Pay It Forward

by Catherine Ryan Hyde

This book has nothing to do with technology or the Internet, and it won't win a Pulitzer or a Nobel Prize for great literature. It's just a simple little parable of the awesome power of doing good things for other people; not a new idea, but one that can use repeating from time to time. You should be able to read it from cover to cover in a couple of hours, and it may change your life. If you're one of those people with a heart of stone, for whom words on paper have little or no emotional impact, then go see the movie, which opens on October 20th. It stars Kevin Spacey, Helen Hunt, and that little kid with a complicated name who costarred with Bruce Willis in The Sixth Sense.

The concept of the book is simple, and is conceived by a young 12-year-old boy, Trevor McKinney, in response to an extra-credit assignment from his sixth grade social-studies teacher: come up with a plan that will improve the world. Trevor devises a "bottom-up" strategy, in start contrast to the "top-down" strategy that many of us still believe in — e.g., elect a President who is smarter and wiser than all of us, and depend on him or her to accomplish miracles. Trevor's plan starts with an individual — any individual, but in order to make it relevant, start with yourself. Then find three individuals who need a favor — and in particular, a significant form of help or assistance, something that they probably would not have been able to accomplish on their own. What creates the miracle is a small twist, which becomes the book's title: instead of asking these three individuals to pay you back for the favor, ask them to pay it forward — i.e., to find three other individuals for whom an equally important favor can be performed. Thus, if 3 individuals are helped at the first level, 9 are affected at the second level, 27 at the third level, and so forth. Though Trevor doesn't extend the math all the way, the power of this kind of geometric progression is such that paying it forward 21 levels covers the entire human race — and that's if each person does only one favor for three other individuals. If the process starts with a thousand people rather than one, and if each person decides to repeat the process a few times, the process mushrooms at a phenomenal rate. Pay It Forward illustrates how the process works with real-world, imperfect people who manage to bungle many of the opportunities they're given, but who (like us) nevertheless muddle on, doing the best they can.

Could all of this happen in such a grandiose fashion in the "real world"? Probably not — but who cares? Even if just one person found three other individuals and provided them with a significant form of assistance, the world has become an incrementally better place. At least I'd like to hope so — I'm already in the process of picking my first round of pay-it-forward beneficiaries, but it remains to be seen whether they'll extend the chain. In any case, you have nothing to lose by taking a quick look at the book — or, if you'd prefer, watching the movie version. If it gives you any new insights or ideas, let me know.