People are appreciated when they give to others through charity, volunteer work, or other acts of kindness, and rightly so. When you can help another person in some way that helps them with their troubles, it creates a spirit of goodwill, and it’s good for your own sense of joy and meaning in life as well.

What is often overlooked, though, is how much time, money and energy each one of us invests in significantly helping other people every day – through the work that we do.

Every hour that you have spent in a classroom, in an internship and at work is an hour you have spent honing and perfecting your skills. Every dollar that you’ve spent for tuition, books, seminars, travel and of course, those most expensive seminars – the cost of failure or loss that have added to your wisdom – is a dollar that you have spent investing in your ability to do your work well.

People are appreciated when they give to others through charity, volunteer work, or other acts of kindness, and rightly so. When you can help another person in some way that helps them with their troubles, it creates a spirit of goodwill, and it’s good for your own sense of joy and meaning in life as well.

What is often overlooked, though, is how much time, money and energy each one of us invests in significantly helping other people every day – through the work that we do.

Every hour that you have spent in a classroom, in an internship and at work is an hour you have spent honing and perfecting your skills. Every dollar that you’ve spent for tuition, books, seminars, travel and of course, those most expensive seminars – the cost of failure or loss that have added to your wisdom – is a dollar that you have spent investing in your ability to do your work well.

And every ounce of energy that you’ve spent thinking about, worrying over, creating ideas for and sweating through during hard work and difficult times is an ounce of energy that increases your ability to provide some kind of product or service to another human being.

In the popular media, and in many other liberal/progressive circles, this time, money and energy is dismissed when it comes to the ideal of “helping people” because in this case, it is suggested, we’re doing it “for the money.”

As though that cheapens our efforts, makes it base, selfish, or the favorite pejorative of the left: materialistic.

Baloney.

That we can earn a living from what we do makes it possible and reasonable for us to do it. When left wing demagogues lecture young college graduates to forego making money and instead to do something to “give back,” something that helps people, they are telling them that what they will do to make money is of little or no value.

This, of course, is exactly the opposite of the truth.

Money is the great measure of value. That some people get rich through deceit or fraud or through the use of government offices (but I repeat myself) does not negate the fact that most of us make our livings doing something that is of value to other people – and to enough other people that the aggregate of what they pay allows for us to afford those things that we need and want.

The contractor who we hired to remodel our house a few years back was not some well-wishing altruist willing to hammer some nails to help out in our time of need. He makes his living doing what he does. We paid him a lot of money and in return we got all of the skill, knowledge, familiarity with the work of the sub-contractors and accountability that led to a finished product with which we were extremely happy. The work that he did adds to our quality of life literally every single day.

But he did not do this as a sacrifice, as a way of giving back, or as some kind of charity. It was the most moral and benevolent of human interactions: It was an exchange.

Think of the work that you do. How many hundreds or thousands of hours have you invested in learning the skills that you use? How many years have you spent practicing those skills to get to the level of competence that you bring to your work today?

This is what you “give back” to the world each and every day, without even thinking about it.

If you run a business, you provide the goods or services that people want. Whether that’s manufacturing vitamins or tool making equipment, mining minerals, drilling for oil, selling real estate, or leading trips you bring something into the world that would not otherwise be there.

If you work as a software engineer, a roofing contractor, or a salesman you are doing something that adds to the problem-solving capacity of your community.

If you work in marketing, medicine, or manufacturing you are adding to the quality of life of other people every single day that you work.

For some people, their work is more of a job – something they do primarily because it pays the bills. For others it is something they get absorbed in where they can enjoy using the skills that they have honed. For others their work is more of a calling – something that they have to do and feel a profound sense of meaning and purpose in doing.

This last scenario is a wonderful thing. It allows a person to bring everything they have into the work that they do, and to feel deeply satisfied in the process.

But whether your work is a calling or mainly the means for a paycheck, either way it is what you spend a lot of your waking life engaged in, and that is a level of practice and commitment that is hard to equal in terms of charity or volunteer work.

Lately, as I drive by stores and other businesses in town, I pay attention to those that have closed. Whether or not they are businesses that I have used I feel a sense of loss. There’s one more possibility that does not exist.

The politicians and bureaucrats who have been draining money and goodwill from our “materialistic” world of commerce in the name of their progressive vision think that they are doing some kind of good work. The public service workers unions think that they are helping “the people” by increasing their own wages, pensions and benefits.

The progressives who so zealously seek to “spread the wealth around” and work for “social justice” think that they are operating on a higher moral level than those who work to increase their own wealth.

I know how these people think. I am in a profession that is filled with such a mindset – a “helping” profession. I’ve got news for anybody who self-righteously proclaims that they are in a helping profession: In the marketplace, every profession is a helping profession.

In the market, the materialistic, mundane, self-interested market, if you are not helping somebody to do something they want or need to do then you will not be making a living. If you want to feel how much good there is in the world through people’s day to day work, imagine a business that you frequent … gone.

Imagine your favorite grocery store closed. Imagine that pizza place you take for granted shut down. Imagine that your doctor has closed his or her practice. Imagine no new computer when yours finally crashes, no good place to take your car for repairs, nothing interesting on the radio or TV, no gas for your car, no milk or meat or vegetables for your meals.

Then you can begin to appreciate how much good is brought to you each and every day by people doing nothing more altruistic than their own self-interested pursuit of a good living.

Help people. Be kind and generous in your life. Such an attitude is heartful, brings a lovely spirit to yourself and the people around you and is an important ingredient in your human connections.

But never lose sight of the incalculable good that you are already bringing, and that others are bringing to you, through what you and they do regularly to earn money.

I want to start hearing that in commencement speeches across the country.