8: Ask Simple Questions

7/2/17

In my last letter to you, I tried to persuade you and share my honest reflections about reading and how to really read. And I stand by that. Books are a wonderful way to develop, and satiate for that matter, curiosity, which is the fist pillar of choosing goodness.

But there is so much more out there to explore than just the things you find in books, like other people. People and their meditations about their experiences are also rich sources of the stuff that cultivates curiosity. A lot of wonderful thoughts, stories, and ideas never make it into books. These thoughts remain exactly that - thoughts - until they are discussed in open air. This, to me, is what’s special about human conversation, it unless potent thoughts from other people’s minds and allows those thoughts, through conversation, to turn into wisdom that can be shared with others.

But this reveals a quandary - how does one unleash the important but frozen wisdom that resides in the minds of others? The answer is simple: ask questions. However simple that may seem, there are many topics to consider about questions: how to ask them, what should you ask about, how do you actually listen? Let’s discuss questions, explore why questions are critical to cultivating curiosity, and how to actually ask them well.

First and foremost, ask lots of questions. Quantity drives quality. The more sincere questions you ask, the better you will become at asking them. The worst kind of question is one never asked.

When you are first learning something new, your questions will be novice and unsophisticated, you will know this very acutely and you may feel shy about asking a question you have. But all that doesn’t matter. If you sincerely want to know, ask the question. Ask it. And iN promos, as you ask more questions, the easier it gets and the more fruitful they are. Like most things, asking questions takes practice. The best way to get better is to just ask more questions. At the beginning of learning something new, just start.

(12/31/19: When I first drafted this letter to you in 2017, this is what I wrote: “Once you start, however, you might ask good questions if you’re going through the trouble to ask them in the first place. The best advice I can probably give you is to ask, “why?”. There are may interrogative words, of course: who, what, where, when, how. But “why is the question you really need to get to if you want to dig into an idea.”.

But in retrospect, even though asking “why” is really important, I don’t think it’s the best advice I can give you. I’m going to revise what I wrote from this point and let you know when I resume drafting from the original text.)

If you’re going through the trouble to ask questions in the first place, however, you might as well ask good ones. The best advice I can probably give you is three-fold: be simple, sincere, and follow-up.

I took a great class in business school, in 2015 during my last semester, with Bob Quinn. The course, called Transformational Leadership, changed my life. The basis for the class were two of Professor Quinn’s books - Lift and Deep Change.

(The framework in Lift is brilliant and I think of it all the time. Any time you're doing something, in particular something new, ask yourself the four Lift questions. The first, and most important, is “what result are we trying to create?”. When asking that question and the three others, you become focused, centered, grounded, and motivated. It’s incredibly powerful. You must read it.)

In the class, we had to put the concepts of Lift into practice. I asked myself the four Lift questions about how I use facebook. I came up with an idea to ask a sincere, reflective question every day on facebook. I no longer ask a question every day, but I do it several times a week, still.

Asking these questions has helped me to learn greatly about the hopes, dreams, and beliefs, of others - and myself. It would not be a stretch to say that I better understand the human condition, now. Beyond that however, I probably have nearly 1,000 reps asking questions. That’s rich data that’s helped me to understand how to ask a good question.

Simply put, the best questions are simple. That means they are clear, written in plain english, and succinct. Every word has a purpose. There is no fluff. A good rule of thumb is to be able to ask a question in one breath in one short sentence. Ask questions in this way makes them easier to answer. Other people appreciate simple questions and in my experience answer them with greater energy, detail, and honesty.

(My college friend, Ms. Lainie, received some good advice from her Mom, which I always thought was smart and charming. She shared it with me once. If you really want (someone) to understand what they are supposed to do, you have to be able to write your direction on one side of one post-it note. If not, it’s too complicated. I always thought that was fantastic advice. She shared it in the context of a wife giving her husband a task to do, but I think it applies to questions too.)

And, if you hold yourself to the standard of asking a simple question, and practice doing so, you start to get really choosy about words and about framing. If a question is short, every individual word matters more and is more likely to reframe the word’s meaning. Choosing words carefully makes your question more specific, which again, makes the answers you receive on them richer and more relevant.

Moral of the story: the simpler the question the better.

In asking these hundreds and thousands of question on facebook, I’ve also realized that that I get better, clearer, and more interesting responses when I ask a question sincerely. By that I mean, when I ask questions that I really want to know the answer to. Or, a question that I don’t already know the answer to, and that I’m genuinely curious about.

I don’t have data and studies to back this up, but other people don’t trust you when they think you don’t really care about the answer to a question or if you’re trying to brag or if you’re trying to trap them with their answers. And they can tell. It’s hard to fake sincerity over the long run. People just have a feel for it, I think.

It sounds silly, but lots of people ask questions that they either already know, or don’t really want to know the answers to. For us then, the advice is simple. If you really want to know the answer to a question, ask it. If you don’t, don’t.

This also sounds silly, but another way to really ask a good question is to follow it up with another question. And another question. And maybe a few more questions. Certainly, asking bogus questions is worthless, but I’ve found that treasure is normally not buried six inches below the surface. To really learn something from someone, you have to dig deep. Which again is aided and better guided when your questions are simple and are asked with sincere curiosity.

In my experience, a well crafted question sincerely asked begets learning. And learning begets curiosity, which begets even more well crafted, sincerely asked questions. The punchline is this: If you ask good questions, it starts a virtuous cycle for learning and curiosity.

So to summarize briefly, be simple, be sincere, follow-up. If you do these, you’ll probably be asking questions which help you grow your curiosity and your wisdom.

(This is where I am resuming to the drafted text of my original letter from 2017. But before I do that, let me share a few other simple questions that I find are useful in many situations. There’s “what result are we trying to create?” and “why?” which I mentioned before, but merit repeating. Also: “what’s that?”, “how does that work?”, “why do we do it this way?”, “who is this for?”, “what do you think?”, and “what happened, exactly?", “how do you feel about this?”, and “why does this matter to you?”. There are certainly more questions simple questions you can add to repertoire, but these are a few of mine that are tried and true.)

Thus far, we’ve covered a few ideas: ask lots of questions, and, if you’re going through the trouble of asking questions you might as well ask good ones. Do do that, try to be simple, sincere, and follow-up. But these suggestions give the incomplete and inaccurate impression that questions should predominately asked about others and the world external to your own mind. That’s precisely the opposite of what I have found to be true about questions, especially as it relates to the enterprise of goodness.

If you are committed to the path of choosing goodness, and conducting your life in a way that reflects goodness, you must evaluate whether your thoughts and actions are good. In addition to asking questions of others, it is essential that you ask questions of yourself. In other words you must reflect.

Questioning yourself is not a trivial activity. Even if you have managed to muster the humility to acknowledge the fallibility of your of your own character and question it, you must then do something even harder - be honest answering your own questions. (We will get to discussion of humility and honesty soon, and throughout. They are running themes throughout this inquiry of hours because they are a true test of whether you are motivated to endure the lifelong struggle of developing your character strongly enough to choose goodness.)

But questions of yourself, when sincerely asked, are extremely good tools to determine what goodness is and whether it is reflecting in you. Asking these questions of yourself will help you understand what a life committed to consistently choosing goodness looks like. (This sounds lofty and abstract, but in practice it’s not. Two simple questions you can start with are, “what does a good person think and do?”, and, “am I a good person?”. I originally had a whole sections about the dark side of questions, but it didn’t fit with the broader argument I was making here. It was extraneous to this letter, but still relevant. Questions, when wielded irresponsibly can be an instrument of power and control. Leading questions help you to hear the answer you want to hear, instead of the truth. Questions can be asked in a way that raises false hearsay or with the intent to shame and bully others instead of pursuing the truth. Questions are a powerful construct, it is up to you to use them to advance goodness instead of power and control.)

Doing this takes effort and practice. Along th way, I’ve learned to reflect and am much better now for it. For me, it started because of a lucky break in school. I was always part of student council and student groups, and because of my involved I was afforded the opportunity attend conferences and camps that were designed to “develop leadership” in youth. Student Council Camp probably changed the course of my life because the adults there made reflection a foundational part of the curriculum. We would have deeply compelling activities, but the real learning occurred during the debriefs that occurred after the activity.

The adult counselors would push us to articulate our thoughts and feelings by asking deeply introspective questions about things like identity, integrity, justice, and conflict. They would dig and dig and then ask why again. I learned to reflect at summer camp, and that’s one of the luckiest breaks I’ve ever had.

I have tremendous gratitude for the student council advisers and camp counselors I had in high school because they taught me to reflect on my actions and thoughts, and challenged me to be honest with myself about whether I was a good person with true character. It is now my responsibility to help you. (Ask your mother about Kairos, i think you’ll find that it’s an experience that affected her in a similar way).

No matter what, when it comes to reflection, you just have to start somewhere. I have always liked to reflect through writing. When I was about 12 or 13, I bought a notebook and called it the “Question Book". I filled up the first two pages with questions I wanted to think about and started to answer them one by one.

Throughout the years I’ve kept writing (obviously), which may or may not be suitable for you, but it has been a wonderful reflection mechanism for me.

Later in life, your mom and I started to talk and reflect together once we started dating, very early in our relationship. We’d take time to do a “temperature check” every week on Sundays, taking turns answering the same five questions: appreciations, issues, requests for change, what we’re thinking about outside of our relationship, and family logistics. (Your mother and I continue this to this day, and we have missed less than 4-5 weeks in our whole time together - which is over 6 years at the time I’m writing this. Here’s more detail on our weekly “temperature check.”)

I am not trying to prescribe a reflection mechanism for you, I merely offer you suggestions to help you find something that works well for you. But what I would urge you to understand, however, is that you will never reflect if you do not create time and space for it. You have to create protected time, with a clear mind, to slow down and step away from the challenges of day to day life. You might even need a dedicated, regular physical space for reflection, too, whether it’s a notebook, a place in the house, or a hideaway around the City or in nature.

But perhaps the most difficult space to come by is the space in your heart. Your whole life, and certainly when you first open your heart, humbly, to reflect, it will be uncomfortable. It will be uncomfortable to ask yourself tough questions, because you may not like what you see after you start asking yourself those questions. (I was having drinks with Uncle B and his friend Zack over Thanksgiving this past year. Zack made this point more eloquently than me, here’s a post summarizing what happened.)

We, because we are mortal men, do not have a perfect ability to choose goodness over power. Some of what we are feels ugly, because, to be honest, some of what we are is ugly. You have to work hard to create the space in your heart to accept the truth, forgive yourself for what’s ugly, and choose to slowly evolve into something different and good. Without this space in your heart, it will be very difficult to reflect on difficult but exceedingly important questions.

The toughest questions you can ask yourself, like: why am I here, what matters to me, what is good, am I good, why have I been put on this Earth, and others - are the most critical to ask if you want to discover what goodness is and cultivate a capability within yourself to choose it. All these questions are ones that you’ll want to avoid talking about, even with people you love, trust, and respect. You’ll probably think that those questions are too big, and too much of a burden to ask others.

But you must. You must not shy away from these questions simply because they are hard.

I’ve found in my short time on Earth that others loved to be asked tough questions when they are asked sincerely and simply. If you don’t, you may go damn near your whole life without asking them, and have decades of regret.

Your Dada and I had a conversation about what he liked, wanted, and cared about. I remember exactly where we were standing in the kitchen, around the island at Dado’s house. It was in the evening, because it was dark. Your Dada was in his early sixties, I think.

He seemed to have a powerful revelation, even though I was just talking with him asking him sincere, simple questions. He told me that nobody had ever asked him questions like that before and that he feared it was too late for him to change anything about his life, his health, and his habits. Part of me, even though I know his death wasn’t my fault, wonders if he would still be here if I, or anyone else, asked him those questions of heart earlier in his life. Would he be more at peace? Would he be less stressed? Would he have taken better care of his health?

I will never know, and despite my guilt I am relieved that I was able to talk about such things with my father and that he was able to open his heart, even if for a moment, to his son.

I hope, my son, that you are able to open your heart - with and without my help - so that we may reflect on questions of the heart together, someday, too. It will be difficult, but I have no doubt in my mind or my heart that you find it to be well worth the challenge.

Love,
Your Papa

7: Really Read

5/28/17

Let me be forthcoming because I have a very strong bias when it comes to reading.

I love reading and so does your mother.

When we first moved into this house, during the first week we asked each other what our favorite room was. We both, very quickly, said the library. You’re being born into a family of bookworms.

There are so many reasons to love reading. First, it’s so captivating; there are so many great stories that take you all across the world, universe, and fantasy worlds. They take you into the most joyous moments of a character’s life, or, let you feel the terrible feelings safely, before you live them yourself. Books are an enchanted place.

Reading is fun, an emotional release, and a vacation, or a spaceship, or a time machine. The best books are masterpieces of art. Reading a good book, and I mean a good book, across any genre, is a joy.

And to top off all of that, I have so many wonderful memories because of books and reading. Your Dada and Dadi read with me and would take me to the library, all the time, wherever we lived. They would read to me and we would read together. There are cassette tapes (ancient technology, I know) of us reading together, which I cherish. I’ve received so many books as gifts, which were shared with so much love, likes once from your mom, aunts, and uncles.

And the best discussions I’ve had come from reading books. In college, high school, adulthood. Books have made my life so much richer.

Beyond these wonderful, beautiful things about books, there are many practical benefits, especially as it relates to becoming curious and becoming good. But before I go into nuances, be sure that the joy or reading itself would be enough to justify spending time with a good book. Reading is necessary and beneficial for other reasons, but reading needs no practical purpose to justify it. More than anything, read because it is beautiful.

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Reading - and by that I mean not just casually reading, but really reading - is absolutely essential for developing curiosity and in turn goodness. It is a potent way to do two extremely important things: answering unresolved questions and wonderings that you have, and, nurturing the inspiration for new questions that lead you to explore and discover. Reading a good book or essay is to digest a potent and concentrated morsel of insight, precisely because someone had to write it. Writing is a process that takes ideas and strips them of their excess. A well written book has nothing but truth left on the page.

Writing is much like making a sauce in that sense. The sauce has many delicious ingredients - water, wine, cream, parsley, garlic, or others, depending on the sauce. But in the process of making a sauce, the chef must take great care to cook it so that the excess liquid is evaporated away and the sauce thickens. What remains is more concentrated, flavorful, and with a better texture.

Writing does the same for ideas and stories, at least when the writing is done well. A good writer, evaporates all the unnecessary “water” leaving only the parts of an idea that are aromatic, flavorful, and potent for the mind. Consequently, reading good writing is an extremely efficient medium for cultivating curiosity - the process of writing leaves a good book with only the most valuable, nutritious, and delicious parts of an idea.

Writing then, is a great labor in service to you, the reader, because it evaporates away all the unnecessary elements. But as a reader, you still have a tremendous labor of your own.

Reading, when done well, is hard work. There’s a difference between reading and really reading. Here’s more of what I mean by that.

The first litmus test between reading and really reading is that of purpose - are you reading for comprehension, reading for the pages, or reading to learn?

Reading for comprehension isn’t a terrible reason to read. Comprehension implies that you are simply reading to understand and remember what the author is saying You’re reading to understand the basic who, what where, when, and why. When you read this way, you’re not reading for deeper thought or a nuanced understanding of the idea or story. In these circumstances, reading for comprehension, you just want to put some information into your head and be able to recall it coherently.

Reading for the pages, on the other hand, is something to avoid. It’s not worth your time, and if you’re reading for the pages it probably means you are cutting corners, or worse, reading to feign intelligence (which at it’s root, is a power-seeking behavior).

What I mean by “reading for the pages” is that you are reading to finish the book or essay as fast as possible and “get it done.” The goal of reading for the pages, rather than learning or even comprehension - at least for me, when I’ve done it - is less about gaining something from the text, but being able to signal to other people that I’ve read it.

But what is the point of doing that? If I were to steal someone’s respect or recognition, why do that by reading for the pages? Reading, even if done for the pages, still takes lots of time. Why not just read a summary of the book if I were to do that? Why not just feign the appearance of reading a book? (The best reason I can think of (for reading a summary or feigning appearance of reading a book) is because the feigner knows reading a book and sort of reading a book aren’t the same thing. They are socially, and perhaps morally, different enterprises. Conflating the two feels deceitful not only to others, but to yourself. Which, to me, is the most dangerous kind of deceit.)

Reading to learn, however, is an entirely different enterprise. The intended outcome when you read to learn, is not just literally understanding what the author is saying. Rather, the intended outcome is changing your self in some way, whether that is deepening your understanding of an idea, seeing the world in a new way, or changing your mind about something. If something about you, however is small, is not changed, you have not learned.

In that way, reading to learn is absolutely exhausting. Reading to learn (the type of reading I mean when I say really reading) takes tremendous focus. You must be listening to the author and providing them your undivided attention. That means eliminating all distractions, and ignoring the concerns of your day-to-day life for awhile. When you are really reading, the book must be your only concern because we mortal men tend not to be good at multitasking. The world is a distracting place, so creating the focus required to really read is really hard.

When reading to learn, it is also best, in my experience, to read slowly (your mother is good at this, if you watch her read something you can tell by the way she moves her eyes that she is methodical and absolutely incisive of what she’s reading). Reading slowly allows you to not only absorb and comprehend what the author is saying, but question it and even explore it through a daydream. When reading slowly, you create the opportunity to reflect on what you are reading and ask questions like:

• Why?

• Does that seem believable?

• Why would the author mention that?

• What is the author not saying?

• How does this relate to the overall thesis of the book?

• Why did the author use this particular word?

• How is the author biased?

• What works has the author built upon?

• How could I build on this idea?

• How does this idea play out in real life?

• How does what the author is saying affect my life?

You cannot even ask these important questions (they are important questions because these will not only help you to understand but to change) let alone reflect on them if you do not go slow.

(Which means you should slow down reading this. Not to imply that this is a good book! You’re the judge of that).

Moreover, really good books that are deep with emotion or rich with ideas and provocative arguments aren’t always easy to read. They take time. It’s not only okay but probably should be expected that you have to read passages over and over again (or the whole book, there are only a few titles that I’ve re-read - Profiles in Courage, the Baghavad Gita, and maybe East of Eden are the only three I can think of). Sometimes, I’ll read a challenging section two or three times, and if I’m using that time to go deep with it, it’s well worth the trouble.

This perhaps isn’t obvious, but what you read matters a lot. Like, a whole damn lot. As I’ve learned working on technology and data projects, “garbage in, garbage out.” What you put into your mind will affect what comes out of it. But I’m not suggesting that you only read dense, esoteric, nerdy books that are from a limited amount of “appropriate” subjects. On the contrary, I think you should read whatever you like (and I highly suggest you mix fiction and non-fiction. I spent many years of my life avoiding fiction, and it’s wonderful and transformative to read both) and mix subjects and genres between ones that you are already interested in and ones that expand your horizons. There are plenty of wonderful and thoughtful books that are on seemingly impractical topics.

As an example, I’m currently pawing through a collection of short stories gifted to me by Miss Emily, a friend of mine from high school. She gave it to me years ago. It’s been sitting on my shelf for years and I finally picked it up. Despite being Russian literature from the 1800s, it has been a remarkably illuminating and relevant read, with prose that in some moments simply leaves me arrested and feeling whimsical at the same time

The point is, there are amazing books on many different topics and from many different genres, and from the authors that you wouldn’t expect.

But there are also terrible books. And by terrible I mean books that it’s plain to see that the author did not do the hard work of developing an original, valuable, thought. Or terrible meaning the author hasn’t put in the work to produce clear, deliberate, enchanting prose.

To me, terrible is less about topic and more about quality and honesty. Going back to the example of making a sauce, I’m talking about a careless cook, not a recipe with ingredients I don’t happen to fancy. (That said, there are books that are well written but are intellectually dishonest, biased, or tell what you what you already believe solely for commercial purposes. These are terrible and also dangerous, because they help you to learn something that is untrue or immoral).

For many years, I made the mistake of reading narrowly selected topics. This was in two ways. I would read books about the same topics, usually about business or government. Or, I might read books I was more interested in telling people I was reading, rather than what I was actually interested in reading (these were usually about business and government, too). To me this is just another form of reading for the pages, because the books I chose in both of these scenarios is driven by the expectations of others, rather than my own desires.

This seems bizarre to say, but I mean it sincerely: do not fear reading widely about a wide set of topics. If you read a quality book, something about it will stay with you and enrich your life and the lives of others around you, regardless of the topic. More often than not, reading across disciplines will give you a mental model that helps you make sense of a difficult idea in your primary area of interest. (I’ve mentioned a lot about intellectual diversity, there’s no better person to share why diversity matters than Scott Page, one of the professors I was really lucky to have during my undergraduate studies. We have a few of the books he’s written on our bookshelves at home.)

For example, your Aunt Alyssa gave me a book last Christmas which uses computer science concepts to inform how humans make decisions. It was brilliant and what I’ve read has helped me make sense of how we organize the cookware in our kitchen and how to conduct a search to fill a job at work. (The idea of a cache, was the concept helpful in the kitchen - stuff we don’t use often should go in the cupboard instead of on the counter. There’s also an algorithm for optimal stopping that’s useful to keep in mind when filling a position. The book, Algorithms to Live By is on our bookshelf, too).

You’ll probably notice that I’ve almost exclusively told you about reading books, as opposed to reading blogs, newspapers, magazines, or anything else. I’ve actually started to shy away from those except for blogs, local newspapers, and the Economist.(I think blogs are great because they occupy niches and go deep on a topic rather than appeal to a mass audience. I have cycled through many authors and subjects over the years, like interstellar travel, data visualization, marketing, strategy, personal memories grief, and others. I like the Economist because it has a very unique perspective - it’s globally-focused, comes out weekly so it’s not chasing stories frivolously, and it’s hilariously cheeky. Most daily publications I’ve found, mix in a lot of fluff stories to get clicks and have bombastic headlines to get attention. The Economist avoids this). There’s a simple reason for this emphasis on books, I’ve found that the quality of a piece of writing is inversely proportional to how hard it is to write and how long it takes to write. In that way, daily publications are usually rather low-quality - if the publication is covering yesterday’s news, the writer quite literally can only put a few hours work into writing.

There are certainly exceptions with some excellent blogs, newspapers, and podcasts, but I’ve come to generally prefer books. When you finish a really rich, challenging book, it feels like you’ve done something special, too.

But let me return to the central question, as we must always do. What does this all have to do with curiosity and choosing goodness?

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When I was growing up, personal computing was emerging, as was the internet. The world, even now, is continuing to go digital. One of the antecedents of this idea became to think of the mind as a computer and to describe the functions of the brain as functions of a computer’s component parts.

But, in my time, I’ve come to see the brain as much more than just a biological information processing machine. (The scientific consensus seems to be that we know very little about the brain, consciousness, and the mind. Which will probably change a lot during your lifetime. That’s very exciting). The mind, the abstract thing that creates new ideas and is susceptible to inspiration and wonder, is something that is not fixed or static. It evolves itself. The mind is not a machine, it grows.

Curiosity is that voracious appetite for a mind to grow and evolve itself. Curiosity can and must be nurtured, lest it stop. Without curiosity, the mind becomes more and more like a machine - fixed and non evolving. In that way, curiosity is something foundational to keeping us human - it inoculates the mind from becoming stiff and like a machine.

Really reading is a terrific way to nourish curiosity because of how adventurous an activity it is. When you take a good book and really read it, it forces you to pay attention and consider new possibilities. Really reading forces your mind to work in ways that it hasn’t before and stay flexible. Really reading does such more than simply adding information to your memory bank, it keeps your mind from becoming a memory bank.

Really reading is also terrific for cultivating curiosity because of how much ground you can cover in a book - books transcend time, space, and even reality in a relatively short amount of time. Books don’t replace real-life experiences (and we’ll get to why later, real-life experiences are foundational to courage) but in books you can try something out. Reading a book can be like an experiment or an adventure. By reading, you can expose yourself to different circumstances and ideas, which allows your mind to consider many different questions and perspectives.

That negotiation of ideas, emotions, information, and perspectives seemingly magically cultivates a voracious appetite for you and your mind to grow. Reading a book book leaves you wanting more, which leads to more reading, which leads to more learning, which leads to wanting more, and so on.

Perhaps this is a pessimistic view of the world, but in your day to day life, nobody will make you reflect about goodness or how to choose it consistently. The world, and in particular the country, you are being born into has a sophisticated structure of laws, institutions, and incentives - none of which specifically prioritize or reward goodness or good character. I don’t even suggest that this is always intentional or even undesirable - our institutions depend on being able to measure things for them to be managed, which is hard to do with goodness.

As I’ve told you before, it can take a lifetime to begin to grasp goodness and how to choose it consistently - if goodness is hard to even define, how can it be measured, managed, codified, prioritized, and incentivized? This again, is why I want to share these letters with you - and try to share in them some of the traits and tools I’ve found helpful, in hopes that they are helpful to you to figure out how to consistently choose goodness, over the course of your lifetime. But again, for good reason or not, despite being an unbelievably important topic, no person will compel you to reflect on goodness.

But books, my son, they will. Good books that you really read, are a wise, honest friend that pushes you to consider the most difficult questions that can be asked of human beings in this universe. Books can be fearless in ways that we mere mortals cannot, because they do not die, which allows their most important elements - their truths - to be timeless and immortal.

Plato, Steinbeck, Lahiri, Orwell, Aristotle, Drucker, Kennedy - these are men and women I’ve never met, that have pushed me to think about the world, about goodness, justice, courage, and my own identity and existence in profound ways. They are people, through their writing that have - with the greatest care and love - compelled me to endure interrogation of gravely important questions in a way that only compares to the people who love me most in the world.

In this way - because of their ability to make those who read them, and I mean really read them, consider the topics and questions that humans struggle to raise with each other - books are superhuman.

I’m sure I will tell you many times as you, and the rest of your siblings we pray we get to bring into this world, that some of the happiest memories of my life are times reading with your Dada & Dada. These memories, some of my earliest, are ones that I have thought of often when your Dada went ahead last year. I’ve been trying to hold onto them as long as I can.

So, I promise you my son, that I will try my hardest to help you love reading, just as your Dada and Dada did for me and your Mimi and Granddad did for your mother. I can’t wait to read with you. I feel like I’ve been waiting my whole life to do it.

But I want you to know that loving to really read is so much bigger than just you and me. Reading is more than getting good grades in school or entertainment. Once you really read a good book, it gives you another ally on your journey to choose goodness. And that’s what matters most of all.

Love,
Your Papa

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If you’re interested in reading more of the Choosing Goodness project, I’d love to send you a quick e-letter when I share additions. Please leave me your contact information and I’ll be sure to keep you posted.

To see all the posts in this series, click here.

6: Slow Down

May 27, 2017

The most important class I took in business school was not a traditional MBA course. The course was a practicum and had three components: trying to launch a business using the lean startup method, working with an executive coach, and working with Dr. Melissa Peet on exercises related to a field she’s pioneering called Generative Knowledge. All were really life-changing, but let me tell you a bit more about what Dr. Peet taught us.

To start off the class, we did a very simple exercise, which turned out to be incredibly insightful, despite its modesty. The exercise is in three parts, and all it requires is a large room. If you want, you can try it as we go.

First, walk around the room like you do when you’re in “problem solving mode.” Act as if you’re trying to fix something, or like when you’re working on a big, serous, urgent group project at school. Spend about a minute walking around in the problem solving mindset.

Now that you’ve done it, think about what it felt like. What did you notice about the room? How did your body feel? What were you thinking about?

Next, walk around the room for another minute or two and pretend you’re in “social mode”, as if you were relaxing, hanging out with friends, or just taking a walk for fun. Ask yourself the same questions - how did it feel?

Finally, for the last round, walk around the room like someone who is radically curious, like the most curious person you can be. And kiddo, really push yourself to be radically curious. After you’re done, ask yourself those same questions. What did you notice about the room, how did your body feel, what were you thinking about? But this time, add one more question: what was different about each round of the exercise.

You probably felt very differently at each stage of the exercise, both mentally and physically. One of the biggest changes you probably noticed between the three rounds was speed - of your walking, of your heart rate, and of your mind. When you walk around in problem solving mode, everything is fast. It’s the pace of “getting stuff done.” Which, by the way, is an expression I loathe, but that’s a story for another time.

When you’re in social mode, it’s not as fast. But it’s certainly fast compared to the mode of radical curiosity. When your headspace is not just curious, but radically curious, everything slows down. Radical curiously is incredibly intense, but slow.

The lesson is an obvious one, but still difficult to practice: to be curious we have to slow down. To learn, your mind, body, and heart need to be open and absorbent, and that requires slowing down. In the world you are being born into, son, slowing down is hard. It’s something you are never taught. In the world today, you will be trained, cajoled, and incentivized to do the opposite - the world will do everything it can to get you to go fast. But you don’t have to always acquiesce.

So many people I have met, that will have children in your peer group, are obsessed with “getting things done”, doing more with less, hustling, and the like. It’s practically a national obsession right now to want to maximize time & effort, doing more with less, or squeezing in as many bucket-list items, and experiences as you can.

Have caution my son, because it is a trap.

Don’t fall into this trap, and I will try to help show you how to avoid it. It was a trap I was in, after all, for probably the first 28 years of my life. If you do fall into this trap of busyness it will be difficult for you to develop radical curiosity, which will make it difficult - in turn - for you to be able to choose a life of goodness rather than power, for reasons that we discussed earlier.

I encourage you to do the opposite of be busy - practice slowing down. I’ve tried to do this a lot in my life and so has your mother. It’s hard, especially because we are both problem solvers (read: we are crazy people) and rather social. And I’m definitely not saying to leave problems unsolved or be antisocial, it is important to be in those modes during your day-to-day life. There is a time and a place to move fast.

The mistake I see a lot of people making, and that I’ve made a lot (and still do) in my own life is that they never stop or even slow down. As a result, because you will inherit at least some of our genes and habits from me, you will probably have a hard time slowing down too.

These are some of the techniques that I have tried, which I hope work for you. Remember son, slowing down is learned behavior. This is frustrating because it has to be learned and isn’t exactly natural. It is a blessing, however, that it can be learned.

Get Outside
The easiest way I know to slow down is to get outside. In the sun, in the rain, in the hot or cold - it doesn’t matter (but dress appropriately). Nature isn’t constrained by petty human concerns. Nature moves at its own pace. Take a walk outside for no reason other than to walk. Being in nature is incredible restorative, and fortunately incredibly slow.

I didn’t realize this in my adult life until the first camping trip with Uncle Jeff and Uncle Ellis a few months after I graduated college. We were in the high peaks region of the Adirondack Mountains, and I had no idea what I was doing. They were my guides.

There’s a moment I distinctly remember during that adventure, it was probably about 20-30 minutes into our hike and something happened that I had never experienced before - I couldn’t hear any cars. Until I was over 20 years old, I had never been far away from civilization to not hear cars or the traces of other people!

Even now, as I write this letter to you, sitting on the couch in the family room of our home, in one of the quietest negihrboods in the city, before 9am on the Saturday of a holiday weekend - your mom and Riley are both sleeping. But I still hear noises. The occasional car passing by, or the dull hum of the refrigerator or electtronics equipment that is always on. Almost anywhere you go on a day-to-day basis will have some noise produced by humans, especially when you’re inside. All those noises make it hard for me to break from being in problem solving mode or social mode.

Getting outside, whether it’s deep into the backcountry of a place relatively untouched by humans or a park in the middle of a city - like Belle Isle or Central Park in New York, or even just the sideway of our neighborhood on a sleepy Saturday morning - getting outside is one way you can slow down and reopen yourself to a mindset of curiosity.

Schedule Unscheduled Time
Before your mother and I were married, one of the challenges we had to overcome was that we burned ourselves out by over scheduling our lives. We rarely felt relaxed because we were always on the move. All our time was scheduled as “fast time” - where we were doing some sort of activity - dinner, socializing, volunteering, working, or something cut from that busy sort of cloth. Our lives were filled with time for which we couldn’t set the pace. What we tried first was saying we needed to schedule fewer things. And so we left our calendar open more.

That approach quickly failed because last minute plans come up, a lot, especially when you’re young. And when those plans sound fun, and you like who proposed them, and your calendar isn’t full, it’s easy to say yes. I’m that way, especially. Last minute plans are like potato chips to me - I can’t turn them down, even though I know they’ll make me feel sluggish the next day. Like potato chips, when a plan to socialize is in front of me, I can’t say no.

Seeing as how our “keep the calendar free” idea wasn’t really working, we tried the opposite. We started actively scheduling “slow time” instead of keeping the calendar free. Around the time we were engaged, we started calling this practice “Black-out Day.”

The idea was simple. We picked one night a week where scheduled time to have no other plans. We called it black-out day because we blacked out our calendar. Doing this made us much more likely to have slow time. It’s not a perfect solution, but it helped.

What’s important to remember about slow time, is that it’s not a time to “catch-up.” Don’t use it to catch up on work or catch up on e-mails, or “be productive.” Use it to rest and decompress - the time isn’t really worth it if you don’t actually slow down.

If you need to, do something that requires you to create something or express yourself. Write something. Bake a pie. Talk to your mother and me. Sing. All these things are great and force a slow tempo.

Take Real Vacations
If you read this while you’re still in middle or high school, you may think this is obvious, but it’s not. Taking a real vacation is not easy. Work and ambition get in the way.

When I was a management consultant, I had a surprising amount of vacation days, about 25 days in a year, I think. But I often wouldn’t use it. That’s step one. You have to prioritize vacation enough to actually take it.

When you are working a job, there will be times you think you can’t take a vacation. This probably means, however, that you’re caught in the trap of thinking your work is more important than your health, your life, and your family. Or, it means you haven’t prepared your team well enough to function without you.

When you are actually on vacation, you actually have to be there. As in, actually on vacation and actually not working. Leave your computer at home if you can. Don’t check your messages and communication tools. That is one of the reasons why I like to vacation in nature, in the middle of a National Park, it’s often impossible to be reached because there aren’t telecommunications signals available (at least not in the 2010s). And as I said previously, nature goes at its own pace, no matter what you do.

The most important aspect of taking a real vacation is freeing your mind from thinking about work. When your job is stressful (and all are in their own ways if you let them be, I suppose) you actually have to observe your own thoughts and let those thoughts leave your consciousness, so you can clear your mind for vacation. Remember, those vacation days are part of your employment contract, so use them. You’re giving money away if you don't.

In recent years, I’ve tried to apply this thinking to any day off, including weekends. Weekends, in a way, are two-day vacations that you get every week. It’s nice to treat them that way as much as you can.

When your mom and I look back at our childhoods, what we reminisce about and remember fondly are the vacations we took with our families. For your mom, it was trips like those she took to Myrtle Beach or Up North. For me it was going to India, Orlando, or New York. We both remember trips to Disney, which we will take you to, soon.

Those trips were the uninterrupted times we had with our families. Those are the times where relationships and bonds were formed - not the surface level ones, but the deep ones. And these memories, whether it’s 14-day vacations or 2-day ones that we get once a week are the ones that your mom and I can’t wait to have with you and the rest of our family and friends.

Love,
Your Papa

——— 

If you’re interested in reading more of the Choosing Goodness project, I’d love to send you a quick e-letter when I share additions. Please leave me your contact information and I’ll be sure to keep you posted.

To see all the posts in this series, click here.

5: Curiosity

May 7, 2017

This is my third attempt trying to share with you why I think curiousity matters so much for goodness (hopefully I’ll be persuasive and you’ll agree - and you’ll have more ideas to bring to the matter than your old pops does). But now that I’ve noticed the difficulty, it makes sense that I would have a hard time explaining why curiousity matters - I can’t remember a time when I wasn’t curious. It’s hard to explain curiosity because it is water to me.

When I learn something new, or an explore an idea by reading, or by asking someone some more expert than me a question, I get such a satisfying feeling. It even makes my skin tingle sometimes. In a way it’s a relief, like the feeling of icy cold water, the second it hits a summer’s parched tongue. It’s exciting like finding a secret passageway for the first time. It’s like finding a distant cairn on a difficult trail, signaling that we are one step closer at knowing the truth. It’s a feeling of connection to many millions of people, both alive and gone ahead, that learned what you learned and explored the idea you just explored.

But most of all, these days, learning something new makes me feel echoes of your Dada. Learning, to him, was such a delight. He insisted upon it. And he brought tremendous intensity to learning. In retrospect, learning is when he was freest, and most himself. He loved it.

That exhilaration for learning is something he passed to me, and I to you. Writing this letter to you about curiosity unexpectedly reminds me of his sincerity, warmth, and honesty. I miss him, and I hope sharing these thoughts on curiosity are something he would be proud of.

Learning is a special craft for your Granddad, too. When your mother and her siblings were growing up, he would always say , “learn something new, do something special” before school every day. But I’ll let your mother tell you more about that. It’s a very special memory of hers.

But let’s focus and turn to curiosity and it’s relationship to choosing goodness. We lay our scene in the kitchen.

Let’s say you want to become a great cook. Not a professional chef, but a great cook nonetheless. So you figure, you’ll cook something. You know what you’ve eaten before and you’ve seen your mother and I make meals in our kitchen at home, so you know at least something about cooking - some of the smells, that burnt food tastes bad, food flavor combinations you like. You know things like this.

Since you don’t have much experience in the kitchen, you decide to make something simple - macaroni and cheese. But if you only know what you know about macaroni and cheese based on what you’ve eaten before, where do you begin? Where do you get ingredients? You’d have to know about grocery stores. And you’d have to know something about cheeses and pasta, generally, to be able to choose what you want when you get there.

Once you bought ingredients, you’d have to know whether to use a stove or a microwave and how to operate each one. You’d have to know what pots and pans to use. On top of all that, youd have to know how much macaroni and how much cheese to combine. And all that for such a simple dish!

And lets say you figured that you could hardly consider yourself a great cook as the dish is not that complicated, nor is it nutritious. To be a better cook, you’d have to learn more dishes, fundamental skills, and practice a lot. You’d have to learn about the stove, oven, knives, and other tools. You’d have to learn to use your senses. After that, you’d be a decent cook.

But a great cook? That would still take you another level of learning. Great cooks know about more than just cooking. They know about chemistry, and why different substances interact the way they do at different temperatures. They understand the physics behind heating, cooling, pressure, and the properties of solids, liquids, and gases. They understand nutrition and how food affects health. They understand history, culture, and customs related to how people eat. They even understand something about art and design and are particular in how food is presented. Great cooks probably know a thing or two about planning and operations, too.

To be a great cook, there is so much to learn, and not just related to the most obvious elements of cooking, but across many diciplines and traditions. It takes time and is hard work. It certainly doesn’t happen overnight.

The reason why I bring up trying to be a great cook is that trying to choose goodness functions in the same way. You have to learn so many truths from peripheral disciplines, same as cooking. You have to practice, just like cooking. You have to start with the basics, just like cooking. It takes years to get there, just like cooking. It’s really hard, just like cooking. You won’t be paid or compensated for your efforts, just like cooking.

So why would anyone want to learn how to be a great cook? Afterall, it’s really quite a commitment. Being a great cook, especially because we’re not considering professional chefs who are paid for their work, requires a willingness and motivation to learn.

That raises a very interesting, essential, and fundamental question: what motivates someone to learn? If we can answer this question, we will learn something about what may motivate someone to learn to choose goodness over power, too.

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There is a theory from the social sciences that is helpful here - intrinsic and extrinsic motivation. The idea is, there are two basic types of motivations. Intrinsic motivation is motivation that comes from the happiness, joy, or meaning you get from the task itself. Extrinsic motivation, on the other hand, is the motivation that comes from earning a reward or benefit that comes from the external world.

With learning and discovering what it means to choose goodness, just like in our example with cooking, there is no extrinsic reward coming. There is no pot of money for learning to be a good person. being a good person. There is no prize or daily recognition that comes with learning to be a good person. being a good person. There is no certificate nor medal for learning to do the right thing. When it comes to learning to choose goodness, there is no extrinsic reward that exists that I can of or have ever seen. I find it even slightly uncomfortable to think about rewarding someone for learning what it means to choose goodness - it feels ideologically inconsistent.

The saying “good things happen to good people” is probably true. But that’s hardly an extrinsic motivator, realistically speaking, because the time between when you learn and when you receive the benefit of the good thing happening to you is so far away, its not really present in your mind when you’re learning.

So when it comes to learning how to cook, learning to choose goodness, or learning just about anything on your own you have to be intrinsically  motivated, because that’s the only type of motivation that you actually have the option of tapping into. Put another way, you have to find pleasure or interest in the act of learning itself, because you will receive no external reward for engaging in that learning.

This is where curiosity comes in. I told you earlier about how much I enjoy and find pleasure in discovering something new. I hadn’t thought of it quite like this until just now, but that pleasure comes because my curiosity is satiated by learning. Curiosity almost creates this very exciting gentle tension, which is resolved satisfyingly by learning.

In a way, learning isn’t as pleasurable unless you have that curiosity putting just a little bit of tension and anticipation into the mix. Because without the curiosity, you can’t get the pleasure of satisfying your curiosity after engaging in learning. Just like a joke can’t have a funny punchline without a setup, learning can’t have the intrinsic satisfaction without curiosity. Just like the Temptation and the Hawaiian War Chant, you can’t have one without the other (you’ll get that joke later in life, it’s a University of Michigan Marching Band reference).

That is why curiosity is the first capability of choosing goodness, without curiosity there is no foundation for the intrinsic motivation needed to learn on your own, and in turn discover goodness over the course of your lifetime.

If you decide that choosing goodness over power matters to you, and that you want to learn to choose it, you must know what it is. You have to understand goodness to choose it.

But as I’ve mentioned already, goodness and an understanding of it doesn’t grow on trees. You’re not born with that knowledge at birth, you have to go figure it out, you have to earn it and learn it. And therefore, you must want to learn it.

That willingingness and desire to learn is what you need to discover goodness for yourself. And that willingness have to be strong and enduring, because the path of goodness is hard more often than it’s easy - as I’ve told you - it can get messy and complicated.

Genuine curiousity is the strongest creator of motivation to learn that I’ve ever come across, and it’s the only motivation to learn I’ve ever seen that actually lasts. That’s why I think curiosity is so important and crucial to discovering goodness - staying the course toward goodness takes an abnormal amount of motivation because it is very hard to learn, takes really long, and comes without any extrinsic rewards. Curiosity is my best answer on where that abnormal amount of motivation comes from.

Certainly, I hope you are curious the world and the real causes and effects you see in how it works. And I hope you are curious about God, too. I hope you are curious about history, science, music, politics, physchology, management, mathaematics, and so many other things. I hope you are able to explore people, places, planets, and philosophies beyond your own. I wish for you a life of voracious learning and discovery.

But if you’re only curious about the world around you, you’ll be missing something important - yourself. You need to be curious about whether YOU are a good person, because you won’t always be. To choose goodness, you need to want to know the truth not just about the world around you, but also the truth about yourself. This act of self-examination is crucially important, and we’ll get to that more later.

By now, I hope the question you’re asking, is, “well Papa, how do I become curious?” And that’s what we’ll turn to now, all the best ideas, stories, and learnings I’ve had about how to cultivate and nurture the curiosity within us.

I’m so excited to share this with you and talk about it with you someday. Let’s begin.

Love,
Your Papa

——— 

If you’re interested in reading more of the Choosing Goodness project, I’d love to send you a quick e-letter when I share additions. Please leave me your contact information and I’ll be sure to keep you posted.

To see all the posts in this series, click here.

4: Abundance

April 24, 2017

In the thought experiment about the tribe, I argued that there are two ways to deal with the difficult and inevitable corruption problem. One option is to build institutions that put boundaries in place to protect against and deter corruption. The other option is to build a culture in which individuals choose goodness rather than power - so that conflict (and in turn corruption) is less likely to occur in the first place.

Truth be told, it’s not an either / or choice. In the real world building institutions and building cultures that choose goodness are both important. Neither approach alone solves the corruption problem.

But I offer one other path to mitigate - but not solve, perhaps - the corruption problem: abundance. That's a huge logical leap to make so let me explain what I mean.

In our world, there is scarcity. Resources are limited. There isn’t an unlimited supply of everything we want and need. We have to deal with constraints and trade-offs.  And those constraints and trade-offs cause stress, because constraints create a tension between what we want and what we have. That stress causes conflict, because people act nutty when they feel like they are in a state of scarcity.

A mindset of scarcity not only makes people nutty, it makes them nutty in ways that make it even harder to get out of the scarcity they suffer from. For example, if you don't have enough money to feed your family, you don't just get stressed, you get stressed in ways that make you spend money even more carelessly than you would normally.

And by scarcity, I'm not just talking about food, water, and shelter. Scarcity could be of time, love, respect, or companionship. It could be a scarcity of meaning. From what I've seen, scarcity of any and all of these types can make people go nuts - I certainly have, as I told you about earlier.

How do you think the tribe in our thought experiment would be different if there weren't scarcity? If the rule-enforcer in the tribe had enough so that he wasn't easily bought, would he succumb to corruption as easily? If the prolific farmer wasn't worried that he wasn't going to run out of food over the winter, would he be as willing to offer a corrupt proposition?

What I suggest is that abundance is a way to mitigate corruption, because if people in a community don’t feel scarcity they’d have less of a need to cheat the system, so to speak. Moreover, if abundance led to less conflict, which I think it would, there may be less need for “the system” in the first place (but I’ll provide a more nuanced thought on this point, however, in a little bit).

But there’s a reason I’m about to write you many letters about goodness and power, rather than abundance. Abundance doesn’t actually solve the corruption problem, it merely displaces it.

Why? Because in the real world, abundance isn’t evenly distributed. We are mortal men who are not perfectly just, nor do we have perfect institutions to mediate the distribution of gains from progress. After technological or other progress creates abundance, the surpluses don’t tend to be spread out evenly. Resources and levels of scarcity end up being uneven - which is exactly the condition which led to the corruption problem in the first place.  

Abundance may make it easier to deal with the tension between power and goodness because fewer people feel like they are in states of scarcity, or their scarcity feels less intense. But abundance is not enough to fully solve the corruption problem. Building better institutions and goodness are still relevant and necessary to solve the problem of corruption.

Perhaps, if we could have such an incredible level of abundance that relative levels of scarcity between people were negligible, maybe that would be sufficient to resolve the corruption problem. If that were true, maybe we wouldn’t have to struggle with the incredibly difficult challenge of becoming men that choose goodness. But that’s not the world we live in, at least right now. That level of abundance is not yet real. We are not off the hook.

I think this digression was worth unpacking, if only for a moment. I felt like I owed it to you to mention abundance, because it does matter. Creating abundance is helpful. Perhaps I will write about abundance to you later. Or perhaps we can discuss it when you are older and we can think and write about it together. It would be a worthy subject to explore.

But alas, abundance is a topic for another time. Now that we’ve identified abundance as useful but not sufficient, let’s return to our chief concerns: power and goodness. We certainly have a lot to discuss.

Love,
Your Papa

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If you’re interested in reading more of the Choosing Goodness project, I’d love to send you a quick e-letter when I share additions. Please leave me your contact information and I’ll be sure to keep you posted.

To see all the posts in this series, click here.

3: Why Goodness?

April 7, 2017

Hopefully my story about the turning point of Spring 2012, and the word of your father is reason enough to choose goodness. But if I am a good father, I will have taught you to think for yourself and pursue skeptical inquiry of new ideas, even ones propagated by me. 

So I will assume you are bright enough to be skeptical, and that I will have to persuade you to choose goodness.

So before going any further, let’s start there, with the question of “why goodness”?

The first argument I can think of is that of God and religion. The two traditions I am most familiar with, Hinduism and Christianity, are fairly clear about goodness and the right way to live. Even in my limited knowledge I know that although neither seems to explicitly lay out the choice of power vs. goodness as the central motivation for living. But Christians I know talk about living and and learning from Jesus' example and Hinduism talks about one's duty to follow the path of righteousness. Even the little bit of exposure I've had to Buddhism suggests at a minimum that power shouldn't be the central anchor of one's life or decision making because power comes and goes - and one shouldn’t attach themselves to things that are not permanent.

Which of course, here, in this letter to you, I have given you the smallest morsels of three religious traditions that I don't claim to be an expert in. But what is striking to me is that even in my limited knowledge of all three of these faiths (and others) I can't imagine one that would advocate for power over goodness in the way that we’ve laid out the concepts. All faiths that I've ever known are different in very important ways, but none advocate the notion of a power-centric life and rather seem more likely to advocate for choosing goodness, or a concept like it.

I also suggest here to you that despite their mystery, the thinking and philosophy underpinning different religious traditions are wise. All these traditions, when interpreted in their purest forms are incredible teachers of how to live, if you open your mind to them. Their teachings have lasted and have been refined over thousands of years. All the traditions that have withstood the test of time, bend toward goodness.

So before we move on to another small argument for choosing goodness let me summarize this first one. If many wise, thoughtful religious traditions (in their purest forms) suggest choosing goodness over power there's strong reason to think that  both you and I should choose goodness too. The referral of sorts by the world’s religions for goodness is a strong one. And even if you don’t become a religiously-oriented person, their perspectives on goodness and power are still valid to consider. I personally find them to be persuasive, too.

Now even though the teachings of religious traditions are good enough a reason to choose goodness (or do almost anything) for some people, let me try to continue building arguments to make the case for goodness. I owe it to you not to depend on strawmen, after all.

At some point in your life, someone will throw the tortoise and the hare argument at you, especially when you're in a position of leading a team or organization. This is the argument of, "when you do the right thing, things work out better in the end", which suggests that goodness leads to better outcomes in the long term. In the case of teams and organizations, it's the simple idea of "doing the right thing is better for business anyway." This argument was one often made to me by my classmates and professors in graduate school.

Those individuals advocated for things like being honest, vulnerable, and emotionally aware. They suggested being good to employees and doing good for society - that sort of thing. And again, their rationale was that doing the right thing was good for business. And what is their logic? Because when you do right by your employees, they work harder and are more loyal. Because when you do right by customers and society it forces your team to produce higher value products and services than you would otherwise - putting you on a path to sustainable profits. Because when you do the right thing, the business is less likely to have a scandal or break the law - events that can be devastating to a business. Good, ethical, companies, they said, have greater goodwill with employees, customers, and society which pays off in the long run, they suggested.

And let me tell you first that I agree with them. In my experience, in the long the majority of successful people and teams are the type that do the right thing consistently - they are the type that choose goodness. And this example of business school rhetoric illustrates a larger point: because it's in your interest to choose goodness, you will be more successful and happier in the long run. As the adage goes, what goes around comes around and the bad stuff that people do catches up to them eventually, even if "eventually" takes a really long time.

But let me also say that I think the tortoise and hare argument is dangerous. Because it's easy for noble self-interest to become more about self-interest than about nobility. If you depend on this argument to convince you to choose goodness, eventually your decisions will be more colored by the prize goodness wins you and the goodness itself will just be a bonus incidental to your choice.

If your only motivation for choosing goodness is that it benefits you, how do you know that you're more interested in the goodness rather than the benefits? If you have to justify choosing goodness in this way, can you really trust yourself to choose it when it's not in your self-interest or even to your detriment?

Again, my experience has shown that good things happen to good people, in the long run which is a good reason to choose goodness. Win/win outcomes are obviously attractive. I just am weary of depending on the argument of self-interest to choose goodness because goodness is important irrespective of the benefits it might bring us.

That said, as I will tell you later, you will have to make tough choices in your life and those choice will take a lot of courage. Knowing that things generally work out when you choose goodness over power is an important way to ease your anxieties and insecurities when you have a daunting decision ahead of you.

Let me reiterate a point I made earlier. In my heart of hearts I don't believe that choosing goodness ought to need justification. To me, choosing goodness is so obvious that I could drop my pen now and and move onto more practical discussions instead of making the case for goodness. But I won't.

I owe you one last argument, not just because you deserve to have good reasons for things I suggest to you, but because I also need to make this argument to reaffirm to myself that the way we should live is to choose goodness over power. I need to be persuaded by these arguments as much as you do.

One of the things your Dada said to me all through my life and is a memory I cling to is he saying, "Neil, you are a very capable person." In my heart, even though I haven't met you I know you are a very capable person. I am confident in the decisions you will make about goodness, power, and any other matter. But we are both mere mortals and we need every support we can find to choose goodness throughout our lifetimes.

So here is the last, and most persuasive argument I can think of for goodness. We should goodness because our society and our freedom depend on it.

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Imagine you are living by yourself in the wilderness or the state of nature as Hobbes might call it. And you renounce society, never to interact with another human ever again. To survive, you'll need food, water, and shelter from the weather and predators. Every tool, lean-to, or piece of clothing you need you have to create yourself. Every meal you eat you have to hunt, gather, grow, and cook yourself.

In this existence you are free from the influence of other people because you are alone. You do not have to fear being harmed at the hands of another person, but you also do not have the support of anyone else. The amount of power to control things you cannot control is limited to a small number of concerns, and the power you need is hard-earned, and totally dependent on yourself.

But say you don't want to be wholly determined on yourself to survive. Say you want to live in a community, both so that someone has your back and so that you do not feel terribly lonely all the time. Let's say you start of by being part of a small tribe of less than 10 people.

Humans aren't perfect beings, so there will inevitably be a conflict between members of your tribe. The first couple of conflicts are small, so they are mostly ignored. Your tribe is doing well and cooperating, so it grows - either through birth or more people joining the tribe. Life is good in your tribe.

But saw the tribe has grown to about 30 people. There are more people with diverse skills, which is good because the tribe has a greater ability to survive the treachery of nature. But the more diverse the tribe is, the more opinions there are. Conflict happens more often now, but it's mostly handled and tolerated. People still know each other and there are enough peace makers that can help resolve conflicts. Life is still good in the tribe.

But eventually and inevitably - because we're all mere mortals who are not perfect - someone in the tribe just isn't agreeable to the resolution of a conflict. A large argument ensues, let's assume for something like eating more than their fair share of food. So the tribe decides to do something new, that was never needed before. The tribe makes a rule  for how food is distributed so that everyone gets their fair share and nobody goes hungry. In the tribe, with new rule in hand, all is good again.

But as time passes, the mortal imperfection of the tribe's members continues and trouble starts to brew. The tribe has grown again, and there are now people who break the food sharing rule on a regular basis. The tribe has decided to create another rule that punishes people who don't share food equitably.

But one of the offenders isn't pleased with his punishment so he fights. Who the strongest person in the tribe is now matters - because disputes now sometimes end in violence, even though there are some rules and punishments to prevent conflict.

This benevolent approach to handling disputes - members of the tribe utilizing a few rules and punishments, but mostly resolving disputes on their own - has worked since the tribe started. But as the community has grown, more and more disputes are now being resolved through violence. As a result people are afraid to go on about their lives. The tribe is tired of violence.

The growing size and diversity of skills in the tribe has been a good thing, because the tribe is now more resilient in surviving the state of nature. At the same time, the tribe has a growing concern about managing conflict. Tribe members do not want to be harassed, beat up, or murdered.

So the tribe comes up with another answer. It designates a few members of the tribe - individuals who are trusted and strong - as people who are allowed to use force to uphold the rules and carry out punishments. Some of those people are also selected to get the opinions of everyone in the tribe and revise the rules on everyone’s behalf.

The rudimentary system of government works and life in the tribe is good again - violent people calm down and the rules that are written aren't too onerous. More time passes.

The system of rule-enforcers and rule-revisers has been working well, but the tribe - still made up of mere mortals - is realizing how hard it is to revise rules and enforce them fairly. Rule-revisers aren't writing perfect rules so rule-enforcers have to be flexible. Sometimes they have to use discretion when enforcing the rules and sometimes the rules are pushed to the edge. The rule enforcers don't let people break the rules, but sometimes it's hard not to bend them. The system the tribe setup is still working, but it's definitely being tested. More time passes.

The tribe is getting comfortable with this regime of rule-revisers and rule-enforcers and because this tribe has become less violent, it's growing again by drawing new tribe members from other places. Some of these new individuals don't understand how crucial following the rules of the tribe is.

But let's say some of these new members from a different place are very good at farming, so the tribe is glad to have them stay and learn from them.

So now, there are a some tribe members that have plots of land that yield more crops than everyone else in the tribe. One of those tribe members wants to keep some of his bumper crop, even though the tribe's earliest rule is that of equitable food distribution. So that skilled farmer asks the rule-enforcer to bend the rules to let him keep some of his extra crops (he’s earned it with his superior skill, right?) and he even offers to share his surplus with the rule-enforcer if he agrees.

The rule-enforcer struggles with this decision, but he is enticed by having some extra food. After all, he has a family to support and there are still sometimes shortages in the tribe. He must decide: is it okay to let this skilled farmer keep his surplus and share a few of the spoils?

Before we go any further, let me recap as we've come to a very consequential point in this thought experiment.

On this journey we've come a long way. We started in the state of nature and moved to a small tribe. Then our community grew and adapted to small conflicts. Then, the community grew and adapted again, this time by making rules, however imperfect they were. As the community grew, it adapted again by creating a rudimentary form of "government" of rule-revisers and rule-enforcers, to prevent violence. This propelled the community to grow even more, and the new influx of people created a surplus of resources that was unevenly distributed.

And now we are at the point where the government has a choice: to maintain the rules or be tempted by a corrupt proposition. Ideally, we would have never gotten to this point because the tribe would have never needed a government to resolve disputes and promulgate rules. But our tribe is made up of mere mortals, so rules and enforcement were needed. So what do we do?

I see two basic solutions here - which brings us back to our crucial decision - power or goodness. The tribe could control the government and the tribe members to ensure they don't behave in a corrupt way. This could be done, generally speaking, by ensuring there is oversight of the government or entities that keep the government in check.

Or, the tribe could ensure the members of the government - and the members of the tribe overall - are good people. After all, if the people in the tribe treat each other with goodness and are less susceptible to corruption, fewer rules would be needed in the first place. The surest way to reduce the size and scope of government is to have fewer and ever smaller conflicts. That occurs when the way people treat each other is more good, more honest, and more fair.

There are in essence two solutions to the corruption problem: create more institutions to manage power or create a community that behaves with more goodness.

---

In our country, we have tried to utilize both strategies to deal with the corruption problem - power and goodness - at least to some degree. But in my eyes, adding controls and competition to deal with conflict and corruption have been front and center during my lifetime. People my age (at least folks that I hang around with) talk much about "changing the system" (which I call institutional reform). If we could only change the system (i.e., how rules are made and enforced), they say, the world would be a better place. Our laws and policies (and the power asymmetries they crate), they suggest, are the problem.

But in our country, changing the system is not a trivial matter. Over time, the "system" has become larger and more entrenched, because our country has become larger and more complex. Moreover, people in our country have low levels of trust in government and other power-wielding institutions. This makes it hard to change the system because fewer people participate in the process of changing the system, making it easier for corrupting influences to go unchecked.

Finally, when we change the system or make new rules, it doesn't always go as planned - sometimes the changes we make to the system turn out worse, we are mere mortals after all, and don’t always architect perfect policies. Putting all this together, changing the system is something we surely have to do - at least to some degree - but it's really hard and doesn't always work.

The other strategy is to deal with corruption at its root - shaping our community to be more motivated by goodness, rather than by power. If more people are motivated by goodness, perhaps we'll have less conflict and less of what conflict remains will require rules and force to resolve.

But this is also really hard. It takes time, dialogue, and compassion to shape the motivations of people. Changing a culture to be more oriented toward choosing goodness, as we discussed earlier, is difficult to do, especially if you or your family are suffering. It's hard to make the idea of choosing goodness contagious. Changing people's minds without using power or coercion takes  vision, repetition, and patience. Moreover, no mortal man can be forced into choosing goodness, because for a culture of goodness to last it must be a choice that all freely make after looking deeply into their own soul.

So let me return to the original purpose of this thought experiment about the state of nature, tribes, and corruption: why the world needs us to choose goodness. We have two really difficult problems when we humans live in a community of others rather than in the state of nature. We have the problem of how to ensure that the community doesn't devolve into a state of violence (i.e., we have to create rules and institutions), and, we have the problem of ensuring that the corrupting influence of power doesn't cause the system of government to rot from within.

My whole adult life, until your mom and I found out we were having you, I've been reading, writing, and thinking about institutions and how to create and run them well. Take a look at our bookshelf at home, the majority of what you'll find that I've read are about institutions. For most of my life, I've been nutty about making institutions work better and changing the system to make sure they do.

But since I've been reflecting on fatherhood, and starting to write these letters to you, I've grown more and more confused about institutions and their role in society. I suppose I've come to see institutions more simply and more critically - essentially, they're an intentional concentration of power. 

And as I’ve really challenged myself to think about institutions through the lens of power and goodness, I’ve come to realize that I don't like what our community looks like if we focus on building institutions that focus on power and ignore goodness. I don’t want our world to be one where to resolve conflict, prevent violence, and deter corruption we stack rule on top of rule, penalty on top of penalty, oversight board after oversight board, and check after balance all to deal with conflict and the corrupting influence of power. I don't like the idea of a community that is so controlling and I'm not even sure that it's a strategy that would ultimately lead to less conflict, violence, and corruption.

Which makes building a community and culture that is motivated to choose goodness so important. Goodness can deal with conflict, violence, and corruption by preventing it in the first place - it doesn't require changing institutions, is reduces the need for institutions in the first place.

To be sure, spreading the message of goodness is at least as difficult as reforming institutions. And we will always need institutions - the size of our society requires it.

But if it were possible to make our world more focused on goodness, I would much rather live in that world than a world that tears itself apart through laws, regulation, and and ever greater requirement to concentrate power in institutions so those laws and regulations can be enforced.

The schism here you must be feeling - between your individual choice of power and goodness and the community's aggregate choice between power and goodness - is not lost on me.  It is hard to see the connection between your choice between power and goodness and that of the community as a whole. But there is a connection there. Your individual choice impacts others, just as others' choices impact you.

Our decisions and actions can be infectious. The actions you take don't necessarily compel others to behave a certain way, but they do have influence because our actions shape what's normal. So if you lie, others you interact with will think it is more normal to lie than they otherwise would have, had you not lied. And if you lie consistently, it will give others more implicit, social permission to lie than they otherwise would have.

But conversely, if you tell the truth, for example, and do it consistently, it will give others the implicit, social permission to tell the truth. Your actions, you see, have reverberations beyond your own life.

This is especially important to keep in mind because of the time we live in. Social technologies make it easier and faster to influence what’s normal. And I've noticed that the terrible parts of our humanity are the ideas that spread wider and faster. And so our perception of normal gets skewed.

If we - and by that I mean you and me specifically, in addition to “society” - don't choose goodness and choose it consistently, eventually, goodness will no longer be normal. And that to me is a scary, scary world. But remember, we have the ability to shape what is normal with our own choices. Why not be an advocate for goodness?

I'm not much of a gambler, as you'll come to learn on your own, but I'll make a bet with you. I bet that at some point in your life you will be in some position of power. Whether at work, at school, or volunteering - in some role, whether big or small. In some, if not all, of these positions you will have an opportunity to be corrupt, even if just in a small way. You'll have an opportunity to abuse the power you have to enrich yourself at the expense of others. And you'll have to make a decision to give into this temptation or not.

The key point here is not that you'll be in a position of power at some point in life, or that in that position you'll have a choice between power and goodness. That is all obvious, and something we've been considering together in these letters since the very beginning. They key point, rather, is that this choice between power and goodness, between corruption and integrity will have a real effect on other people's lives. In that moment, when the opportunity to abuse power is thrust in front of you, how you choose to act will have real consequences. The tension between power and goodness will be a constant part of your life, for your whole life.

Because we came out of the state of nature, and chose to live in communities this tension between power and goodness, between corruption and integrity will always be part of our life. It's a struggle we have inherited from our mothers and fathers before us and their mothers and fathers before them. And because we are mere mortals, and are not perfectly good, we had to form rules and institutions to help us navigate and manage that tension.

This is probably always what mothers and father think as they prepare for their children to be born, but the America you are being born into seems more and more like it is consumed by a lust of power and control, which leads an ever escalating cycle of conflict, rules, the struggle to control those rules, and conflict again.

The world I hope for me and your mother, and the world I hope for you and your siblings[^Your mother and I hope to bring a few more children into the world, God willing. These siblings are not here yet, but we pray that someday they will be. And if any of you kids - regardless of your spot in the birth order, this book is for you too, not just your oldest brother. As I write this, I am enveloped with love for you too. This is for all of you.] is just the opposite. Instead of struggling for power, I hope you aspire to find peace in goodness and that the world ends up requiring fewer rules and institutions as time goes on, instead of more. I hope you are persuaded that our freedom, from the ever growing reach of rules and institutions, is inextricably linked to goodness. But for that to happen, more and more people have to choose goodness over power. And that my child, starts with us and the choices we make every day of our lives.

Love,

Your Papa

——— 

If you’re interested in reading more of the Choosing Goodness project, I’d love to send you a quick e-letter when I share additions. Please leave me your contact information and I’ll be sure to keep you posted.

To see all the posts in this series, click here.

2: Goodness and Power

April 6, 2017

In the spring of 2012, just as I was meeting and getting to know your mother, my life was a mess, even though it didn't appear that way to almost everyone, even me. But a few people did realize I was struggling, and that literally changed the trajectory of my life. It might have even saved it, at least from misery and loneliness.

In the spring of 2012, I was making poor choices, and didn’t know It. Luckily, there were a few people who noticed and made a few acts of gracious love that brought me back to the path of goodness. But I’m getting a little ahead of myself here.

The path to goodness is an important one, a righteous one - a dharma. But it is also a winding one, with many distractions and diversions. It is not well marked or mapped. It requires focus, effort, and sacrifice. It is an important path (and I’d argue a better one) but not an easy one to walk.

And I, your father, like my father before me, and his father before he. And my mother and grandparents, and their grandparents. And your mother and grandparents, your uncles and aunts, and my Mamas, Masis, and their Mamas, Masis, all of us before you - we have all tried walked that path before. In our family, that is what we do.

And that's why I wanted to write these letters to you. I am trying to understand how to choose the path of goodness clearly and simply so that I can walk that path, even when it is exceptionally difficult. The best way for you to learn to choose goodness, I believe, is seeing me choose goodness consistently.

---

In the spring of 2012, the season just before I started dating your mother, I was living in Detroit with your Aunt Jenny. We lived in a building called the New Amsterdam - apparently it was an old penny factory - at the corner of 2nd Avenue and Amsterdam, at the south end of the New Center neighborhood. We moved there because your Uncle Jeff and Aunt Laura lived there, which turned out to be a very important decision, for reasons I wasn't aware of at the time.

It was a neighborhood that was representative of the transformation of the City. Detroit was simmering with new people and ideas. I and the City were changing together, which I think is why I've had a love affair with Detroit since I had moved there about 18 months earlier.

During that part of my life, I was in a fog. Perhaps not a full-blown crisis but definitely a fog. I was not living a blind life, but I wasn’t seeing or thinking clearly.

In the spring of 2012 I was lonely, I worked too much, and spent too much money at the bar. I was studying to take the GMAT for admission into Business School, which I thought would get me out of the life I was living. At the time, I thought I needed something new and bigger in my life. Luckily your Uncle Jeff and Aunt Laura knew better. I didn't need anything new and fancy, but that I needed to get back to basics.

That spring, your Uncle Jeff and Aunt Laura had me your Aunt Jenny and Uncle Mike over for dinner and a bible study. Perhaps not obviously, at the time I wasn't practicing any religion, let alone Christianity, but I always enjoyed learning from the wisdom of any philosophy or theology, and I still do. Besides that, I got to spend time with all of them. And it was easy enough to walk down the hall to their apartment.

And that's what my life consisted of: working too much, drinking, studying for the GMAT, (unsuccessfully) chasing girls at bars in Detroit, and hanging out with your Uncle Jeff, Aunt Laura, Aunt Jenny, and Uncle Mike - sometimes for dinner and Bible study.

That May, I took the GMAT and when I pushed the submit button at the end of the test, I knew I had bombed it (in retrospect, I had done good enough, but scored about 50 points lower than I was achieving on practice tests). That night, I had pre-planned a bar night with friends. I was super stressed and upset, so I obviously drank too much, even more than normal. And to make a longer story short, a girl I had just stopped dating was there.

As difficult as it is to admit, especially to you as my son, I woke up in her apartment (and we were not studying the Bible, so to speak). Having a night like that is something I thought I'd never do. Something I never wanted to do.

It was unfair to the woman I had dated because it was rekindling a relationship that I knew I wasn't interested in long-term, even though she was a kind, interesting, person. I wanted a long-term relationship. I wanted a girlfriend that would be my wife someday. I didn’t want to be in a casual relationship, physical or not. The night I had was not reflective of the man I wanted to be.

That next morning in the middle of May was my low point. In that moment I didn't know exactly what path I was walking on or why, but it certainly wasn't goodness.

I was lucky though, a few weeks later, at one of those dinners around your Uncle Jeff and Aunt Laura's table, we skipped the bible study and just talked. They made me talk about how I was doing. And for the first time, I was honest with myself and with them.

All I remember is weeping uncontrollably,  as I realized for the first time how lonely, sad, and depressed, I was. That day was a turning point in my life. That was the day, I was ready to start choosing goodness again, and realized that I had a lot of help - God, your Dada and Dadi, and people like your Uncle Jeff, Aunt Laura, Aunt Jenny, and Uncle Mike who by sitting around that table brought be back from the lowest point in my life.

---

The reason I'm telling you this is not to draw attention to my past to make me seem more relatable to you in my bachelor days, to try to be a “cool dad”, to have a self-indulgent catharsis, or to make you feel sorry for me. It's to contrast what happened before that day to everything that happened after.

After that day, your Uncle Jeff gave me the book Emotionally Healthy Spirituality - one of the most important gifts I've ever received - which helped me start dealing with my anxiety instead of ignoring it and rediscover my belief in God. I stopped chasing girls and focused on developing a deep friendship and eventually a deep love and romance with your mother.

As you know, your mother and I eventually married. To this day, I trace the chain of events that led to our marriage back to, that one dinner, in our apartment building in anew Center, around your Uncle Jeff and Aunt Laura’s table.

So many good things happened after that dinner when your Uncle Jeff, Aunt Laura, Aunt Jenny, and Uncle Mike pulled me from the brink.

Your mother and I started dating, and eventually married. I graduated from my Master's program and had the courage to walk away from a lucrative job with a lot of prestige. I started to improve my relationship with my family, especially your Dada and Dadi. Your mother and I adopted your big brother Riley, and moved into the first home you would ever know. I gained a new family of Pauls, Platers, Bazils, and Boczars. I ran a half marathon and started reading and writing again. I started to stop taking friends for granted and obsessing over work and career.

And of course, one of the greatest things that happened was you. Right now, as I write this, we are on a plane from France with your grandparents, Your Aunt Lyss, Your Great Aunt and Uncle Stephen and Mylene, and Uncle Oliver. Your mom is pregnant with you and sleeping in the seat next to me, on our way to your Aunt Ellie's wedding in England. Your Uncle Toph has just moved to Japan to teach English, which is where he is. Your Dadi is at home in Rochester, sleeping, and your Dada is watching over you from the heavens.

And I'm sitting here writing and all I can think to say is how it's perhaps the greatest gift in life for your Mom and me is to love you. To create you. To raise you. To be your parents So many good things have happened and there are so many left to come.

When I look back on my twenties (yes, your Papa is almost 30 as I'm writing this) I think about it as the period of my life that God used to prepare me for starting a family. I've made so many mistakes along the way - and don't you worry, I'll make plenty more once you get here in November - but I've learned so much too, and I finally feel ready to build a life and family with your mother.

——— 

What's dawned on me as I've contemplated what to write in these letters to you are two things. These are my two driving motivations:

First, I can't be a good father without being a good man. The real reason I'm writing is not for you, it's for me - so I can make sure I understand what a good man is and how to become one. Writing this book is a process I want to go through to make sure I'm as prepared as I can be to be a good man. That I can put it into action. It’s a process for talking the talk and walking the walk. If you, any siblings of yours we are blessed to have, or others find value in it, that's great. I hope you (and anyone else) can learn from my mistakes and adventures so you can hopefully make more useful mistakes than I have.

The second lesson has taken me years to figure out. I haven't been able to understand why my life was in such disarray in the spring of 2012, and how it got back on track. Through reflection, I've realized that I was chasing power instead of choosing goodness.

I’ve come to believe that that if you eliminate artificial, impractical, purely academic distinctions, mortal men are driven by two things that often come into tension with each other: the desire for power and the desire for goodness.

This is a dilemma I’ve experienced and observed often. It happens so often where we must choose between what we know is right and a wrong that gives us more resources, status, or influence.

It happens in the schoolyard when you either choose to join a bully or stand up to him. It happens in business when profits come at the cost of a harmful (but legal) externality. It happens in the community when competing interests jockey for support on an upcoming vote. It happens between family when making decisions as simple as what movie to watch, where to eat, or how to split up an inheritance.

Sometimes, power and goodness are not in tension, and that’s great. But for many consequential decisions, power and goodness are in tension with each other. God can have both, mortal men must choose one or the other when these two desires conflict.

---

The simplest way I can define power (for the purposes of our conversation) is based on its function.  For a mortal man, the purpose of power is to coerce, compel, or influence what he cannot control. And in the world we live in, the league of things we cannot control is vast: we cannot control the weather or the quaking of the earth. We cannot control how we are treated by others and whether others intend to hurt us or not. We cannot control the payout of the genetic lottery endowed to us by our parents when are conceived. We cannot control famine, disease, or the absolute security of our water supply. We cannot control threats of violence or the respect we receive or the degree to which we will be bullied and exploited by individuals or groups with more power than us. This list goes on.

And why would we not want to have control over those things? Isn't it rational and natural to avoid death and suffering? Isn't it reasonable to fear for our own delicate and precarious morality? Does anyone like to be exploited, bullied, or disrespected by other people?

Because we resist suffering and death, we seek to use power to control nature or other people as much as we need to avoid suffering and prevent death. Power is our coping strategy to temper the difficult things we cannot control. As a result, power is a very alluring and desirable.

I find goodness to be more difficult to explain, but I will try.

Goodness is not the opposite of power, it is a desire that sits beside power.

I know that I feel the desire to be pure of heart and soul, to be a creature that doesn't cause pain or suffering to other people, other creatures, or the earth. And I do not just want to avoid the prospect of bringing suffering, pain, and destruction into the world, I want to bring beauty and joy into the world.

I find a certain peace and deep pleasure that comes from being good. Despite knowing that I cam capable of being a monster that hurts others, this is not what I want to become. I do not know where that desire comes from but I know it is there, and I've heard and seen echoes of the same feeling in others. The ability to manifest this feeling through action is what I mean by goodness.

Even if I could substantiate why I feel this deeply rooted inclination of goodness, I don't know that it's something need to substantiate. Does anyone need a justification to be truthful or love purely? Do we need an excuse to do what's right? Do we require a reason to contribute to the beauty in the world?

Even if power and goodness are not opposites, I've felt and observed there to be a trade off between the two. Sometimes, having power makes you less good, which is what the expression “power corrupts” refers to. This can happen in many ways and power comes in many forms, but the corrupting influence of power all boils down to the same mechanism.

If you have power and you grow so accustomed to it or favorable toward it, you come to need it and are afraid of losing it. Humans don't like losing things they need or are addicted to. And when a person is afraid of losing power, they'll go to extraordinary lengths to keep it, even if it means lying, cheating, stealing, or any number of other behaviors that conflict with goodness. The trade off between power and goodness lies in the moments when you cannot bear to lose the power you've grown accustomed to and cannot preserve it in a way that's honest.

Power comes in many forms. It can come in the form of authority, where the power holder has the ability to legally use force or administer sanctions for non-compliance. It can come in the form of money, where the holder of money can exchange that money for goods, services, or loyalty. It can come from status, where the person of high status can persuade others to act in a way of his choosing. It can come in the form of physical fitness or longevity, where the fit body can outmuscle or outlast another.

In the Spring of 2012, my life was falling a part because I was consumed with the pursuit of different forms of power. I was still trying to be a good person, but I really wasn't. Trying to have both - power and goodness - was tearing me into pieces.

I was ignoring the people who I cared about most, cared about me most, and needed me most. I didn't speak with any regularity with your Dada or Dadi - maybe once or twice a week. I was trying to indiscriminately find a girlfriend. I had a tremendous arrogance because of how seriously I took my job and the prestige of the form I worked for. I was destroying my body through exhaustion and my mind through anxiety and sadness.

I was falling apart because I was trying to have power and goodness that were in conflict and couldn’t be held simultaneously. I am lucky that my soul wasn't torn between them for longer than it was.

---

Here is what all that I've described to you so far boils down to: you have to make a choice because life has trade offs. Will you put power at the center of your life or will you choose goodness?

You may think that you can have both and that's true to an extent. I'd even say that you might need to have some artifacts of power to survive. You have to eat, you have to have shelter, you need some clothing, et cetera. Our individual lives and our whole civilization depends on power, and we will talk about this in its own dialogue.

But there's a difference between "having" both power and goodness and putting both at the center of your life. putting both at thlife. At some point, you will have trade offs between power and goodness. And in those moments you must choose which side of the trade off will win out; will the driving motivation of all your thoughts, decisions, and actions be power or will it be goodness?

Choosing "neither" isn't a choice at all. First, the tension between power and goodness is so prevalent, you won’t be able to avoid it forever. Second, If you don't choose the rest of our culture will choose for you. You will regress to the mean of those you spend the most time with, which as far as I can tell means that by choosing neither you will default to choosing power. Why? Because our culture seems to talk a lot more about power than it does about goodness.

In my life, I've spent too much time chasing power. Most of the time, I didn't even know that I was doing it - precisely because I wasn't making a conscious choice, I was letting society choose for me. I've made so many mistakes and wasted so much time choosing power, and I regret it.

But despite wasting all that time and making all those mistakes, I was still lucky and touched by the grace of God because right around when I met your mother, your Uncle Jeff, Aunt Laura, Aunt Jenny, and Uncle Mike helped me start changing what I was choosing at just the right time. With their help, I was ready at just the right time to become friends with, then date, and then marry your mother. They helped me get back on the path of goodness before I did something which pushed your mother away.

So, my child, what I've realized is that among many things, one of the most sacred, important duties I have as your father is to  choose goodness for the rest of my life and to help you do the same.

This is the reason I have written you this letter and the others that follow. Choosing goodness over power and helping you figure out how to do the same is exactly what I (and your mother, of course) intend to do. To me, this is the essential purpose of me being a father to you.

But before we get into the mechanics of how,  I owe you a real explanation of why you should choose goodness to be the driving motivation of your life instead of power. So that’s exactly where we will begin in my next letter to you.

Love,

Your Papa

 ———

 If you’re interested in reading more of the Choosing Goodness project, I’d love to send you a quick e-letter when I share additions. Please leave me your contact information and I’ll be sure to keep you posted.

To read the next post in this series, “Why Goodness?”, click here.

To see all the posts in this series, click here.

1: Dedication

Let me be honest with you.

I don't know whether I'm a good man, whether I will be a good father, or even whether I'll ever have the capacity to know - in the moment, at least - whether I'm either of those things. What I do know is that I want to be. And that brings me to one more thing I have to be honest about, and then we can get on with this book.

This book is dedicated to you, your mother, and your grandparents. You, in particular are the inspiration for this book. But it's not for you. It's for me.

I'm not scared to be your father. I'm excited to be your father. I'm prepared to be your father. But I'm not ready to be your father, yet. I think I have the skills, and I think I'm mature enough to be your father (and marrying your mother was definitely the right, God-gifted, choice). I am confident and the joy in my heart builds greater every day for you to be with us.

So now, let’s begin.

Succeeding is simple as long as you ask yourself the right questions. Graduate school - and everything I've read about management that's any good - taught me that the first question to ask yourself before starting any journey is "what result do I want to create?" The idea is, once you clarify exactly what success looks like (and what it doesn't) you can spend all your time working at it, instead of working toward something else.

And I've thought about that a lot as I get closer and closer to being your father. The result I want to create is simple: I want you to be a good person. My job as your father is to mold you into a good person. That's it. I am razor focused on that. Any other result I'm able to create with regard to you is a bonus, gravy on top if you will.

Let me be perfectly up front with you, too - I'm not focused on your happiness. Obviously, I want you to be healthy, happy, and prosperous. And that's what I pray for, every time I bow my head. But I'm not committing to that. For one, you are the only person (and your eventual spouse, perhaps) who can make you healthy, happy, and prosperous.  It is difficult for me to admit that I can't guarantee that you will be healthy, happy, and prosperous, but it’s true- that's in God's hands and yours. I will help you in any way that I can, but I won't promise you health, happiness, and prosperity because it simply isn't a promise I can keep.

I can't even promise that I will succeed in guiding you to be a good person. I am a falliable man, just like you will be. But I promise, right now, two things - even if they are the only things I can ever promise you.

I promise you that I will never give up on cultivating the goodness in you. I will work to do that as long as I exist in body, mind, or spirit. How I approach that task will change as you grow older, but I will never give up on it. I will make mistakes, and I will learn from them. I am committed to the challenge because it will be among the most important things I ever attempt. I am in it for the long haul.

One of the books I will read to you one day is East of Eden by John Steinbeck. It is one of my favorites and the most important novel I have ever read. I first read it in high school and I don't even remember most of the plot. What I do remember is it's most important idea - timshel.

One of the characters in the book tells the story of a Biblical passage discussing man's conquering of sin. Something interesting that the character finds is that different translations of the Bible have different understanding of what God says about the matter. One translation says that thou shall conquer sin, implying that a man overcoming his sinning ways is an inevitability. The other translation says that thou must conquer sin, implying that God commands man to overcome his sin. The guidance from these different translations isn't clear (and the relationship of man an sin is obviously important) so the character goes back to the original Hebrew of the passage to see what it says.

The character finds the word timshel which means “thou mayest” conquer sin. So, conquering our sins is not an inevitability and it's not an imperative - it's a choice. A choice! It is up to us whether we become good men. What God says is timshel - that we may conquer our sins, if that is the choice we make.

So you, just like I do, have a choice. I believe that you, and every other person in the history and future of our planet is born as blank slate, but with a seed of goodness sown within. And again, my first promise to you is that I will never give up on cultivating that seed of goodness within you. Which brings me to my second promise.

What Steinbeck reminds us, is that conquering our sin is in our hands. It's our choice. And I may fail to cultivate that goodness in you just as you may fail to cultivate that goodness in yourself. But no matter what happens. No matter how good or wicked you are. No matter how tall or short you are. No matter how wealthy or poor you become, no matter what you look or act like, no matter what - I will always love you, unconditionally, and so will your mother. Always. Always. Always.

We promise.

Love,
Your Papa

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If you’re interested in reading more of the Choosing Goodness project, I’d love to send you a quick e-letter when I share additions. Please leave me your contact information and I’ll be sure to keep you posted.

To see all the posts in this series, click here.