How to Be a Good Person In Two Difficult Stages

  By Shlomo Maital

Amos Oz

    American writer and humorist James Thurber once observed, in a serious moment: It’s more important to know some of the questions than to know all the answers.

    And years later, Nobel Laureate Richard Feynman observed, “I would rather have questions that can’t be answered than answers that can’t be questioned.”

   So, here is a question that is hard to answer – maybe even, one that can’t be answered.

   How can I be a good person? A better person?

     One of my big disappointments (of many) with business schools, is that they teach people how to be good managers, bottom-line driven, and not how to be good persons too.   The results are often disastrous (take, for instance, Oxycontin and Purdue Pharma).

   So, from the vantage point of my grey hair and over seven decades on this earth, here is my ‘take’ on the title question. And my answer, for certain, can and must be severely questioned.

     Becoming a good, and better, person, is a two-stage process.

   Stage One, or Grade One. Follow what the late author Amos Oz once said:   ‘We can fold all the moral imperatives, the Ten Commandments, and the human virtues, into a single commandment: Thou shalt not inflict pain. That is all. Do not hurt.’

   Cause no pain. This is the Ten Commandments folded into one. Oz died last December. He wrote many wonderful books and should have won a Nobel Prize. In her eulogy his daughter Fania Oz-Sulzberger quoted his ‘cause no pain’ words.  

   It’s hard to complete Grade One successfully. It’s complicated. What if, sometimes, you need to cause pain, to prevent more pain later? As doctors and surgeons may do?

   So, let’s say you pass Grade One. What is Grade Two?

   It is the core principle of startup entrepreneurship.

   Make meaning. How? Create value. Make people happy. Or more broadly:   Make people happier, smarter, healthier, wiser, more secure….

   Make people happy. Don’t just cause no pain. Cause happiness. Actively.

   And that idea too is complex. Make people happy – how? In any way? Do I lie to them, when truth would cause pain?

   Being a good person is really hard.   But I’ve found, probably way too late in life, that if you avoid hurting people and actively find small ways daily to make people happy – you yourself find a great deal of happiness and meaning in life.

     Now, why didn’t I figure that out sooner?