Our personal mission must be to exceed at helping people when they need help. Why they call us is pretty much immaterial; if they didn’t need help, they wouldn’t have called for it.

Once there was a stone cutter who was dissatisfied with himself and his position in life. One day he passed a rich man’s home; he became envious and wished he could be like the merchant.

If we can’t put people together and work with them, we are no more an effective emergency services team than is dumping a load of building materials on a job and calling it a house.

The only way you will achieve this ability to lead with altrusistic values is to do it yourself and make it a hallmark of your leadership.

It is all very much contextual as to what is and isn’t valuable and sacrificial when it comes to the actions we consider altruistic.

What is good for the team is good for us as individuals. Alone, we may survive, but as a unit, we survive and lessen the effort on us all through cooperation.

Leadership implies that we have something that others don’t have. We can use it for good. Or we can use it to our own advantage. And in that, it requires a choice.

We talk about the “supreme sacrifice” and wear shirts that say, “We fight what you fear.” We tell people that our bond is based on “brotherhood’. These are all words that suggest a higher calling.

Deep down inside, we might say to ourselves, “That could never happen here.” Or we feel it coming up and we suppress it, because we know, if we were ever to actually verbalize that, it WOULD happen.

Our life on this earth is dependent upon a chain of others, and we depend on each element of that chain.