Shari Arison, Activate Your Goodness: Transforming the World Through Doing Good, Hay House, © 2013, ISBN 978-1-4919-3797-3, 176 pages, $14.95.
By Donald H. Harrison
Shari Arison, daughter of the late Carnival Cruise Line founder Ted Arison, runs a network of international businesses and philanthropies in her own right and is ranked as one of the richest women in the world. She has the wherewithal for her ideas to be taken seriously, ideas which, if proffered by a woman of lesser means, might be dismissed as naively utopian.
“Think good, speak good, do good,” is her mantra.
This involves, at first, doing good for oneself by ridding oneself of negativity; then graduating to doing good for the community by volunteering for charitable projects or just taking the time to help others, and finally, doing good for the world, by extending one’s kindness and consideration to Mother Earth and its inhabitants.
Arison writes of a project undertaken by a Dr. Blum and his daughter Maya to help patients in their recuperation by presenting them with new teddy bears, called “recovery bears,” which, they explain, are suffused with “positive” thoughts. Patients who received them reported they suffered less from anxiety during their healing process.
Keren, an employee of a high-tech corporation, found an outlet for creative energies by baking cakes in any shape and color desired by children with special needs. Perhaps a football? Perhaps a fairy?
Doing good does not only involve giving material gifts like teddy bears and cakes. According to Arison, it can be as simple as “picking up a piece of litter you see, holding the door for the person behind you, or giving up your seat to someone on the bus.”
Arison suggests that both smiles and frowns are contagious and that the world would be better off with more of the former and less of the latter. She is critical of a news media model that deems such bad things that happen to people as traffic accidents, crimes, and the adverse impacts of nature, as being far more “newsworthy” than the good things.
While she does not advocate censoring the bad news, she favors creating more avenues for people to learn about good news. In Herzliya she created a Center for Communication Awareness, to teach ways of reflecting the good in the world to the news-consuming public. One year’s project featured videos from students and the public about different projects to help sustain the earth. Another had students create gigglers.tv, showing people from all over the world laughing. Yet another documented the water and sewage systems, manufacturing jobs, and paper products associated with the toilets we use at home or at the work place. The lesson was that even in our most private activities, such as using the toilet, we are dependent on the work of so many other people.
Arison believes that “news” can be most useful if it helps point the way to positive solutions.
Another way in which Arison invests in spreading news about good was through the creation of the website www.goodnet.org, which features stories about doing good in the realms of “me, people and planet.”
Similarly, she offers “Good TV” clips on the Internet, and sponsors “Good Deed Day” in which entire communities participate in endless varieties of beneficial projects.
Arison’s theory is that “doing good will change the world” while at the same time greatly benefitting its practitioners. “Doing good builds self esteem and self-confidence,” she writes. “Doing good makes you a leader and an inspiration to others.” It also “brings out your very best attributes.” And, she adds. “doing good brings you more happiness and joy to your life.”
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Harrison is editor of San Diego Jewish World. He may be contacted via donald.harrison@sdjewishworld.com