I was chatting with a good friend and pro speaker, Chris Petersen, and she shared a cool story. Seems she was in line at a Chic-fil-A to grab a quick bite on the road, and once she got up to the window, the server told her that her meal had been paid for by the car in front of her.
Chris quickly tried to look at the car and see if perhaps she knew them, and wondered what would have caused them to be so generous as to buy her meal. She is not in the military, or in her mind, in any other way overtly deserving of this type of generosity.
With her confusion over the situation unsolved, she nonetheless told the server, “Well then, I will buy the lunch for the person behind me.”
Beaming, the server said, “Thanks, you are the 35th person in a row who has done so!”
The ensuing conversation was centered on how long the chain of generosity would last. Then the server told Chris, “The manager says tomorrow, we are going to give the 2nd customer a free meal and see if we can go through the whole day with everyone paying it backwards.”
Now, think about that for a minute. First, if you were in Chris’s situation, would you “pay it backward?”
If not, why not?
Next, consider the attitude of the store manager and crew who gain nothing from this exercise (in fact, if they truly take up this mantle, they will be giving out a free meal each day they try it out). And of course, as I pondered this through, I figured there would be someone, somewhere who would try to take advantage of this and game the system to order sandwiches for the whole office thinking that someone else would be paying the bill. But, it does show that, at least in some small ways and in some places, there are people who are looking for ways to be generous and pay it forward.
Find a way today to initiate a small, undeserved, random act of kindness.
Pay something forward.
Or backward.
Or sideways …