

When you figuratively, or in my case literally, show up unannounced on someone’s doorstep to help, most people simply don’t know what to make of it.

In general, the experience taught me unsolicited in person help is simply not welcome.

Contrast that with the millions of people on the Internet who are desperate for your spur-of-the-moment assistance. I discovered Sparked.com on Help Day and their challenges were just the thing I was looking for. It was micro-volunteering at its finest with the ability to zero in on the challenges best suited for my help.

I’m all about helping people make huge changes but sometimes I just have time for a quick hand. It’s great to see Sparked and other online communities making the quick help experience rewarding and easy.

Side note: If you haven’t considered helping the world virtually I recommend you do. There’s never been a better time to make a difference online.

In the end I didn’t have to worry so much about idle chit-chat, people abusing my time, or whether to help people versus “things” (a.k.a. something other than a human, like an object in the environment). I’ll focus more next time on helping the “things” in this world as they don’t question your motives or reject a helping hand.

Bottom line: The experiment was a partial success and I plan to do it again. Next time I’ll have to plan ahead more so my unannounced help will be better received and have a bigger impact. Sometimes you just gotta put more prep work into being spontaneous.

Do you have a way I should modify Help Day #1 so that #2 is better? Or maybe you have an idea for the next experiment I should run in the test lab that is my life? Let our community know about it on Twitter or the Facebook fan page. It’s super simple to join and a lot of valuable stuff goes on there that never makes its way to this website.

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Photo credit: Gabriela Ruellan

You like to experiment or tinker, right? Everyone gets fired up to experiment with something different like a new tool, some new software, or a new Lego set.

I’m no exception although my experiments tend to be on (or with) myself.

My biggest one right now involves dedicating work to a purpose beyond mostly empty hours in corporate America.

Or maybe you remember the 72 hours I spent in a state of continuous creation without things like eating, reading and non-essential communication?

Well here comes the latest experiment and I think you’re going to be excited! I hope you’ll want to run this experiment yourself and see how rewarding and humbling it can be.

I’m talking about my first ever “Help Day” this Friday. Here’s what it is, why I’m doing it, how I expect to help and the value you can get from it.

Help Day Is…

If I told you today was Help Day without any context I’d expect you to say, “Umm…what’s a Help Day?” (Cue Ralph Wiggum from The Simpsons with “What’s a battle?”).

At its core, Help Day is a full day of helping as many “things” in as many ways as possible. I say things because this isn’t just about helping other humans. For example, my environment can’t communicate its need for help like a person but I intend to help it as well.

Rules and guidelines are unimportant but the key principle is this:

From the moment you wake up to the moment you go to sleep, almost every second should be spent trying to help other things. And yes, it’s OK to spend a few minutes getting dressed or eating to make sure you are prepared to confidently power through the day.

Sounds incredibly vague and utopian right?

That’s intentional.

Your goals for making an impact might focus on touching the lives of folks in your local community, assisting a stranger on the Internet, helping living objects thrive in your environment, calling that isolated relative desperate to hear a human voice…or none of the above.

You get to define the rules around things like (but not limited to):

1) Time limits on each helping experience

2) Focus among individuals, groups, animals, trees, etc.

3) Categories of people like family, friends, strangers, co-workers, religious congregation, etc.

4) How structured the day is like doing volunteering versus roaming the streets

5) The format for the help like Internet based, phone based or outdoors based

6) Whether you recruit others to magnify the impact

Each Help Day looks and feels completely different than the rest. Mine will look just as unorthodox to you as yours would to me. That’s part of the fun and a huge part of the reward.

So let me briefly fill you in on the driving force behind this Help Day experiment.

My Favorite Question: Why

There are countless ways to help people and they can’t be easily categorized. There’s random acts of kindness, charitable work, telling someone feeling down how awesome they are and so on.

Some involve structure and planning (like charitable work), some you just happen across (like starting up a lawnmower for your 92-year-old neighbor), and some you go hunting for (like leaving a great answer to a tough question in an online forum).

Why create an experiment from scratch when so many folks have already created great ways to help our world?

It’s because my current challenge in life is creating something new, seeing if it has legs, applying the lessons learned to my greater sense of purpose, and communicating how this can help other people (like I’m doing right now).

This may not seem original or daring but I need a feeling of uniqueness to motivate the change only I can bring to the world. That unique change might be small but it needs to be distinctively me.

Plus, according to my 2012 Goal Setting and Action Workbook – get your own from Scott Dinsmore at Live Your Legend and thank me later – I have a major goal of helping others in as many ways as possible. Help Day is one more way to end the long delay behind fulfilling my burning need to truly help others.

The Ever Changing Shape

Curious to know how I plan to help people? Well here’s my brief list. I’m open to however the day unfolds so what really happens could look completely different.

· Ring door bells on my block and ask neighbors if they need a hand with something

· Head over to the local senior living community and see what I can do

· Stroll to the local elementary school to ask if they need help

· Pick up trash to help my environment look better and be less polluted

· Call friends and relatives and offer a friendly ear or assistance with a problem

· Post on social media sites that I’m available to lend a hand

· Go through online forums and give people really good input that will get them unstuck on their struggle or question

The toughest part may be getting people to believe I have no hidden motive and that I truly want to help with no strings attached. I’m also expecting issues cutting off chit-chat when help has been offered or completed so I can move on to the next thing.

I’d like to limit each experience to about thirty minutes so no one thing takes up too much of the day. But in keeping with the spirit of loose boundaries I’m open to chucking this out the window if necessary.

Will This Help?

In the process of helping in unpredictable ways, I hope it will help me in unpredictable ways. At the very least my sense of purpose will be validated for an entire day.

How many people will reject my offer because it’s so weird for a person to randomly extend help?

I’ll keep track (and report back later) how much of the day was spent extending rejected offers and how many things I helped with. In the end it doesn’t matter how many things I help, whether they were big or small, how long the help will last, and who/what received it. This isn’t a contest with myself or anyone else.

I’m just trying to live my core values and awaken people to possibilities outside the standard ones.

I’m so confident this experiment will be rewarding that I already have Help Day #2 scheduled for later this year. If I feel this is worthwhile, I eventually plan to coordinate Help Days or assist people with creating their own.

Unanswered Questions

I promised you something valuable from reading this and you’ll get it by taking a moment to answer a question or two.

Pick one or more of the questions below and leave a comment on this post with your answer. Instead of having me guess what value you’ll get, find the real stuff yourself. Who knows, the answers may just reveal something important you never knew about yourself.

1) How would you try and help “things” on your own Help Day?

2) Would you spend most of your time helping people, animals, the environment or something else?

3) If someone rang your doorbell and offered to assist you with anything you needed how would you react? What barriers would this person have to overcome before you would let them help?

4) If Help Day was today, how many people in your life could benefit from a little of your time?

I’m excited to see your comments!

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Photo credit: pangalactic gargleblaster and the heart of gold and Marc Falardeau