Below are kind acts filtered with the concept that “A kind act helps a person achieve freedom of thought and action.”
- Write a daily journal or blog post. This is almost essential to achieving freedom of thought.
- Befriend people who are kind; it will help you to become kinder yourself.
- Take a laughter workshop or stand-up comedy course. Standup will force quick thinking and a better relationship with people.
- Acknowledge who you are! This will help you to take risks, and risks are necessary for kindness, and kindness requires paying close attention.
- Read a book or magazine or watch a TED talk that challenges you. Something that challenges you to write a commentary that carries the ideas further.
- Ask for what you want. This is risky because it might pull in a rejection which is painful. But do it! Asking clarifies the issues.
- Write thank you notes but be specific about what was so special. Write ones to yourself so you can understand yourself better.
- Magnify your small problems so you can see them better, and then work out alternate solutions for yourself and others.
- Write a daily journal about solving real world problems.
- Ask children to write down how solve a really difficult world problem. Don’t criticize their solutions, but ask for more details if they are interested.
- Treat yourself to something special when you have done something special.
- Go for a walk at least two times per day and watch for chances to do kind deeds for the public.
- Use visualization and meditation to solve real problems, not to zone out.
- Cut out sugared drinks and drink the right amount of water. Offer non-sweet drinks with real flavor and enjoy them yourself.
- Do lots of unusual things at which you will probably fail, but do things with a potential big payoff and little damage when you do fail.
- If you are not passionate about what you are doing, do something more challenging.
- Meet new people often, and cultivate their acquaintance if possible.
- Intentionally eat exactly the right amount of the best possible food for three days to set your base line.
- Set special spaces in your life for special activities and a special quiet spot.
- Participate in what’s going on.
- Watch TED lectures and try and apply the ideas to you life.
- Join the local Socrates Cafe and participate.
- Praise specific things which requires that you to pay attention to what the person actually does.
- Observe when others need a specific help and give them a little boost.
- Demonstrate little acts of kindness by doing them.
- When someone disrespects you find a way to do an anonymous favor for them.
- Look at the sky and smile. There are hot days and cold days and just right days and we need them all.
- Acknowledge other people’s work and help them a bit at the difficult times.
- Be acknowledging of other people’s participation in our daily struggles.
- Extend a friendly invite to an introverted or shy colleague. Challenge them to acknowledge your presence first.
- Have a colleague drive you home from work because it gives them a chance to be kind.
- Be sensitive to other people’s needs and respond with deeds which will help them along their path.
- When someone degrades another person, counter it with some little thing they did well.
- When someone begins a task, step in with the helping hand.
- Make compliments specific to little things, so the person has no need to return the compliment.
- Be considerate of other people’s risks and worries.
- Help everyone live their ordinary life more fully.
- Support everyone you meet in their productive goals.
- Support productive activities in every way possible.
- Find out what is inspirational for each individual and help them get it.
- Encourage people to be helpful to other people.
- Everyone needs support, so give them enough to find their way.
- Make a point of listening to others and giving them what they need.
- Watch for new people and try to connect them to people they would find helpful.
- Practice perfecting perfect manners at every opportunity.
- Leave a note. “If you need a little help, please ask me first.”
- Help people to help other people.
- Find out people’s spouse’s or child’s special day, like a birthday, and help that day be free for your friend. This day becomes your gift to them and it is their gift to their significant others, and perhaps it goes on to the kid’s friend which would make it a quadruple-level kindness.
- Only give money to things which will help the recipient help themselves and others. Andrew Carnegie claimed that 95% of charity money would be better used by being thrown into the sea, because largess drives people the wrong way, into dependency and despair.
- Reduce, restore, reuse, recycle, compost, replant and repeat.
- Volunteers are routinizing the helping of others, which is good, but it is better to have kindness be spontaneous to the local situations.
- Sign your organ donor release form, it is the gift of productive life-energy to a person who is physically weakened.
- Standing in lines is nearly inevitable so helping the person next to you, with conversation about local affairs will help you both pass the time and you will learn something useful.
- Help everyone become online literate and stop traveling physically too much.
- Get involved with people and guide them to a better place.
- Join Big Brothers; it gives you many opportunities to be kind in the moment, which is the best kind of kindness.
- Being a mentor gives you opportunities to be spontaneously kind.
- Dogs are social animals, and man is dog’s best friend. Avoid leaving a dog alone without their personal humans.
- Visit old people; they may appreciate the conversation more than cookies.
- Picking up litter doesn’t do much except focus your attention on litter. Put a dime under a piece of litter and reward another litter picker-upper.
- Support pride in the beauty of your city. For example, make Bend, Oregon the cleanest and most beautiful city in the world.
- Get involved in community politics and generate kindness committees for getting people on track to being socially productive.
- Cheering your sports team is a form of kindness, especially if the cheering comes before the successful action.
- A real Christmas gift wouldn’t be a temporary gift but a path to a better life.
- The key need of a community is always to maximize the health, vigor and sanity of the people who live here now.
- Post a daily blog on issues and occasionally send them to the “Letters to the Editor.”
- At meetings pay close attention to the actions which will affect the core problems and pass over the superficial ones.
- Be a fine example of the kind of person you want other people to be.
- Set an example of what the successful people are expecting.
- When reading to children make sure they are following along in the text, so they will be learning to read without your help.
- Find out what grows naturally in your area and plant those things for decoration.
- Plant lots of trees, and other bushes that are likely to grow naturally in the local area.
- Find volunteer trees and bushes that won’t survive where they are and place them in good spots. Organize a group to show others how it’s done.
- Save natural resources; get the smallest most reliable car you can. It’s old but a 96 GEO Prizm is still a good example and it looks reasonably modern.
- When getting a new residence, choose a location within walking distance to necessities like a grocery store and a job.
- Grow some vegetables, just to maintain some contact with the source of your food.
- Consider upgrading to the maximum insulation; it will cut down on consumable heating and cooling expenditures for many years and will ease natural resource consumption.
These ideas give the tone of what a kind act is. It is different from just treating people well or not treating them badly.
“A kind act helps a person achieve freedom of thought and action.”