Algorithms shape our lives in multiple ways every day from what we can buy at the grocery store to where and when we can travel on an airplane. They’re used to manage everything from determining stock sales and purchases to matching organ donors and recipients and they have all ‘sorts’ of names: bubble sort, bucket sort, and mergesort. They are mathematical equations used by machines to help people solve problems and bring a semblance of order to our everyday lives.

The programs, formulas, and sets of steps we—humans—sometimes try to follow to better ourselves and our relationships are also considered algorithms. Many of us look for steps, for example, that we can take to become physically stronger and/or intellectually sharper whether it’s following a specific diet or learning technique. We look to such programs to help us solve personal problems but they have a major weakness: they are almost exclusively focused inward. It’s a weakness because many sources of our personal problems also involve interpersonal relationships or, in other words, outward dynamics. To be human, after all, is relational…a person is defined by the interactions of both our inner and outer worlds.

We are shaped by not only our personal thoughts and beliefs but also our interpersonal experiences and actions. Our inner and outer beings are the co-authors of the music and rhythms that our lives dance to. Whether we find ourselves in a place surrounded with love or surrounded without love makes a difference in how we live our lives. Aren’t you more likely to have confidence moving forward through life if you felt “surrounded” in a protective, caring sense as compared to feeling that you are “surrounded” by nothing but lonely emptiness? All ideas and programs used to help us succeed in any aspect of life should be based on creating and maintaining an inner-outer balance.

We are born with a natural algorithm for succeeding in life, according to Jean Jacques Rousseau and Charles Darwin, that many of us unlearn as we interact in society: compassion. Darwin even called compassion “the almost ever-present instinct.” We unlearn it because society teaches that it is not important and even a sign of weakness. Think of what children learn in playground games such as “king of the hill” and “kill the carrier” (I won’t even get into video games). Do we really believe, as a society, that a rewarding life is based on the idea of attaining personal achievements at the expense of others? Practicing compassion helps to strengthen both our inner-personal and interpersonal lives and it can be relearned by following the algorithm of compassion: LUCA=listen+understand+connect+act.

Listen to learn. Listening to learn involves noticing the spoken as well as unspoken signs of communication. It’s about having focused attention, a willingness to explore a problem with another through questions, and the patience to find meaning in silence. It’s when your ears, eyes, and mind converge in devotion to hearing someone talk. When you listen to learn from someone instead of listening to reply to them, you open yourself to understanding rather than arguing.

Understand to know. Understanding to know is about trying to complete a 360 degrees search for comprehension. It’s focused on acquiring a holistic understanding of a person (i.e., their beliefs, feelings, mindset) and their problem so that you can provide options for how to help. Your goal is to strengthen your comprehension of a situation by turning facts into concepts and perspectives into awareness so that you generate multiple solutions to any one problem. It’s about connecting various types of information you’ve learned into a coherent whole…think of it as turning bits and pieces of information into a mosaic of understanding. Being able to make and identify connections between facts (turning factual knowledge into conceptual knowledge) enables you to assess the resources or capabilities you will need to effectively address a problem or challenge.

Connect to capabilities. Once you understand how to help, you need to be able to find resources that can help. Sometimes it’s you that is the resource but in other instances help is somewhere and someone else. You increase your potential to connect to capabilities the more you are open to: shifting your opinion or perspective about a problem and person, looking for resources hidden in plain sight, and diversifying your social networks. Connecting to capabilities generates options for effective action.

Act to solve. Acting to solve includes both action and inaction. Helping someone requires that you find ways to overcome the fear or reluctance to act. It involves developing a hybrid sense of responsibility and resilience as well as an understanding that inaction—however paradoxical it may seem—is sometimes the best course to follow in solving a problem. Think of the doctor who prescribes rest over pills or treatment in some cases. Taking action (both in doing and purposeful nondoing) is what differentiates compassion from other values such as empathy and sympathy.

Compassion is defined as a holistic understanding of a problem or the suffering of another with a commitment to act to solve the problem or alleviate the suffering. When we live a compassionate life, the lives buzzing around and within us start to sync because we are helping ourselves as we are helping others. Following LUCA provides a way to simultaneously plug into our inner and outer worlds so that they are not only in sync but also in harmony.

“800-CEO-READ” offered the following book review during their book giveaway:

Christopher Kukk first learned the power of compassion working in a field you’d imagine would be one of the most cutthroat—as a counterintelligence agent in the US Army. It was there he learned it was more effective to sow seeds of support, goodwill, and mutual interest rather than fear and intimidation in the communities he was operating in, to be more understanding and responsive to people’s environment and needs rather than ruthless, more compassionate than callous.

Now, as a teacher and founding director of the Center for Compassion, Creativity and Innovation at Western Connecticut University, he has been spreading the gospel of compassion into classrooms, boardrooms, and communities across America. In The Compassionate Achiever, he brings that message to the printed page. And although it is a personal development book, it begins by looking at the issue more broadly, from a perspective of humanity’s development:

[C]ooperation has been more important than the idea of competition in humanity’s evolutionary success. A cooperative perspective in more important than a competitive mindset in any group’s success. Compassion is the reason for both the human race’s survival and its ability to continue to thrive as a species.

Kukk lays out the physical and social science evidence of how we are hardwired for compassion, and how our evolutionary survival has depended upon it. In doing so, the idea of “survival of the fittest” (a phrase Darwin never wrote, by the way, and an idea his writings on the “sympathy hypothesis” contradict) gives way to a more nuanced reality of “survival of the kindest.” Natural selection may be competitive, but it is those that are most cooperative, collaborative, and connected that win that competition. Which is all well and good, but what has compassion done for us lately, and what can it do for us today? Well, in the corporate world, Kukk tell us that:

When you examine many of the most successful organizations around the world, you find that they capitalize on fostering cooperation, coordination, and collaboration. Companies such as General Mills, Aetna, Target, and Google have buried the competitive culture and resurrected compassion. They have woven compassion into their corporate structure to increase employee satisfaction, boost productivity, and raise the bottom line. Although many people believe that you need to be hard-nosed and ruthless to succeed in business, highly successful businesses not only know better, but also understand how to be better, and it’s through compassion.

But that is the larger, evolutionary and organization level. I’m sure you’d like to know how it helps you achieve individual success, as well. Kukk explains how acting out of compassion is the underpinning of that, as well, how helping and strengthening your connections to others helps stand you up and make you stronger. And it is not an either/or, zero-sum proposition, but a both/and, symbiotic, and interdependent one:

When you help another, it also physically and psychologically strengthens you. The social interaction of helping another provides individual benefits to you. The price we pay by not taking action to help others is the diminishment of ourselves and the deterioration of communities.

It is also something that is learnable, that can be put into practice with an easily remembered acronym, LUCA:

listening to learn, understanding to know, connecting to capabilities, and acting to solve.

Kukk devotes most of the book to cultivating compassion through those four pillars, dedicating an entire section of the book to each. Each practice has many learnable skills and smaller daily practices within it, and each is painless if only we can remember to be conscious of others. That consciousness and compassion, in the end, will lead to our own success: “Compassionate achievers,” Kukk proclaims, “challenge the notion that you have to look out for number one in order to be number one.”

There is a trend of books emphasizing emotional intelligence over technical intelligence. As artificial intelligence and automation advance in taking over the more technical aspects and tasks within our organizations, the most valuable skills will be the most fundamentally human. The Compassionate Achiever will teach you how to build strength through kindness, unity of purpose through understanding. It is, in the end, about helping ourselves by helping others. So, if you’re really selfish, you should begin to act more unselfishly. It is the best way to get ahead, and contribute to the creation of a community that is more healthy, resilient, and less violent. Christopher Kukk offers practical and practicable techniques for doing all of this on a personal, interpersonal, and daily level.

The original review can be found by clicking here.