You Learn by Living: Eleven Keys for a More Fulfilling Life

by Eleanor Roosevelt

To be useful is, in a way, to justify one’s own existence. The difficult thing, perhaps, is to learn how to be useful, to recognize needs and to attempt to meet them. Most people encounter this need first in the family group where, if the family is really a closely knit unit, they learn to carry their share of the responsibility for the family. They meet it next in the most difficult relationship of all, marriage, where each must learn for himself to understand his partner, to know what his needs are, and to meet them with unselfishness and flexibility. They meet it next when they discover that their home is part of a community and that community a part of a larger society whose limits are increasingly wide. Someday, perhaps, they will be world-wide. The needs of that community, of that society, are endless, beyond calculation. If you can learn to see where they are, you will find, at the same time, a way to be useful.