How to become a better person and an inspiration to those around you through small and simple actions. Khalid Larif shares his perspective that will change the way you look at the world forever!
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00:00 Some of us just don't think that much.
00:02 One night I left from a meal and there was a homeless man asking people for money outside of our center.
00:09 And I said to him, "I have some sandwiches I could give to you."
00:13 And he said, "I don't want your sandwiches."
00:16 I walked away thinking that this guy doesn't want my food, all he wants is money,
00:22 he's probably not even hungry, or he's going to use the money on drugs or alcohol or something like that.
00:29 And I caught myself in my thoughts.
00:32 And I said, "The only person who can answer why he doesn't want my food is he himself."
00:39 And so I walked back to him and I was a little annoyed and I said to him, "Why don't you want my food, man?"
00:46 And he walked to his shopping cart and he took out a bag and he said, "I already have food."
00:53 And he said, "If I was to take your food in addition to the food that I have,
00:58 there's no way I would be able to eat all of it and some of it would get thrown away."
01:05 And he said, "Me living the life that I live, I will never throw away food."
01:12 I said thank you to him for not just teaching me something about himself, but teaching me a lot about myself.
01:20 And I walked away with a different recognition of who it is that I'm not necessarily today,
01:27 but what it is that I really want to be in the long term.
01:32 Society teaches us to look at ourselves a lot, but not really look for ourselves.
01:38 You just think about how much time you spent in front of a mirror,
01:41 how much time you spent in terms of the care of your physical, your external,
01:45 to fit into boxes that people place you in that you might not even know you're in,
01:50 but you're trying to fit into somebody else's standard of who you're supposed to be.
01:55 My daughter and I, we go to Dunkin' Donuts a lot.
01:59 She's four and a half years old.
02:01 If you ever see her, her name is Medina.
02:04 She's got this just contagious energy to her,
02:07 real deep love that people can't help but fall into.
02:13 We were going to Dunkin' Donuts one morning and we walked into Dunkin' Donuts
02:18 and the poor guy behind the counter, even before any of us said anything,
02:23 saw my daughter smiling at him and he's just giving her munchkin after munchkin for free
02:29 and she's just taking them one by one by one.
02:32 And after we got our food and we left, we're standing on the street
02:38 and there's an elderly woman standing next to us and a person comes out of Dunkin' Donuts
02:43 who had just finished whatever he bought and threw the wrapping paper on the ground.
02:49 The elderly woman, with very clear disgust, just spoke out loud and said,
02:56 "Can you imagine somebody would do that?"
02:59 My four and a half year old looked at me and looked at the trash on the ground
03:04 and then looked at the woman and said to her, "Why don't you pick it up?"
03:09 I got very uncomfortable and I went and picked up the trash from the ground.
03:14 But it made me really think about things.
03:18 Where you have people who are definitely making the world a much dirtier place
03:25 and then you have people who can even identify that that's a problem,
03:28 that you shouldn't be throwing garbage on the ground,
03:32 but there's not that many people who are actually going out of their way
03:35 to still pick it up and make it much cleaner.
03:38 And I think where we transition into that third place
03:42 that says that it's not just enough to say that something that is not good is not good,
03:48 because you can say that that's wrong, but what are you doing that's right?
03:53 What are you doing to add something that's just positive?
03:57 I think we get scared sometimes because we fit into this very formulaic pattern
04:02 of what it means to be successful.
04:05 Our sense of identity is tied to things that we possess and things that we own
04:11 and our sense of fulfillment is based off of things that come from outside of us
04:16 rather than inside of us.
04:18 Nobody's telling us that we need to be honest, we need to be compassionate,
04:23 we need to be merciful, we need to be just, we need to be loving, we need to be generous.
04:29 But they're telling us that our sense of worth is based off of what it is that we drive
04:34 and how big of that thing it must be.
04:37 So you'll learn how to be a doctor, you'll learn how to be a lawyer,
04:40 you'll learn how to be an engineer, you'll learn how to be an artist, an activist, an academic.
04:46 But as you're learning how to be a worker, most of us aren't really learning how to be thinkers.
04:51 We're not engaged in spaces where we're understanding why do we love what we love
04:56 or why do we hate what we hate or why do we desire the things that we desire.
05:01 And your story is not your story when you force yourself to become someone else's story.
05:09 You are where you're coming from and you are where it is that you're going to.
05:15 The only person you need to compare yourself today to is the person you were yesterday.
05:21 And if you want to have a competition with anybody, then make it between those two people.
05:27 You'll find yourself in a space where the person you are today
05:31 is no longer afraid to meet the person that you can become tomorrow.
05:35 [Music]