There will not be a single person on this planet who had not experienced the compounding effects of cooperation. Though they give lesser room for cooperation, even the introverts and socially reticent would have experienced it in one way or other because the compounding effect of cooperation is a societal phenomenon whose effects extend beyond the parties involved in the cooperation. Only does it differ in the scale that the strength of the compounding effect depends upon the levels of cooperation. Cooperation is an unavoidable element of socialization, for man is a social animal — though socialization without cooperation is not uncommon. However, the individual dividend, i.e., the compounding effect of cooperation, is subjective, thanks to the disallowing and inherent behavioral traits of man as well as the chemistry that plays out among people during interpersonal interactions.
We are all familiar with the term: cooperation and what it signifies. However, for the sake of this blog, let me define cooperation as ‘giving’ in order to benefit oneself as well as others. I deliberately used the word: as well as instead of ‘and’ because the benefits of cooperation are not equally shared among the participants but in a compounding fashion. Given in this giving can be both tangible and intangible things like time, effort, money, kindness, benevolence, well wishes and so on. I coerced and cajoled myself to be convinced that only giving, not taking, is involved in cooperation as ‘taking home’ from cooperation is the aftermath of cooperation, which exactly is the compounding effect of cooperation I am talking about. To drive home this point of giving, let me put across three gems pulled out from the different and distant historical timelines.
The Maha Upanishid, the Sanskrit text believed to have been conposed beween the late BC and the early AD, has a beautiful concept: “Vasudhaiva Kutumbakam,” which means ‘the world is one family.’ The concept signifies the told and untold facts that humans are bound to cooperate with each other and exist for one another. Intereestingly and non-coincidentally, Zeno, the founder of Stoicism school of Philosophy, who lived beween BC334 to BC 262 in Greece, which is thousands of miles away from India, where The Upanishid was belived to have been written, had taught his students the same concept of world-one-family, and his words, “We should consider all men to be of one community and one polity, and that we should have a common life and an order common to us all, even as a herd that feeds together and shares the pasturage of a common field.” These words can be synopsed into vasudhaiva kutumbakam. The golden thought from Marcus Aurelius of the same class, “The highest good of a man is the common good.” Across the times and geographies that span the progress of humanity from the day without yesterday, the souls who understood the purpose of life as scripted by the universe unequivocally articulated one thing that humans are natured to cooperate with each other. Even science has the same discovery when it stated that humans are social animals. Cooperation is the bedrock of human existence.
A 9-year old child had died in a tragic car accident in Kerala, India, recently. The child’s parents took an unprecedented decision to donate its vital organs to the patients who were waiting for organ transplantation, and the doctors did it successfully. This proves that even the dead could cooperate, intensely to the extent of life-saving, with the living. Humans are built to cooperate, even their organs are exchangeable and suited to each other, irrespective of age, ethnicity, religion, rich or poor, dead or alive.
The most familiar phrase connected with compounding is the ‘compound interest’ that financial institutions apply to fixed investments in order to make the investors benefit the maximum possible. For the beginners, it is combining of interest to principle on a fixed-time basis like quarterly or biannual and that the subsequent aggregated amount becoming the new principle earning interest which, thus, has the interest earned on the initial principle as well as the on the interest added to the principle — and the process continues unabatedly based on the compounding time-interval set. So compounding demands an initial investment to augment upon and aggregate. The same principle works flawlessly in cooperation, too, as augmentation and consequent aggregation are a fundamental universal principle. Investment of every element of cooperation viz: time, effort, money, kindness, benevolence, providing succor, etc., get rewarded with aggregation like the interest does.
The compounding effect of cooperation is the individual dividend of contentment that a man earns from his investment in cooperation, which works impeccably like the universal principle of sow-to-harvest. It is the accruing happiness earned from showing kindness; undimnishing satisfaction resulting from benevolence; timeless feeling of contentment from providing succor; and similar such non-profit feelings coming from giving without expecting anything in return. Such happiness, satisfaction and contentment are unfailingly bound to produce feel-good that adds in a compounding way to the man’s state of being — wholesomeness.
Though man is wired to be a social animal, he still has the discretion whether to cooperate or not. Man who does not cooperate is like a stagnant waterbody that will not have springs or rains to add up in order to replenish and refresh. And he misses one of the valuable maxims of humanity, that is, cooperate to grow. It is like an uncooperative man living at an apartment complex not realizing that his ceiling is someone’s floor — the safety over his head is as good as the ground under the feet of the man living one storey above. In cooperation, there is only constructive cooperation, that is, giving. The individual dividend of constructive cooperation, or simply cooperation, has no limit like the zenith as the compounding of the initial investment of the elements of cooperation will keep adding up affirmatively and indefinitely — more the investment more the adding up.
Compounding effect of cooperation is reserved for the souls who realize that the universe had natured man to cooperate and that he cannot achieve anything significant by standing alone — there is nothing called a self-made man, for hundreds of souls would have directly or indirectly contributed to the making of the so-called self-made man, starting from his parents, siblings, teachers and friends.
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