An actor walked into a room of generals asking for a plane full of pencils

When was the last time you did something kind for someone you would probably never see again, and let it end there, with no follow-up, no thank-you expected? Admiral William H. McRaven suggests that most of us can answer that question, but not as quickly as we'd like to.

He tells of Gary Sinise, an actor recognisable mostly for playing Lieutenant Dan in Forrest Gump, walking uninvited into a dining hall full of generals at Bagram Air Base during the Afghanistan war and asking, essentially, who's in charge, because he had bought ten pallets of school supplies for Afghan children and needed a military aircraft to deliver them. He got his plane within hours. McRaven later kept running into Sinise for a decade afterward, showing up unannounced at hospital bedsides with gifts for wounded soldiers he had never met, asking nothing in return.

He also tells a smaller, older story his mother used to repeat: during the Second World War, a young woman in North Platte, Nebraska, started making sandwiches for soldiers passing through on the train. Within months the whole town had joined in, and over four years the people of North Platte fed roughly six million soldiers on their way to war, simply because one person started.

McRaven's argument is that compassion, unlike some other virtues, comes easily to a few people and has to be deliberately practiced by the rest of us, because daily life pulls attention toward work, image, and self-interest instead. He notes, in passing, that giving is known to trigger a genuine sense of well-being in the person doing it, not just the person receiving it, though he's careful to say we don't really need that fact to already know that giving feels better than most of what we chase instead.

What matters, in his framing, is not the size of the act. Sinise's plane-load of supplies and one sandwich handed to a stranded soldier belong to the same category. Both are small next to the scale of a war. Both are proof, to the person on the receiving end, that they are not invisible.

Before the day ends, do one kind thing for someone who will never be able to repay you and who may never even find out it was you, whether that's paying for a stranger's coffee, helping a colleague with a task that isn't yours, or simply giving someone your full attention when they talk. Choose it deliberately rather than waiting for an obvious opportunity to present itself, since obvious opportunities are rare and daily habits are not. Say nothing about it afterward and resist checking whether it was noticed. Do this again tomorrow, for someone different if possible, and let the habit, not any single grand gesture, become the actual measure of your compassion.