Have you ever noticed that we never, ever celebrate someone for how much garbage they successfully carried out of their house?
Think about it. We have endless reality shows, magazines, and social media trends dedicated to people bringing things in. "Look at my massive haul." "Check out my new car." "Welcome to my crib." We are mesmerized by the sheer volume of stuff people can accumulate. But if someone were to stand on their porch and say, "Behold! I have successfully removed thirty bags of useless junk from my living room, thus creating a beautiful, breathable space for my family!" we’d just look at them sideways and ask why they had so much junk in the first place.
It's a funny little quirk of human nature, but it points to a much deeper, somewhat uncomfortable truth about how we operate. We are culturally, historically, and perhaps even biologically obsessed with accumulation. We measure our success, our worth, and our very identities by what we can take from the world.
Settle in, my friends, grab your coffee, your tea, or whatever makes you comfortable, because we are going to look at the balance. We’re going to talk about the takers, the givers, the quiet champions of everyday life, and why history, rather annoyingly, has a terrible habit of remembering the people who took the most.
Let’s start with the metric itself: Success.
If you stop a random person on the street and ask them to describe a "successful" person, what are they going to say? They’ll probably describe a billionaire, a famous actor, a tech mogul, or maybe a high-powered politician. And what do all these roles have in common? They are defined by their harvest. The billionaire has harvested money. The actor has harvested attention and adoration. The politician has harvested power and votes.
We literally have a financial term for this: "Net Worth." We assess a human being’s value on this planet by calculating the total sum of the assets they have managed to pull out of the collective pot and legally attach their name to, minus what they owe.
But what if we had a "Net Contribution" score? What if Forbes published a list not of the 500 richest people, but the 500 people who added the most unreciprocated value to the human experience? It’s a lovely thought, isn't it? But it’s also incredibly difficult to measure, which is probably why we don't do it. You can count dollars. You can count square footage. You can count followers. How do you count the ripple effect of a teacher who convinced a struggling kid not to drop out? How do you measure the value of a nurse who held a frightened patient's hand at 3:00 AM?
You can't. And because we can't measure it on a spreadsheet, we tend to sideline it. We smile at it, we call it "noble," and then we go right back to reading articles about how some guy twenty years younger than us just bought his third yacht.
This bias isn't new, by the way. If you look back through the annals of history, our collective memory is basically a highlight reel of humanity's greatest takers.
Think about the titles we give to historical figures. We have Alexander the Great. Catherine the Great. Peter the Great. What made them so "great"? Mostly, it was their staggering ability to take things that didn't belong to them. They took land, they took resources, they took lives, and they took control. They expanded their empires by extracting from others.
History books are overwhelmingly written in the ink of conquest. We remember the warlords, the emperors, and the ruthless industrialists. Genghis Khan essentially wiped out entire civilizations, but his name is known to almost every living person today. Julius Caesar plunged the Roman Republic into civil war to consolidate his own power, and we named a salad, a calendar month, and a casino after him.
Meanwhile, who invented the wheel? Who was the first person to realize that boiling water prevented disease? Who was the farmer who cross-bred ancient grass until it became the wheat that fed thousands? We have no idea. Their names are lost to the wind.
Taking is loud. It requires trumpets, armies, hostile takeovers, press releases, and flashing lights. Taking disrupts the status quo, and therefore, it creates a historical footprint.
Giving, on the other hand, is usually remarkably quiet. Giving doesn't usually come with a PR team. When Jonas Salk developed the polio vaccine in the 1950s—a disease that was paralyzing and killing thousands of children every year—he was asked who owned the patent. His response is legendary: "Well, the people, I would say. There is no patent. Could you patent the sun?"
Salk gave the world immeasurable freedom from fear. He gave millions of children the ability to walk. He is remembered, yes, but he doesn't have the mythical, god-like status in our culture that a conquering emperor has. And that’s because giving is an act of smoothing things out. It heals, it mends, it nourishes. It doesn't create the chaotic friction that history loves to record.
But here is where we need to take a step back and have a really honest conversation. Because the temptation right now, especially when we talk about this topic, is to paint all "taking" as an inherent evil and all "giving" as pure, unadulterated good.
Let's not do that. Let's not fall into the trap of oversimplification.
I’m not sitting here telling you that taking is wrong. In fact, taking is an absolute, non-negotiable requirement for survival.
You took oxygen from the air the moment you were born. You took nutrients from the earth today when you ate your breakfast. If you’re reading or listening to this, you are currently taking up space, time, and bandwidth.
To grow, you must take. To learn, you must take the knowledge that someone else generated. To build a house, you must take wood, stone, and space. We are organisms in a massive, interconnected ecosystem, and consumption is how the engine runs.
Even on a professional and personal level, you have to take in order to become someone capable of giving. You have to take that promotion so you can have the authority to implement better policies for your team. You have to take a higher salary so you can secure your family’s future and have the excess resources to donate to causes you care about. You have to take a vacation—literally taking yourself out of the workforce for a week—so you don't burn out and become a miserable shell of a human being.
Nobody wants to be the martyr who gives absolutely everything away and ends up living in a cardboard box, lecturing pigeons about altruism. You cannot pour from an empty cup. If you don't take, you have nothing to give.
The problem isn't the act of taking. The problem is the ratio. The problem is when taking becomes the only metric of success, the only goal, and the only phase of the cycle we ever care about.
Think of it like a metabolic process. A healthy tree takes massive amounts of water, nutrients, and sunlight from its environment. It is a very aggressive consumer of resources. But what does it do with what it takes? It processes it. It uses those resources to grow strong roots and broad leaves, and in doing so, it gives back oxygen, provides shade for other creatures, drops leaves that enrich the soil, and bears fruit that feeds the ecosystem. The tree’s success isn't just in how much water it sucked up; its success is in what it became and what it provided because of that water.
Imagine a tree that just sucked up all the water and sunlight, refused to drop any leaves, refused to bear fruit, and just hoarded all the nutrients inside its trunk, thinking, "Look how rich I am!" That tree wouldn't be successful. It would be a tumor on the forest.
And yet, this is exactly how a lot of us are conditioned to live our lives.
We are taught to aggressively harvest. Get the best grades, take the best job, negotiate the highest salary, buy the biggest house, accumulate the most impressive title. And then... what? We just sit on it. We build higher fences to protect it. We look at our bank accounts and our resumes and think, "I have won."
But have you? If your entire life’s work culminates in a giant pile of resources that serve no one but yourself, what exactly is the point?
This is the great illusion of modern success. It tricks us into believing that the accumulation phase is the finish line. But accumulation is just the prep work. It’s gathering the ingredients. The actual meal—the meaningful part of life—is what you cook up and serve to the world with those ingredients.
I think about this a lot when I look at the content we consume today, especially online. We live in an attention economy. Everyone is trying to take your attention. "Look at me, listen to my hot take, buy my course, subscribe to my channel." The people who are most successful in this economy are the ones who have mastered the art of taking attention away from everything else.
But occasionally, you stumble across someone who is playing a completely different game. Someone who commands attention not just to hoard it, but to distribute it. They use their platform to highlight others. They teach something valuable for free. They share a perspective that makes you feel a little less alone in the world. They are taking your attention, yes, but they are giving you value in return. The transaction is balanced.
That balance is what we desperately need to recalibrate in our own lives.
So, how do we do that? How do we stop measuring our lives solely by the yardstick of accumulation?
It starts with shifting the questions we ask ourselves at the end of the day. Instead of just asking, "What did I achieve today? What did I gain? What did I earn?", we need to start adding a second set of questions to the ledger.
"What did I contribute today? Whose burden did I make a little lighter? What did I create that didn't exist this morning? Who did I encourage?"
Notice that none of these questions require you to be a millionaire philanthropist or a saint. You don't have to give away all your worldly possessions and move to a monastery. Giving is often profoundly ordinary.
It’s the manager who takes an extra twenty minutes to mentor a junior employee instead of just barking orders. It’s the neighbor who notices your trash cans blew over in the wind and picks them up for you. It’s the creative who writes a story, paints a picture, or records a podcast that makes someone else smile on their miserable commute to work.
It is also, importantly, about how you show up in your relationships. We often measure our relationships by what we get out of them. "Does this person make me happy? Do they support me? Do they meet my needs?" And those are valid questions. But how often do we ask the reverse? "Am I a safe harbor for them? Do I bring peace to this house, or do I bring chaos? When I enter a room, does the temperature drop, or does it get a little warmer?"
I’ll be the first to admit, I struggle with this. I like nice things. I am ambitious. I want to build a successful magazine and a successful podcast. I want to see the numbers go up. There is a very loud, very persuasive voice in my head that constantly tells me that if I’m not accumulating more, I am falling behind.
But I also know that on the days when I am solely focused on what I can get, I am usually anxious, irritable, and deeply unfulfilled. It’s a thirst that cannot be quenched, because there will always be someone who has more. There will always be a bigger house, a higher title, a larger audience. If your only metric is taking, you are playing a game designed to eventually make you feel like a loser.
Conversely, the days when I feel the most grounded, the most peaceful, and the most genuinely successful are the days when I know I put something good into the world. A well-crafted article that might make someone think. A conversation where I really listened instead of just waiting for my turn to speak. A moment where I used whatever small influence or resources I have to lift someone else up.
Those moments don't usually come with a trophy. No one is going to build a bronze statue of me in the town square because I was a decent listener on a Tuesday. And that’s okay.
Because we have to stop outsourcing our sense of success to the judgment of history or the applause of society. History is a terrible judge of character anyway. Let history remember the conquerors and the billionaires. Let the history books be filled with the loud, chaotic takers.
For our own lives, for our own sanity, we need to aim for a different kind of legacy. A quiet legacy.
A quiet legacy isn't written in textbooks; it’s written in the lives of the people you intersect with. It’s the way your children remember how you made them feel. It’s the culture you helped build at your workplace. It’s the community that is just slightly more resilient, slightly more compassionate, because you were a part of it.
You see, the ultimate measure of success is not a static number. It is a dynamic flow. It is the grace with which you handle the intake of the world’s resources, and the generosity with which you release your own energy back into it.
We must take to survive. But we must give to live.
If we only take, we become stagnant, heavy, and isolated. We become like the Dead Sea—a body of water that has rivers flowing into it, but no outlet. It takes and takes, and because it never gives anything out, the water becomes so salty and dense that nothing can live in it.
But if we balance our taking with our giving, we become like a river. Water flows in, water flows out. It is constantly moving, constantly refreshing, and everywhere it goes, it brings life to the shores around it.
So, as we wrap up this thought, I don't want you to feel guilty about the things you want to achieve. Go after that promotion. Build your business. Buy the nice shoes if they make you happy. Take up space.
But don't let that be the end of the story. Don't let your accumulation be your only masterpiece.
As you go through your week, I challenge you to look at your personal ledger. Yes, track your goals, track your finances, track your personal growth. But also start tracking your outflow.
Find the balance. Be the tree that takes the sunlight and turns it into fruit. Be the river that takes the rain and gives it to the valley.
Because at the end of the day, when the noise fades and the grand illusions of modern success are stripped away, the only thing you truly get to keep is what you gave away.
A Few Questions to Ponder
Before we part ways today, I want to leave you with a few questions. You don't have to answer them right now, but maybe let them marinate in your mind while you're driving, doing the dishes, or winding down for the evening:
- If you stripped away your title, your bank account, and your possessions, what exactly is the value you bring to the people around you? It’s a tough question, but a revealing one.
- Think of a time when someone gave you something unexpectedly—time, advice, grace, or a physical gift. How did it change the trajectory of your day, or even your life? How can you replicate that for someone else this week?
- In what areas of your life are you currently acting like the Dead Sea—taking in without ever giving out? Is it in a relationship? Is it in your consumption of information? How can you create an outlet to start flowing again?
Over to You
I really hope this editorial gave you something to chew on. Success is such a deeply personal concept, and yet we let society define it for us far too often. I want to hear from you. How do you strike this balance in your own life? Have you ever had to intentionally step back from the "accumulation" mindset?
If this piece resonated with you, I’d ask a small favor. Share it. Send it to a friend, talk about it at the dinner table, or post it on your social media. The best way to change the cultural narrative around success is to start having better conversations about it.
And if you haven’t already, I want you to check out English Plus Magazine. We’re all about exploring the nuance, the depth, and the beauty of the human experience—without the fluff.
Until next time, keep learning, keep growing, and remember to check your ledger. Take what you need, but don't forget to give back what you can. Have a great week.
Danny Ballan
Editor-in-Chief
English Plus Magazine
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