It’s easy to be good. Why is this a secret?
Being good to people who are good to you is not being good; it’s just being nice. Being good to people who are nice to you is also not being good; it’s just being fair.
Being good means trying to do right by people who may not deserve it, or may not even be able to appreciate it. It means taking pains to help someone, even if they don’t explicitly thank you for it. When most people think of “being good,” they think of helping the helpless, but the real test of goodness is when the person you’re helping could easily get along without your help, and might even resent your interference.
Most people have never actually tried to be good. They’ve only tried to be nice or fair. And so when someone asks them for help that goes beyond what is nice or fair, they get upset and feel put upon. They think: “This isn’t my problem.” But you can’t know whether something’s your problem unless you try to solve it.
You can always tell the difference between someone who has really tried to be good and someone who has only pretended, because the first person will have a kind of glow: an inner glow of satisfaction
It’s easy to be good because no one is trying to stop you. If someone were, it would be hard.
People who try to make other people good tend to do so because they themselves want to be bossed around. People who think other people are bad tend to think this because they want the privilege of condemning others. People who object to other people having rights tend to do so because they want those rights for themselves.
And all these people are wrong, because what you really need in order to be good is an absence of obstacles.
In a recent interview, Peter Thiel said something that caught my attention:
The hard thing is to be good, not to be great.
I’d never thought of it that way before. I agree with him. It’s easy to be great. Just do what other people are doing and put in 110%. But it’s easy to be good, too. Just do what other people aren’t doing and put in 10%.
A business has two kinds of competition: direct and indirect. Direct competition is the kind everybody focuses on, because it’s obvious: you’re either for Nike or against Nike, for Starbucks or against Starbucks. Indirect competition is harder to see: you’re either for coffee or against coffee, for sneakers or against sneakers.
Most startups compete directly with a few similar companies. But they also compete indirectly with whatever else people spend time and money on: parties, hobbies, TV shows, video games, sports–or working at Microsoft. And if you can make something that competes with any of those things–something that the users care about more–you’ve got yourself a startup.
The danger of the past was that men became slaves. The danger of the future is that men may become robots.
-Erich Fromm, The Sane Society
I have a simple formula for getting rich: Create value, capture value. If you can create something people want, you can get rich. That’s how Microsoft and WalMart got rich. And once you have wealth, it’s easy to be good.
The problem with the traditional view of goodness is that it focuses too much on doing good deeds instead of making good things. You don’t need to be good to give away money; if you’re smart enough to get rich, you’re smart enough to find a way to do it that doesn’t require personal virtue. When Bill Gates gives money to charity, he’s not being virtuous; he’s just doing what’s necessary to keep from going to hell when he dies.
What we need is a new view of goodness which focuses on creating value for others instead of just avoiding harm or giving charity. We need a philosophy that makes it moral for entrepreneurs to get rich by creating products people love and hiring people who love their jobs– so they can afford more charity and compassionate leave time.
The best way to do good is to act. It’s sometimes hard to know what the best thing to do is, but even if you end up doing something modestly good, you will have done more good than if you had spent that time “thinking about” or “researching” what the best thing to do is.
There are a few things that stop people from acting:
•They think they can’t make a difference.
•They think they don’t have time.
•They think they don’t have money.
•They have no idea where they should start.
A recent New Yorker cartoon showed two dogs at a computer. One of them is saying to the other: “On the Internet, nobody knows you’re a dog.”
The implication is that if you are communicating by text only–not face to face–you can misrepresent yourself in whatever way you want. You can pretend to be someone else, or even pretend to be a dog.
But that’s not true. On the Internet, everybody knows you’re a dog. Even if you pretend to be a cat, everyone will know you’re really a dog. The reason is simple: there are so many ways for people to find out whether what you say is true or not.
The Internet makes it easy for people to fact-check each other. There are search engines, so if something puzzles you, it’s easy to look up an answer online and see what others have discovered about it. And there are newsgroups and blogs and wikis and chat rooms and email lists and lots of other places where people who care about the same things can get together and discuss them in detail. So if someone lies, they will know pretty quickly (thanks to Google), and the whole community will know pretty quickly (thanks to the social software).
The net result is that on
