Contributing to Humanity as a Way of Being
Reflections from an EBBF learning dialogue with Mika Korhonen
You can find here the next ebbf learning dialogue experience created for your learning and exploration: https://www.ebbf.org/events
What does it mean to contribute to humanity — not as a slogan, not as a KPI, not as a heroic ambition — but as a way of being?
This was the quiet, persistent question at the heart of a recent EBBF learning dialogue led by long-time board member Mika Korhonen. It was not framed as a call to “change the world,” nor as a strategy for maximizing impact. Instead, it unfolded as something more demanding and more liberating: an invitation to rethink the very game we believe we are playing.
From Strawberry Fields to Systems Thinking
Mika describes himself as “a child of EBBF.” He joined the community more than twenty years ago, coming from what he calls “the strawberry fields” — a life far removed from global dialogues on ethics, leadership, and systems change. Looking back, he says with disarming honesty that his younger self would not have recognized the person he is today.
This transformation did not come through a single insight or decision. It came through lived experience — through trial and error, through applying principles too literally and getting fired, through observing people whose lives were organized around something fundamentally different from success or status.
For years, Mika worked in the corporate world, raising children, learning, serving where he could. Yet a question kept returning: How can my work be more meaningful? How can it contribute to something lasting?
The surprising realization was not that he needed more impact, but that he was seeking something else entirely.
Changing the Game We Think We’re Playing
To explain the shift, Mika offers a simple but powerful metaphor: Monopoly.
In the version most of us know, the goal is to win by accumulating property, extracting rent, and eventually pushing everyone else off the board. Harshness and domination are rewarded; collaboration is naïve.
But what if the purpose of the game were different?
What if success meant keeping everyone playing as long as possible — and creating as much shared value on the board as we could?
Suddenly, every move would change. Strategy, relationships, even the meaning of “winning” would be transformed.
For Mika, contributing to humanity meant realizing that he no longer wanted to play the old game. And leaving it required letting go of some powerful illusions: career as identity, CV as worth, income as safety, ego as motivation. This was not an act of heroism — it was a gradual, often uncomfortable process that took decades.
There was no shortcut.
Becoming, Not Achieving
One of the most striking insights from the dialogue was Mika’s insistence that this shift cannot be taught — it must be lived.
“How does becoming happen?” he asked. “How does one become a genuinely good person?”
There was no formula offered, no checklist of virtues. Instead, participants reflected on daily practice: choosing again and again to orient away from ego and toward community; accepting that failure and imperfection are part of the journey; recognizing that growth unfolds over a lifetime.
Service, in this sense, is not an activity we add to our lives. It becomes the organizing principle of everything we do. Work becomes a way to uplift others. Leadership becomes an act of care. Progress is measured not only by results, but by trust, hope, and human development.
The Danger of Burnout — and the Wisdom of Limits
Several voices in the dialogue named a tension that ethical leaders know well: the fine line between service and self-erasure.
History offers us powerful examples of self-sacrifice — figures like Gandhi, Mandela, or ‘Abdu’l-Bahá. But most people are not called to live at that scale. Many who try to do too much, too alone, too relentlessly end up exhausted, disillusioned, or burned out.
To contribute to humanity sustainably requires discernment and boundaries. It means learning when to say no, when to rest, and when to accept that we cannot meet every need. Goodness that destroys the person offering it cannot be the goal.
Service Begins Close — and Small
Again and again, the conversation returned to a deceptively simple insight: service begins with those closest to us, and it often looks ordinary.
Helping someone navigate technology. Listening without rushing. Saying yes when someone asks, “Can I talk to you?” Offering time — the most precious resource of all.
One participant shared how a brief conversation years earlier had unknowingly changed someone’s life. Another described how helping an elderly woman reach a bottle on a supermarket shelf made her, briefly, a superhero.
These moments rarely feel significant at the time. Yet they ripple outward in ways we may never see.
Community Before Contribution
A recurring theme was the necessity of community. In an individualistic culture that glorifies heroic leadership, EBBF offers a different pattern: find community first, then serve together.
Service rooted in relationship is more joyful, more sustaining, and more humble. It reminds us that we are not meant to carry the weight of the world alone — and that our contribution is always partial, always interdependent.
One participant described service as “tuning into the field” — paying attention to the cracks, contradictions, and unmet needs in the environments we inhabit, whether a university, a workplace, or a neighborhood. Contribution emerges not from grand plans, but from presence.
Lowering the Basket
Perhaps the most moving image shared by Mika was a personal one.
He spoke of playing basketball with his children as they grew, gradually raising the hoop over the years. The marks of those adjustments are still visible on the wall. “I stayed the same height,” he said. “They grew.”
For Mika, this became a metaphor for mentorship and service. True teachers and companions do not elevate themselves; they lower the basket so others can play. They meet people where they are, without judgment or condescension.
This, he said, is one of the greatest gifts he has received from the EBBF community.
Love, Practiced Daily
As the dialogue drew to a close, one word surfaced again and again: love.
Not sentimentality, but love as action. Love as attention. Love as responsibility.
One participant offered a simple acronym:
- L: Look inside yourself for your strengths
- O: Observe where those strengths are needed
- V: Visualize a slightly better world because of their use
- E: Engage — simply begin
Another reminded the group that we are always being observed, often unknowingly. Our words, our presence, our way of being can shape lives in ways we may never fully understand.
A Quiet Invitation
To contribute to humanity, then, is not to seek importance. It is to live attentively. To clarify one’s values. To reflect daily. To act with care. To stay human in inhuman systems. To choose, again and again, to play a different game.
It is not abstract. It is not heroic. It is not finished.
It is a way of being — practiced in community, sustained over time, and offered with humility.
And perhaps that is enough.
“… is it not the object of every Revelation to effect a transformation in the whole character of mankind, a transformation that shall manifest itself, both outwardly and inwardly, that shall affect both its inner life and external conditions?”
(Bahá’u’lláh, The Kitáb-i-Íqán)
About Mika Korhonen
Mika Korhonen is a creator of conversations and concepts that help people and organizations reimagine growth, purpose, and impact. His work focuses on transforming how we understand human development — from individual achievement toward collective development. Mika helps communities discover new ways to work, learn, and be together so that everyday action becomes an expression of service to each other, to their surroundings and eventually to humanity.
