Pay It Forward

Over the Christmas break, tv plays a hundred and one different, amazing movies. My family, luckily, has the technology to record all of these movies. And do you think we watch them straight away? Of course not! No, we always find something new to watch live…

Anyway, the point is, January is a busy month of catching up on series finales and movies. And one of the movies we watched was called Pay It Forward, about a kid who was told to change the world in his social studies class. This is what he came up with:

So, you start off with just one person (say it’s me). I do a good deed for three different people, asking for nothing in return except that they ‘pay it forward’. So it’s up to each of these three people to do something kind to another three people each, which gets us up to nine helped people. Then they help three each, then they help three each, and so on and so on. In the movie, the kid said it had to be a big deed – for example, one guy had a car that broke down, so someone else gave him his brand new Lamborghini. In my opinion, I don’t think it needs to be something that huge. Sometimes, a tiny thing can change someone’s life.

Although I wasn’t blown away by the movie, I did fall in love with this idea. To change someone’s life, I only need to take ten minutes out of my day. And I know it’ll be passed on, growing and growing, and helping so many people. It’s amazing to think what just a tiny little action can do for someone. Maybe it won’t affect me, but if it all goes how it’s supposed to, it will affect so many other people in such a positive way. Of course, I do help other people. I’m there for my friends, I’m the kind of person that will pick up what a stranger drops, or give them a little bit of change to catch a bus. But in the long run, that only helps a person for two minutes. I want to do more than that.

So, I want to do something big. Not something huge, but something that’ll really make an impact. The kind of thing that will make another person look back on me, and feel thankful that I was there to help. And more importantly, the kind of thing that makes a person want to pay it forward. I challenge all of you to do the same – it’s not a big thing to you, but together, we could make a really big impact on the world