What would you do?

A couple nights ago, I managed to find some time to snag a TV show that I was kind of interested in watching when I saw commercials. It has different scenarios, similar to Boiling Point, but rather than testing how long someone takes to get ticked off, it instead examines human reaction in different social scenarios.

One particular example that i was very intrigued with was this particular scenario where a stranger comes up to you and ask you for not for some money, but rather, for some gas. At a time when our economy is a mess and when gas prices had climbed to almost five dollars a gallon, how would one react to such a scenario and what would you do in this position.

While this is not a scientific study, there were some interesting observation made about this experiment:
- when a male was the subject asking strangers for gas, he didn't have the greatest success rate
- however, when a female was the subject and asked strangers for gas, she had about a 75% success rate, no matter what kind of car she was driving. (they experimented to see the difference if the woman had a cheap car or a nice car.
-when a thick accented immigrant male asked strangers for a gas, there was an interesting finding. He had a very high success rate when he asked males for gas, but was rejected from every female he asked.

A thing to note about the immigrant was that he was one of the males that offered assistance to the female subject that was in the experiment earlier. He was an immigrant that had just come to the United States a year before and was someone who commuted thirty miles each way to work in a resturant. Someone like that doesn't have much money himself, but he was willing to not only give up some of his gas to help the women, but he came over to her car to help her put the gas in a tank...in the rain. When asked why he did what he did, his response was...
"Because she needed help."

Something simple as that. No strings attached. Just because someone needed help, he performed a simple act of kindness. Living in such a competitive world where everyone tries to get to the top, its easy to forget that we also live in world where other people exist . We also forget that we really can't make it in this world alone and there are so many things that aren't possible if we didn't get a helping hand from someone else.

Simple acts of kindness are underestimated. To me, if someone shows such acts of kindness, it means a lot to me.

Like the saying goes, "A little goes a long way"

Take the time out of your day to just help that other person make it through the day a little easier, and you will see how the rewards will benefit you more.