Celebrating your intention to do good effectively

By kuhanj @ 2025-06-03T20:52 (+10)

I often ask myself: How could I do more good? How could I be more productive? What mistakes am I making? What would a more courageous/smarter/ethical/virtuous version of me do differently? 

It is rare that I take a step back and appreciate how wonderful it is to care about helping others. Nor do I celebrate being part of a community that cares so much that we want to do so as effectively as we can. One that is willing to rigorously question our intuitions, motivated reasoning, and biases to help others more effectively, and do what is right, even when it’s hard. 

I have been reflecting on the effectiveness of using positive vs. negative emotions to motivate behavior. This excerpt from a talk about ending the inner critic deeply moved me, and has meaningfully shifted my emotional orientation to doing good (and all the other unimportant junk my brain often preoccupies itself with). 

I expect it will resonate with many others on the forum. Even if not, I hope you can take a second to celebrate being on this forum reading this post, and your intention to do good effectively. In my humble opinion, nothing is more important or worthy of celebration. 

Enjoy! 🙂

Excerpt from “Ending the Inner Critic” by Rob Burbea:

 (Full audio, transcript). Bolding/emphasis mine.

“So what would it be to really sit in, or [...] incline the mind, incline the awareness, to dwell in a recollection, an acknowledgment, an admittance of [...] the beautiful qualities within us, that which is lovely within us? It’s interesting saying this because, again, you think, “Oh, that’s going to be completely ineffectual,” but also a person might think, “Wouldn’t that be egoic? Wouldn’t that be some kind of ego trip?” It won’t be at all. Funnily enough, the inner critic is actually a kind of ego trip. It’s just turned upside down. The ego is actually massive when the inner critic is there. The self-sense is massive. It’s way overblown, but it’s all negative.

This is an interesting one. I have to be careful what qualities I acknowledge and what qualities I kind of choose to celebrate and dwell in acknowledgment of. The cultural pressure will be for worldly qualities – what kind of car do you drive, what do you do for a living, what’s your social status and all that. And again, it can feel like, “I’m not influenced by all that. I don’t buy into all that.” But we live in that culture where that is what determines people’s opinions of each other, oftentimes, in terms of celebrities and all that. What would it be to respect ourselves for the right things, for the important things? So for our ethics, for instance. You know, you don’t open a newspaper and there’s a whole list of celebrities who get celebrated for their ethics or their care of ethics. It just doesn’t register in most people’s consciousness as something that’s worthy of bowing, worthy of devotion, worthy of celebrating, unless someone really does something in flagrant violation of agreed-upon ethical codes. Or not even ethics, but my intention to live ethically, or inquiring into what it means to live ethically, to explore that. Just that those intentions come up in me is something extraordinarily beautiful, that I care about that and I have the intention to kind of – especially these days with globalization, very complex ethical issues, that I care about trying to navigate through that in some way. It won’t put you in the newspaper, it won’t make you famous, it won’t make you rich. But there is so much more beauty in that than any of that other junk that we can very easily be kind of brainwashed into believing that this is what we should be respected for.

The intention to cultivate qualities of mind like kindness, like goodness, like concentration, all of that. These are beautiful, [...] noble intentions. Something so worth celebrating. Very easily we can lose touch or [...] not even fully be aware of what it is that we care about most. Occasionally someone says, “I was at this party, and I looked around the room, and so-and-so played amazing guitar, and the other person just published a book, and so-and-so was a great juggler” and whatever it is, “and I couldn’t do anything.” This person is just missing that stream of intention in them, the stream of how deeply they care about something that’s beautiful.

And it’s weird saying this, because sometimes I feel it’s like, it can feel sometimes hard to convince people that that would be significant, that that would make a difference or that it’s even worth dwelling on that. But sometimes the things that don’t sound like a big deal are actually way more a big deal than they seem. There’s so much potential for a kind of unshakeability here. We’re rooted in what we care about the most. If we’re going to play the game of respecting ourselves and kind of judging how much respect we’re worth – which is a very dangerous game to play anyway – if we’re going to play it, at least let it be for the right things, for the things that are really beautiful and really important, that our hearts care about.”

If you enjoyed this excerpt, you might get a lot out of other Rob Burbea content (as I have). Here is a full list of his talk transcripts and audio files.