Last week I shared the above tongue-in-cheek meme on LinkedIn depicting the “comprehensive list of everything you’re entitled to and what the world owes you.” As you can see, it was a blank piece of note paper.
I received a lot of responses on the post (thankfully all positive), including a quote shared by one of my LinkedIn connections, Howard Cunix. The quote is by author Steve Maraboli, who wrote:
“When we replace a sense of service and gratitude with a sense of entitlement and expectation, we quickly see the demise of our relationships, society, and economy.”
I certainly agree with this thought-provoking statement. Just about everywhere we look and every other headline we read we see glimpses of this entitlement epidemic. It’s easy to point fingers and cast blame—on younger generations, on opposite political parties, on other belief systems, etc.
But I’d like to stop grumbling and blaming, and instead take another look at the quote above, this time from a different perspective. Let’s give this statement a little twist:
When we replace a sense of entitlement and expectation with a sense of service and gratitude, we quickly see the growth and advancement of our relationships, society, and economy.
What’s stopping us from working toward this change in 2019? No matter how much we’d prefer pointing fingers at others, the hard truth is that most of us do operate with a certain sense of entitlement and expectation. It shows in our impatience and irritation anytime something takes too long or doesn’t go our way.
If we truly wish to see the growth and advancement of ourselves, our relationships, our communities, and society as a whole, we need to start with service and gratitude. And we need to start with ourselves!
