Love*Ankit*more
I just came across something perfect for our Love Is The New Black column. Ankit is a 17 year old young man from Long Island, NY who has a blog called One Grain of Sand. I found out about him when he stumbled upon our tumblr blog and took the time to send us an email. A seemingly little thing that means so much to these new entrepreneurs.
Ankit describes himself as, “A kid that cares for little more than open minds, strong opinions, passion, genuinity, a good laugh and conscious living for the people and the world around me.” Right on! Today he blogged about doing random acts of kindness in Central Park. We LOVE that, and we love*Ankit*more. This is just the kind of thing that inspires us over here at Lovemore. His post is below, or you an click the link to read it on his blog. Thank you Ankit for the love you put in the world, it’s awesome!
From Ankit’s blog: Fail With Purpose
Before I got a tumblr, I never kept track of the great quotes I heard, so it makes it hard when I want to revolve these posts around those quotes because they are kinda hard to find, but I’ll paraphrase:
Success is going from failure to failure without loss of enthusiasm.- Someone Noteworthy
Yesterday, I realized the truth of that quote. With a bunch of fantastic people, I did random acts of kindness in Central Park. We set up a table with a giant Smile Card poster in front of it, hand out cookies (as our random acts of kindness) and direct people towards a board with ideas of how to pay-it-forward. We present ourselves as just a group of friends trying to create a bit of a ripple effect with the random acts of kindness. Now, compared to what people in New York are used to, this is a totally radical idea — giving away free cookies? No organizational affiliation? Real kindness? Believe it.
Because it was so crazy, only one of every ten or so people actually stopped to hear us out and receive us (which is actually a lot considering the hundreds and hundreds of people that walked by). It is hard to really be open to strangers when there is so many underlying intentions and relative corruption in the world, but those who are open and do stop to hear us out are our successes. We won them over and were able to produce the domino effect from the idea of paying it forward.
Now, the message here is to continue trying. Especially in the beginning of the day, when we’re setting up and before the momentum starts to create itself, we fail over and over as people blatantly ignore the offers for cookies and tune out our introductions — “Hi! We’re doing Random Acts of Kindness today, and [walks away].” We can get upset over our failure, or we can keep the smile on and try again. Of course, we chose the latter, and that’s what made all the difference.
One of the best pieces of advice I’ve ever received is to fail, but to fail with purpose. Succeed from failure. It’s the only way to get it done.
Happily failing, Ankit
**Note: Ankit, you got the quote right, and it was said by Winston Churchill. I’m sure he’s love*you*more too!
That’s a really neat story and what you did is really neat.
I did some things like that called a listening project where we would like write a question on a board. The first time was what do you think of the elections (that was years ago) and then last time I did it was at a Pow Wow in Portland, OR, we had a question, what do you think of the war in Iraq when it was first starting …
Then we just listen to the person as long as they want and we give them good attention and warmth and loving attitude.
That’s it and it’s really neat.
The idea is people have so much intelligence that sometimes gets clouded with hurt and if (we) a person gets an opportunity to really get out their thoughts and emotions that it will clear up the person’s (my/our) true benign intelligence and positive changes and healing can often follow this …
So, it’s truly a neat random act as well.
Thank you for what you’ve been doing. It makes me want to do a listening table again.
love,
cindy aka rawprincess
xxx ooo
Ankit is a really cool kid. I only wish that I had the courage to do something like that, I’d be so paranoid of looking stupid that it’ll never happen.
Hopefully he succeeds in his aim, he’s got the right idea about success anyway.
I love this! Ankit is wonderful and so are you, I love the idea of lovemore shirts!
I will be in Austin TX, I live in Italy and will order your t-shirt and have it shipped to me while in TX we need more love, to give and receive… love to you! xoxoxo
Dea
Dea,
Thanks for your great comment and we’d love to ship you a shirt to Texas. Have safe travels! xo