Two years ago, my friend and I were living in our fraternity house at USC. With his birthday quickly approaching he came to me with an unusual request, instead of receiving presents and getting drunk (like most every other 21 year old in a fraternity would) he wanted to do ‘random acts of kindness’ instead. I was struck with such an idea and I asked him what exactly had overcome him to have such a novel idea. He told me about a TED talk he had watched by Nipun on designing for generosity which had inspired him.

I was impressed. Giving instead of taking for your birthday -- now that was different. I told him I’d be glad to help him out with the random acts of kindness so we started planning out creative things we could do.

#1 Hot Chocolate Security: If you’ve heard of USC, you’ve probably also heard it’s not in the safest area in LA, which is true. In fact, its location is so unsafe that USC employs the second largest private legal militia in the United States to protect its students: DPS. They’re not as scary as they sound but they do have to work around the clock to keep us safe, standing on street corners throughout the university all night keeping watch. For the most part it’s a thankless job as most people grow accustomed to seeing officers all around and eventually barely even notice their presence. How could we show them our appreciation?

Well, we decide to take a 5 gallon industrial sized coffee maker and brew up a large batch of hot chocolate. Then, we hired an Uber and asked him to drive us around campus where we knew the officers would be and we poured them each an individual cup of hot chocolate from our oversized cauldron in the back of an Uber. The Uber driver was initially a bit tentative to the entire scheme but after awhile he was helping us spot officers and our lively spirit had spread to him as well. We were met with many smiles and appreciative words from the officers as well as bewilderment as they said students often rarely acknowledge their efforts. Soon they were talking about us over their radio and we were the ones being spotted and called over. Eventually, the hot chocolate seemed secondary to their interest in meeting us, the two guys that went around in the back of Uber at 1am with an oversized vat of hot chocolate looking to share some late night laughter. It was amazing to see how a small simple act or even intention of generosity can lift everyone’s spirit.

#2: The Car Wash: Outside our fraternity house we have a large parking lot full of tandem parking spots, and living in LA rain is a rare occurrence so cars quickly collect pollutants and dust. We decided it would be a kind gesture to surprise our fraternity members with a car wash. So we bought car washing supplies from a nearby auto mart and brought out all the bath towels we could find. We then re-purposed the hose we had rigged outside the fraternity house to start a garden on the roof in an earlier venture. With all the supplies in hand we were able to convince another roommate to help out as well and we began rinsing down the cars.

Every once in a while, someone would come by and asked perplexed, “who told you to wash the cars?” or, even better, “who paid you to wash their car?”. We just explained it was our friend's birthday and he had wanted to do something kind. But our response was often met with an even more confused look. As the afternoon went on, some people that came by noticed the electric eccentric energy of the spontaneous event and started helping out with some of the duties. First one friend then two, and by the time we had cleaned the entire lot we had an entire car washing crew complete with independent individually assigned tasks and duties.

When we finished the cars were sparkling and the group’s energy was radiant, as if amplified by the opportunity to be productive with no expectations other than the task at hand.

It made me realize that the expectation of payment for a service can often distract the mind by diverting awareness to the compensation rather than focusing wholeheartedly on the service. Instead our group had no reason to rush the cleaning process (to maximize profit) and skimp on quality. I was able to maintain presence more fully to the task at hand because my objective was aligned with my task. I wasn’t cleaning cars to be able to afford a new phone, I was cleaning cars simply because I wanted to clean cars. I also noticed that acts done through generosity negate the classic mindset of opportunity cost where the value of actions spent doing X are weighed against the value of actions spend doing Y. There was no metric to weigh our value created. We couldn’t measure our success in dollars earned or lament over the time spent washing cars when we could have been earning twice as much at work.

I now realize, first hand, that there is a special energy created when you choose to think bigger than yourself and act in service of others (especially when it’s your birthday).