Are you a good person?

My nephew, Kyle, coming over with my brother for dinner.

Are you really as good a person as you think you are? I want to challenge you to discover your blind spots and shortcomings so you can become an even better version of yourself. First let’s bring some clarity to the vague notion of what it means to be a good person.

What does being a “good person” mean anyway?

Philosophers have debated this for millennia. Here is my best shot: Good people satisfy their wants and needs while (1) helping other people satisfy theirs, and (2) minimizing harm. That definition leaves a lot of room for interpretation, so that’s why I devised the test you’ll find below. But I don’t want to move on without drawing your attention to something really important: being a good person isn’t entirely about self-sacrifice and grim puritanicalism. Goodness returns many benefits to you, which is convenient, because otherwise it would be really hard to sustain—we only have so much discipline and willpower. Aristotle, the Greek, suggested that when you connect your satisfaction to helping others flourish, you enter into a self-reinforcing cycle.

don’t rely on these things to decide how to be a good person:

• What your society or community generally thinks is right. For example, the evil of keeping human beings in enslaved bondage was perfectly legal in the United States for almost a century. But gay marriage was illegal for most of our history. We can see that laws and customs have not always lined up with morality.

• What a religion says is right or wrong. Without trying to enter into a broader discussion here about the merits of any particular theology, I will observe that churches are subject to the same political decisions and human frailties that lead governments to pass bad legislation. I grew up in a devout Catholic home, but I would much sooner trust my conscience and the counsel of wise thinkers before looking for guidance from an institution that has caused much harm recently and historically.

• The way you were raised. Perhaps you were raised in a home where corporal punishment of children was the rule. But now you need to make your own independent decision about the wisdom of striking your kids. Your parents gave you a particular model to observe, now you must choose the behaviors you will or will not repeat.

• Guilt or pleasure you obtain from a behavior. Perhaps you feel like you’re committing some sort of sin if you’re having sex before marriage. Without suggesting that sex isn’t a serious decision with consequences, does pre-marital sex among consenting adults really diminish you or harm anyone? Or, consider infidelity, which some people rationalize because of the thrill. The moral dimensions of these actions are independent of your feelings, so beware of leaning too hard on your emotions.

• Your accomplishments. Perhaps you’ve attained a high level of education, made a lot of money, or distinguished yourself professionally. Good for you, those are all significant achievements and each brings its own rewards. But they don’t make you a good person. And if you don’t believe me, just think of all the rotten people who have succeeded in those ways.

• Your life circumstances. If you survived a traumatic childhood, for instance, my heart goes out to you. But that doesn’t entitle you to cause problems for other people; in fact, it was probably people who suffered their own difficult childhoods who caused so many problems for you. This is one of those crappy, unfair things about life: you’re going to have to work that much harder to be a good person, although at least you’ll have a head start on knowing what miseries you don’t want to inflict on others. And if you’ve had a relatively privileged life, well, the bar is much higher for you. You were dealt a great hand and you have a responsibility to share your winnings. All of us need to be bigger than our opportunities.

• Your intentions. I don’t mean to suggest that your desire to do good doesn’t matter, because that’s usually where being a good person starts. But it’s hardly enough. You need to be really interested in the outcomes of your actions. There is a branch of ethical philosophy known as “consequentialism,” where the moral value of your behavior is measured by the actual results. For instance, advocating for a healthy democracy by sharing memes on Facebook is just slactivism. You need to get out into the world to produce the change you seek: organizing, or protesting, or donating, or volunteering on a campaign.

• Thoughts that go through your head. What if you have ugly thoughts, but let them go without indulging them through your spoken words or deeds? As long as you don’t continue to fuel those thoughts with additional investments of time or energy, I’m inclined to give you a pass. Thoughts come and go, not always with any deliberate intention. Sometimes thoughts are just storm clouds blowing through our minds, without any consequence unless you invest in them.

• Your opinion of how good a person you are. In fact, because of the “moral licensing effect” we tend to feel entitled to engage in morally questionable behavior if we have previously done something virtuous. It’s almost like we maintain a psychological bank account of good deeds that we draw on when we want to act selfishly. Once we start seeing ourselves as morally correct, we take on that identity and we find it easier to justify behavior we would criticize in others. Appreciating your own special skills and qualities is one thing, thinking yourself better than others is quite another. Genuine humility is a big part of being a good person.

The test

We probably all like to think that we’re good people, but how do we know? Do we just focus on the better angels of our nature, and rationalize away our character deficits? It’s really difficult to make these assessments about ourselves because humans are pretty expert at deceiving themselves for their own benefit, and we are vulnerable to so many cognitive biases.

So when you answer the following questions, be a tough grader. In the absence of a wise panel of judges protecting you from your partialities, you need to rely on your own evaluation. Don’t just remember the incidents where you rose to the occasion and did the right thing, but include all the times you screwed up, too. Of course no human, not even a saint, could say yes to all of the following questions at every moment. Being good is an ideal, something we might approach through a daily practice that we engage in for the rest of our lives.

I’ve divided the questions into four categories:

• Being good to yourself

• Being good to your community

• Being good to others

• Being good to the Earth

Being good to yourself

• Are you kind to yourself? If you had a tough day at work, do you flagellate yourself for your mistakes or do you treat yourself as a mensch friend would, helping you keep things in perspective and focusing on lessons that will make tomorrow more successful?

• Do you take good care of your mental and physical health? Do you seek emotional and social enrichment? Do you eat good food and exercise the one good body you were given? Do you make appropriate investments in your close relationships by reaching out periodically?

• Do you contain your emotional energy so your moods don’t cause problems for others? If you’re struggling with a frustrating computer problem and someone unintentionally interrupts you to ask a question, do you bark?

• Do you think about the impacts your words have on others or do you just spew a continuous flow of complaints and negativity? Do you bring positive energy to your interactions? If you had a tough morning commute, are the first words to your coworkers, “you’ll never believe how bad my day started? This sucks.”

• Do you have the inclination and ability to reflect on your own behavior so you can understand the effects on others? Can you learn from your mistakes, apologize as necessary, and permanently modify your behavior to implement this wisdom? If you’re chronically late to pick up your kid from school, are you willing and able to devise and execute a plan to be on time? Or maybe you just don’t think it’s important to be impeccable in honoring small or large commitments?

• Do you demonstrate courage when a situation demands action? If a colleague tells a sexist joke in a meeting, will you pull him aside afterwards to address the issue?

• Are you a good steward of the money and other resources available to you? If you already have thousands of dollars in credit card debt, are you still buying new clothes or restaurant meals?

• What kind of company do you keep and support? Do you choose your friends based in part on their character and good decisions? If a friend is cheating on his spouse, are you cool with that, or do you insist that he get his act together if he’s going to remain in your inner circle?

• Do you protect yourself and others from those who would try to hurt you? Being a good person isn’t the same as being a doormat. Do you have the skills and/or weapons to defend against a violent assault? Do you have the confidence and ability to negotiate successfully when others try to take advantage of you?

• Are you maximizing your potential, using your skills along the lines of excellence? If you’re a college student and smart enough to become a doctor, are you pursuing that opportunity or are you doing just enough to get by, getting high and playing video games?

Being good to your community:

• Do you care enough about being informed that you expend significant energy in discovering the truth, rather than consuming the predigested versions offered by those who want to take advantage of your laziness for their own financial or political benefit? Do you get all your news from Facebook and a cable news channel? Do you avoid opinions different than yours because you feel threatened?

• Do you take your responsibilities as a citizen seriously and participate in our democratic processes? Do you do the bare minimum of voting every November, for the big and small elections?

• Do you give back to the community in any way other than showing up for work and paying your taxes? If you have discretionary time, do you volunteer or participate in any civic organizations?

• Do you share any abundance you might be fortunate to enjoy? Do you share your talents to benefit the community? If you’re well off, do you use your money to help those who need help?

• Do you drive responsibly and consistently devote your full attention to the road? Do you regularly drive more than 10mph over the speed limit on residential streets? Do you routinely talk on the phone or occasionally send short texts?

Being good to others

• Do you generally treat all people the same way, no matter whether they’re able to help or harm or you, or powerless to affect you? If you’re a manager at your company, are you just as considerate and responsive with your subordinates as you are with your CEO?

• Are you polite and respectful to everyone, all the time, even when you’re not in the mood? When an airline gate agent can’t switch your seat because the plane is full, do you grump off or do you express some sincere appreciation that she tried?

• Do you give people more than you take from them? What value do you bring to your friends relative to the investments they make in you?

• What is your basis for respecting and admiring others? Do you respect people because of their wisdom, generosity, or other pro-social characteristics, or for their dominance? If someone gets rich by breaking the rules and exploiting people, is that okay with you, even admirable?

• If you disagree with someone, can you make your needs known in a gentle way, being politely assertive without being aggressive or nasty? If you think you car was repaired poorly by the dealership, are you able to have productive and rational conversation with the manager to state your needs and seek a reasonable resolution?

• Are you honest, or do you mislead to optimize situations for your benefit? Do you use white lies to evade responsibility?

• Do you behave better in public than in private? If you were being filmed 24/7 for a documentary about your life, would you act differently than you do now?

• Do you do the hard work of focusing your energy on your own self-development rather than blaming and judging others? Do you criticize other people for driving gas-guzzling SUVs or do you examine your own resource consumption so you can take action to reduce your footprint?

• Do you devote your full attention to others when you’re with them? Do you put away your phone when you’re talking with someone?

• Do you “do the right thing,” even if it’s not in your short-term interests? If your server at a local restaurant neglects to include several items on the bill, do you ask for a correction?

Being good to the Earth:

• Do you put the greater good ahead of your own moment-to-moment satisfaction? Do you eat animals and fish? If so, have you invested a minimum of effort in discovering the cruelty and negative environmental impacts of such a diet? Do you care enough to change your habits?

• Do you minimize your consumption of natural resources? How big is your house, how much stuff do you own, how often do you fly? Do you have more than you really need compared to many people around the world who don’t have that much?

• Did you consider adopting one of the 140 million orphans in the world, or going without children? Putting your own desires aside, did you consider the environmental consequences of bringing children (especially more than one) into a society like ours with such high resource consumption per capita?

Conclusion

You may have noticed that some of these questions concern behaviors of greater impact and importance than others. Whether you recycle a few pounds of steel cans a month, for example, matters less than electing leaders who will steer the entire economy to greater sustainability.

I’ve set a high bar here. I think I’ve invested very deliberately in becoming a good person but I can hardly say yes to all these questions. For example, I currently earn much of my living from a business that sells automobiles. I have a lot of room for improvement in being good to the Earth.

I hope you’ll join me in this opportunity to reflect on how you can be an even better person and start today by taking small steps. Examples:

• If you eat a lot of meat, perhaps you could start eating one vegetarian dinner per week.

• Take a loving instead of peevish tone when your children need correcting.

• Be a little gentler with your spouse, or start a productive conversation about an annoying behavior instead of nagging.

How well do your present self and future self get along?

I saw this steam locomotive returning to the earth in Madrid, New Mexico. At the time it was built a century ago, it cost perhaps a $1,000,000 in today’s dollars. Its value is now less than zero, because it would cost a lot to dispose of it if the land underneath it were needed for another purpose. The value of something can change a lot depending on when it’s available.

Your destiny is inescapably influenced by the relationship between your present self and your future self. A healthy marriage between these two people will result in a happier, healthier life.

You know your present self pretty well, it’s the person sitting here right now, reading this post. But you can use the human power of mental time travel to imagine various versions of yourself, over the short and long term. It’s easier to empathize with your “tomorrow self,” who will be much like your present self because you’re only a few hours away from becoming that person. It’s harder to conjure up the person you will become many decades from now, the person who will enjoy the benefits and bear the costs of decisions you will have made over a lifetime.

Psychologists have a term for the gap between the value of an immediate reward and a reward that arrives later in time: “hyperbolic discounting.” We tend to privilege the wants and needs of our present self over our future self, so we will tend to choose the current benefit over the future benefit. This is why you might sometimes have a few too many drinks. You’re willing to sacrifice the feeling of well-being tomorrow for the benefits of the buzz right now. You get the benefits, and some other person has to bear the costs. Until the passage of time converts that other person into you, and you wonder what in the world your past self was thinking.

First, the bad news about the psychological phenomenon of the present/future self:

• A pioneer in this area of study, Hal Hershfield, reports that we actually think of our future self as a different person. And that’s not a good thing, because most people are somewhat selfish, and therefore willing to shortchange their future self because they they think they’re externalizing the costs of their present actions to someone else. They don’t fully appreciate that they will be become that person. It’s like peeing in somebody else’s well to discover that one day you will be drinking from it.

• One of the unavoidable and unfortunate conundrums of life is that the investments you might make for the benefit of your future self, such as exercising, eating a healthy diet, or saving for retirement, are usually not the things your present self wants to do today. Your present self would probably prefer to sit on the couch, eating Cheetos, and ordering stuff from Amazon. It takes self-awareness and discipline to make difficult decisions with your future self in mind.

The good news is that you can still do a lot to foster harmony between your present and future self.

• Good habits can enforce a functional relationship between your present and future self. You probably observe a rule that you brush your teeth every night before bed, no matter how tired you are. That habit eliminates the discord between satisfying your immediate desire to fall asleep with your wish to enjoy the long-term benefits of good dental hygiene. You just do the best thing automatically.

• With modest effort you can arrange your life to benefit your future self. It’s a lot easier to pass on buying the cookies at the grocery store, when your present self can’t enjoy them, than it is to bring them home, where you set up a direct conflict between the desires of your present self and the waistline of your future self.

• Savor the many present benefits you enjoy as a result of prior investments you made in your future self. Note and appreciate, for example, that your good income derives from the investments you made in your education or trade. This exercise strengthens the emotional bond between your selves.

• Evolve the way you think about your future self. Focus on compassion. You wouldn’t subject a loved one to high-blood pressure or diabetes, so why are you making dietary choices today that would create those problems for your future self?

• Find things that your present self enjoys but also benefit your future self. If you hate the gym, you probably won’t be able to keep going for very long. After all, your grit muscle can work only so long and hard before it gives up. Choose sustainable activities that your present self can derive at least some pleasure from right now. Maybe you would rather watch television than walk for an hour around the neighborhood, but getting together on a schedule with a friend will make exercise a lot more enjoyable because of the social time. And if you remain committed, your present self will start enjoying the good feelings associated with increased fitness—a virtuous feedback loop.

What's your superpower?

Superman can fly, Wonder Woman can deflect bullets, Spider-Man can sense danger. Real people can’t leap tall buildings in a single bound, but we can develop special abilities that form the backbone of our success over a lifetime.

It usually takes a few superpowers to make a superhero, because even a monumental talent will not, by itself, guarantee success. For example, towering athletic ability won’t get you very far unless you also have the long-term discipline to sharpen your skills and match your competition. I use the term “superpower skill set” to describe a cluster of a few exceptional strengths that add up to a whole greater than the sum of its parts. Imagine a person with unusually high levels of manual dexterity, stamina, and intellect—those qualities would combine to make very good surgeon, or a pilot. The set of faculties work together to create quite a competency.

When identifying your superpowers, keep these things in mind:

• There’s a difference between the things you want to be good at and things you actually are good at. As a boy I wanted to be a great baseball player. I persisted through my little league years on modest talent, hoping that that my genetics would eventually deliver me the physique necessary for real success (you know—big butt, powerful upper body). It was not to be. I made it to six feet but never to even 140 pounds. I permanently abandoned my efforts on the diamond after I failed to make the Blacksburg High School junior varsity team.

• A superpower should be super. It should be something that very few other people can match. For example, a lot of people can play a guitar pretty well. But Eddie Van Halen can coax sounds from the instrument like few others. You probably do a lot of things well. But what do you do really well? What’s easy for you but hard for others? That’s where you can really make things happen.

In my case, I have always been freakishly organized, I have a feral risk tolerance, and I can remain intensely focused on goals for years on end. This skill set is ideal for entrepreneurship. I have depended upon those qualities my whole life, and they have helped me compensate for many deficiencies in other areas.

Be respectful of your superpowers. Use them for good, to make the world better for you and everybody else. Don’t waste them, because they don’t necessarily last forever. There might come a time in your life when you regret screwing around with your prime years instead of discovering the frontier of your potential.

What are the handful of special abilities that comprise your superpower skill set? Have you developed each to its full potential? Are you making the highest and best use of your overall capability?

How to be wrong less often

I say a lot of things and make a lot of predictions. We all do. But how many of these utterances are actually true? I started paying attention to the things I said, and later investigated whether they were accurate or not. If I found myself quoting a statistic from memory, I would Google it. If I remembered a person attending an event, I would go back and check my pictures. It turns out that I was wrong, often. I approximated my failure rate at 22%, or roughly a fifth of my statements. I’m probably wrong about that, too, because I didn’t conduct my research project very scientifically.

In his book, Thinking Fast and Slow, Daniel Kahneman identified overconfidence as the king of human cognitive biases, and that’s really saying something, because there are a lot of major human cognitive biases. But how many times have you been certain that you remember something correctly, and upon further reflection or research, you realize you were wrong? Our overconfidence can get us into a lot of trouble, like taking on excessive risk with our behaviors, or distancing ourselves from loved ones because we can’t see the errors in our ways.

How can we reduce the number of inaccurate things coming out of our mouths? You can employ one simple tool that will immediately improve the veracity of your statements, without gathering any more data. Just speak more precisely about what you do know. If you know that 45% of Ferraris are delivered in red because you just finished a biography of Enzo Ferrari, then say that. But if you read a supercar article years ago and you vaguely remember that roughly half of Ferraris at that time were red, then say just that, with a qualification that you can’t be sure you remember the statistic correctly and that it may no longer be true.

In casual conversation then it might not matter if you make mistakes or confuse your facts, but I think it’s generally a good idea to maintain a reputation for making accurate statements and using the appropriate level of confidence to make assertions based on some kind of efficient evaluation of how likely you are to be wrong.

And if you really don’t know what you’re talking about, heed philosopher Ludwid Wittgenstein’s advice from the “Tractacus,” “Where of one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent.” Know when to shut up.

How often do you think you’re wrong? Start to notice.

The last time you'll see a wedding guest

Julie and I married October 2nd, 1999, and approximately one hundred people celebrated with us. I didn’t give it a thought at the time, but it recently occurred to me that I never saw several of the guests ever again. This would seem unlikely, considering the guests met a pretty high threshold of closeness to at least one of us.

I have since asked many others about their weddings, and I’ve yet to find a couple who haven’t had the same experience with at least one guest. Why does that happen? Primarily, weddings often cause, or are contemporaneous with, lots of major life transitions.

—The couple often moves to a new neighborhood or city, taking them physically away from legacy relationships.

—Many couples marry in their 20s, when the lives of many similarly-aged guests are also in max flux. Friends are marrying, graduating from school, taking new jobs, relocating. Established interaction patterns get scrambled.

—Old friends don’t always like the new spouse or don’t want to spend time with the friend post-coupling.

—Not all wedding guests are necessarily that close to begin with. For example, sometimes parents of the bride and groom invite their friends or colleagues even though they don’t know the couple very well.

—Some guests, such as elderly family members, might die before the next reunion.

Were there any people at your wedding that you never saw again?

What is your ministry?

We usually think of the word “ministry” in religious terms, or, if you’re accustomed to European politics, you might think of a person who leads a government division. The word actually comes from the Latin for servant, and this is the sense I’m discussing here: how do you use your skills along the lines of excellence, to serve others, in a way that brings you satisfaction?

The other night I helped a friend work through the process of making some decisions about adding the right car to her family fleet. She apologized for spending so much time after-hours talking about work stuff. I guess it was technically work related, but it hardly felt like work at all, because helping people solve their transportation problems is one of my ministries. As a child, when adults asked me what I wanted to be when I grew up, I certainly didn’t tell anyone that I wanted to help people make intelligent decisions about automobile ownership, but life is funny like that. Sometimes you wake up one day and realize that you’re an expert in some arcane skill set that you never would have predicted.

One of the ways you identify a ministry in you life is observing when a particular form of serrvice to others gives you more energy than it consumes. Another way is find the intersection of these three activities:

—Something you like to do.

—Something you’re good at.

—Something that has value to others.

There’s another Latinate word that crosses religious and professional boundaries: vocation, from the root vocatio, to be called. We know vocation as a calling to the priesthood, or secularly as a trade, profession or occupation. How fortunate you are if you think of your career as a calling and not just a job.

What is your ministry or ministry? How are you called to this service?

Why are jaded people so gullible?

Why do some relatively intelligent people scorn the opinions and research of established authorities, instead basing their decisions on uninformed hearsay and internet gobbledygook?

I’m not focusing here on human cognitive biases generally, or wading into the swamp of absurd conspiracy theories. I’m trying to understand why people who are pretty skeptical about most things invest what little faith they do have in unworthy people and ideas. I’m talking about your uncle who thinks all politicians are crooked but thinks Trump cannot tell a lie, or your friend who thinks vaccinations are dangerous but takes handfuls of unproven nutraceuticals and Airborne gummies. They distrust everything but fall for the dumbest stuff.

It is impossible to function in society without trust. Even the most skeptical people drive through green lights. They trust the people who engineered the intersection and programmed the lights. They might look both ways as they enter the intersection, but they also have some trust that other drivers will observe and stop for the red light in their direction. Distrusting every person and institution is a not a strategy and it sets you up to fall for anything. If trust is required at least occasionally to function in society, the key is to develop your ability to determine who is trustworthy and who is not.

What is trust? I see trust as a skill set that reliably (but not perfectly) evaluates the fitness of an idea, person, or institution to deliver on it’s promises. It’s the ability to see the future based on your knowledge of how things have occurred in the past. Some people are better than others at these skills, but I think they can developed and strengthened.

Here are some common failures:

• Some people never developed basic critical thinking abilities. They do not think in an evidence-based manner (arriving at conclusions by making and testing assumptions).

• Some people prefer false promises of quick results over the hard work of making real progress. Many people and institutions are intentionally and constantly polluting the public square of information for their own personal gain—power, fame, money. Lies about getting rich quick, or the steel mills coming back to depressed industrial communities can be just too tempting to resist.

• Some people choose their opinions based on affiliation rather than their own independent evaluation. They outsource their thinking to a political party, a lobbying organization, or a church.

• Some people think that disagreeing with established wisdom shows how independent they are from the masses. (We should oppose the established wisdom when it’s wrong, but not because we think it’s cool to be a rebel. Making mistakes and causing problems is not cool).

• Some people overestimate their expertise on a topic. Said Shakespeare, “The fool doth think he is wise, but the wise man knows himself to be a fool.” This is the Dunning-Krueger effect: people who are least able at a task think they’re great at it. Consider the expertise it takes to become truly expert in a field: formal education, apprenticeship, long hours over years and decades. Experts get things wrong from time to time, of course, but what kind of pilot do you prefer to fly your plane, or what kind of doctor do you want treating your sick child—those who read a few articles on Facebook about aviation and medicine?

• Some people typically prefer certainty, even when none is available. Few people and things fit neatly into all-or-nothing categories. Evaluating trustworthiness requires nuance. F. Scott Fitzgerald said, “…the test of a first-rate intelligence is the ability to hold two opposed ideas in the mind at the same time, and still retain the ability to function. One should, for example, be able to see that things are hopeless and yet be determined to make them otherwise. This philosophy fitted on to my early adult life, when I saw the improbable, the implausible, often the ‘impossible,’ come true.” This is gray-scale thinking, holding contradictory information in our minds without shutting down. Black-and-white thinking is the enemy of discovery.

• Some people confuse election methods with logical arguments. The democratic idea of one person, one vote can lead to a prejudice that every opinion has equal merit. Isaac Asimov said it best: “Anti-intellectualism has been a constant thread winding its way through our political and cultural life, nurtured by the false notion that democracy means that 'my ignorance is just as good as your knowledge.'” We have many freedoms in the United States, including the freedom to be stupid, but that doesn’t make an opinion correct.

• Some people watch too many movies and television shows, and they get in the faulty habit of thinking that entertainment narratives provide reliable information about the way things work in the world. For example, our political system is certainly held hostage by dangerous people, but watching House of Cards is not how you’re going to discover who the real bad guys are. The screen is a fantasy land.

• Some people are just arrogant jerks. “I’m smart and you’re stupid.” Darkly, their ignorance is not a failure of intelligence but a failure of character.

I hate to tell you, but all of us are guilty of one or more of these on occasion. And if you think you’re immune, you’re part of the problem! What can we do? Start by improving yourself, which is really the only change you can ensure actually occurs, because you are the one thing that is under your own control. Said Ramana Maharshi: “Your own Self-Realization is the greatest service you can render the world.”

A new values-driven zeitgeist is happening in the United States right now

We have entered an era where the most successful companies will be defined by their ability to resonate with their customers’ values. Years ago, product quality and superior service would put your company above others. But now customers take those for granted, because many companies have mastered them, and can rapidly deliver a product to a customer’s home with a just a few clicks on a keyboard. Now companies are seeking a competitive edge by adopting a philosophy about how the world should change, and then rallying customers to join them by buying their products. Consider these fundamental trends in society:

·       We are more politically polarized than any time in memory. We are more inclined to think in terms of “us” and “them.” We’re feeling more tribal so we want to support like-minded businesses, and avoid those that don’t see things our way.

·       Social media networks and online review websites make it easy to acquire and distribute information and opinions about companies, and even to organize boycotts. For better and for worse, the internet has given customers the voice to share with many people their appreciation or outrage.

·       Businesses can lose billions of dollars in market value overnight when customers discover corporate malfeasance and decide they don’t want to be associated with those companies.

·       Our paralyzed political institutions are not delivering the change that a significant percentage of citizens are demanding on global warming, social justice, economic inequality, and other issues. Companies are stepping into the void and pursuing progress using their internal policies, donations, business practices.  

To give you some historical context for this new era, I prepared the following chart that summarizes the primary competitive differentiator for each period. I refer to these eras as “commercial zeitgeists.” (A zeitgeist is the defining ethos of a particular period of history as revealed by the dominant beliefs and values in society. The word is a German portmanteau that translates literally means as time-ghost, or spirit of the times).

Era      Zeitgeist         Winners--companies offering:                    Familiar Example Firm

1960s Marketing       Clever commercials and ad copy                   Philip Morris

1970s  Branding         Safe choices in a turbulent economy             Proctor and Gamble                       

1980s  Quality           Fewest product defects                                  Toyota

1990s  Efficiency       Best products at lowest cost                           Dell

2000s  Internet           Virtual connections among people               Facebook

2010s  Convenience   Products at your doorstep                             Amazon

2020s  Values             Synchrony with customers’ beliefs                Patagonia

(This is a very basic chart to illustrate the concept. Reasonable people will disagree about exactly about how to define an era. Multiple forces are at work. You could argue, for example, that technology drove the 2010s, and convenient commerce was just the result. Also, the associated decades are for general reference only; complex macroeconomic movements do not obey a calendar.)

What causes zeitgeists to shift? There are many factors, but I think the most important is that the competitive advantage of operating a business under the current zeitgeist expires as other companies catch up. When the playing field levels out, businesses need to find a new way to differentiate themselves.  Consider the example of automobile manufacturing and retailing in the United States during the 1980s.

With superior quality and durability, Toyota and Honda continually chipped away at the dominance of Ford, Chrysler, and General Motors, who largely ignored the competitive threat and continued to build crappy cars. By the end of the 1980s, the Honda Accord was the best-selling car in the United States for three years in a row, an almost unimaginable achievement for a company that had reached our shores just a few decades earlier (in 1959) with an initial team of only 8 people. But the “Big Three” eventually woke up. In 1992, after years of serious investment in quality, Ford’s Taurus became the bestseller, five years in row. By that time, manufacturing defects across the industry plummeted, everybody was building pretty good cars, and customers wanted more from their cars than just reliability. A new zeitgeist had begun, and others would follow.

Using your full powers along the lines of excellence

At President Kennedy’s 63rd news conference, on October 31st, 1963, he replied to a reporter’s straightforward political question with a classic Kennedy-esque, philosophical response:

QUESTION: Mr. President, just shortly after the Bay of Pigs I asked you how you liked being President, and as I remember, you said you liked it better before the event. Now you have had a chance to appraise your job, and why do you like it and why do you want to stay in office four more years?

THE PRESIDENT: Well, I find the work rewarding. Whether I am going to stay, and what my intentions are, and all of the rest, it seems to me it is still a good many months away; but as far as the job of President goes, it is rewarding and I have given before to this group the definition of happiness of the Greeks, and I will define it again. It is full use of your powers along lines of excellence. I find, therefore, the Presidency provides some happiness.

I discovered this video of the press conference at the Kennedy Library in Boston. You can read the transcript and listen to the entire session here.

I was struck by the simple elegance of his phrasing: full use of your powers along the lines of excellence. It connected with the way I sometimes experienced fulfillment in my own life. There are multiple dimensions to happiness, but I liked the way he captured that particular sense of joy that I occasionally encountered in a professional context. There is a special sort of satisfaction derived from the successful exercise of hard-won skills.

There were many things I couldn’t do when I began my career, and over the years I made a lot of mistakes. I steadily grew as my confidence, wisdom, and my experience increased. Occasionally, I was able to focus the benefit of all those powers on a situation, and everything would fall into place. I would defuse a confrontation with an angry customer, or pull off some kind of creative marketing coup, or take a risky bet on an applicant who would become one of our stars.   

How, and to what end, do you use your skills along the lines of excellence?

The Most Consequential Decision in Your Life

I found this pair of ‘57 Chevy’s near an abandoned garage near Schuyler, Virginia. They will likely spend the rest of their lives together, and will return to the earth in this spot.

I have some thoughtful opinions about how you might go about finding your life partner, even as you may legitimately question what authority a car dealer can muster about marriage. (I did marry my trophy wife the first time around, together twenty years and counting, so there’s that.)

I argue that this is the most consequential decision that most of us will make in life, for two reasons. First, you’re tying up your destiny with this one other person for (hopefully) the rest of your life. The only termination clause in a wedding vow is death. Second, unlike most other major decisions, marriage is extremely difficult to reverse. Other decisions can be quite costly, but few so much as a failed marriage. Consider these other major decisions in terms of their reversibility:

·        Go the wrong college? You can finish out the semester and transfer.

·        Wasted three years in law school because working as a lawyer isn’t what you thought it would be? Your J.D. looks great on a resume, and that hard-won education will come in handy over a lifetime.  

·        Find yourself in the wrong city? Move.

I don’t mean to trivialize the impacts of other really bad decisions. You can obviously make catastrophic choices, such as experimenting with heroin. But those mistakes, and others like them, belong in a different category because they are so obviously ill-advised that they are best characterized as “brazen assaults on good judgment” rather than “decisions.”

How do you avoid marriage mistakes?

·        Perhaps the single most important secret to marrying well is dating well. Since you will draw your spouse from your dating pool, don’t even date people who are not right for you. It’s difficult to think clearly after you fall in love; it’s much easier to think clearly when you’re deciding whether or not to go out with someone. At this early stage, be particular.

·        Love involves feelings, but marriage is a choice. Just because you find yourself in love with someone doesn’t mean they’re right for you, and you don’t have to marry that person.

·        Have a plan. This is more romantic than it sounds. Would you recognize Mr. or Ms. Right if the person walked through the door? I encourage you to write up one page describing the perfect partner. I like to do this for my single friends, and I save a copy so we can review it when they start dating. Falling in love with a person isn’t necessarily a choice, but you can choose what you’re looking for in a person, and you’ll know it when you see it. We tend to seek in others what we find familiar (even if it’s not good for us) so if you find yourself falling repeatedly for the wrong kind of person (alcoholic, emotionally unavailable, whatever) then figure out the right kind of person and start looking! I’ll add that working on being the right person is a fine place to start.

·        Marry a little later in your life rather than earlier, allowing more time to get to know what you need and what you can give. As a young man, I was lonely and very eager to marry. Julie and I have now been married for over twenty years, and with some luck we could be married another fifty. I see now that there was no rush.

·        Date a person for a while before making any major commitments. Take your time to make sure you understand exactly who you’re marrying. The initial buzz of infatuation seems to last a couple years, so if you can date that long you’ll probably know your partner pretty well. If you’re coming out of a divorce, beware making a quick commitment to the first person who shows up telling you it wasn’t your fault.

·        Consult your personal board of directors about your dating life, and especially before you move in, buy a home, or get engaged.  Love is famously blind, but your confidants can see. If the people who know you best and have your best interests at heart aren’t enthused about your partner, that should tell you something very serious.

·        Soul mates are made over time, not met in a moment of romantic epiphany. You’ll be a lot happier if you remember that you need to meet your own needs in life; your partner is just there to help you do it.

Like any other decision in your life, you will increase the likelihood of a successful outcome by investing the time and effort to choose well.

The Arrival Fallacy

This post in a sentence: removing misery is not the same thing as being happy.

When I was a younger man, I fell for the “arrival fallacy.” Professor Tal Ben-Shahar coined this term to describe the “illusion that once we make it, once we attain our goal or reach our destination, we will reach lasting happiness.” It doesn’t matter whether the goal is finding a spouse, becoming a parent, or taking your company public. You’ve fallen for it, too, if you’ve ever said, “I’ll be happy when _________ happens.”

Some people discover the danger in this empty self-promise earlier than others. I pity those, for example, who don’t find our until they retire that there’s nothing so good in the golden years to make up for decades in a job they didn’t enjoy. It’s like pulling into the train station you always dreamed of reaching, only to discover that the whole place is surprising empty of what you thought you might find. You can find out too late that the whole point of the trip was to enjoy the scenery with your fellow travelers.

Perhaps we all dedicate ourselves to projects that we think will bring us fulfillment, only to figure out that the results do not deliver the expected rewards. I had my own experience with the arrival fallacy. I spent a couple of arduous decades building businesses, on the assumption that the pot of gold at the end of the rainbow (financial freedom) would make it all worthwhile.

Well, the financial freedom did alleviate a lot of misery in my life. I no longer had to set a painfully early alarm, or hustle all day trying to stay ahead of all the stressful tasks, or solve the same problems I had already solved too many times. I had removed many afflictions. But removing pain is not the same as experiencing pleasure. Freeing yourself from hassles doesn’t mean you’re happy. So now I’m in the process of embarking on a new kind of life project, trying to discover how I can invite more good times into my life, especially through the process of helping other people grow. And I hope I’ve discovered these insights early enough in my life that I’ll have many more years to enjoy the ride with my fellow passengers.

Why is the car business booming during Covid?

As of this writing, coronavirus cases and deaths are increasing nationally, but the car business is doing fine. Many manufacturers and franchised auto dealers shut down or seriously curtailed operations in April and May, but since then the industry is struggling to keep up with demand. The demand shock (or cratering in consumer demand for products) that we saw during the government-mandated shutdowns has turned into a supply shock (or shortage of inventory to sell). Some observations about the state of the industry:

• Planet Subaru sold 250 new and used vehicles in June, our highest volume month since we opened in 1998. Our Jeep store had its best month since opening in 2004. I never would have guessed we would be breaking records just a few weeks after reopening our showrooms.

• We, and our fellow dealers, are running out of new cars. Manufacturers, and the many suppliers they depend upon for all their components, shut down for weeks or months, and it’s taking time to get the whole supply chain moving again. You appreciate the complexity involved in building a car when you stop and think about how many parts go into one. And a car can’t be sold until every last part goes on the car. Some parts, such as tires, could be easily substituted in a pinch, but more complicated parts, such as electronic control units programmed for that specific car, might be available only from a single supplier. And if that supplier is struggling to restart its operations because of labor shortages or component shortages of its own, it may not be able to supply the quantity the manufacturers require. These shortages won’t last forever, but they will continue for a few months.

• We’re also running out of used cars. At the Planet dealerships, we generally stock up in the spring, so we were loaded with inventory when the crisis first struck. We were really concerned about having so much inventory as demand plummeted, and wholesale prices for comparable vehicles at the auction dropped too. Because used cars typically depreciate while they sit on our lots, we try to avoid owning inventory that no one wants to buy for several months—we would rather buy it later when it’s less expensive. But now we’re relieved that we had so many cars, because we have a lot to sell while demand is high. But that supply is dwindling quickly, and we can’t easily replace them. Typically, dealerships replace inventory as it sells in an orderly way. But with most dealers running out of cars, there is tremendous upward pressure on prices at the auction. The Manheim Used Vehicle Index, which tracks wholesale used car pricing, is setting another record this month after an all-time high in June. There is a ceiling on what we can pay for a used car—for example, no one wants to pay more for a one-year-old Subaru than a new one. We have witnessed overheated wholesale prices during other times and we’re familiar with the Catch 22. We can’t pay so much for a used car that consumers won’t pay, but we can’t afford to run out of inventory either.

I’m not an economist, I do have a view from the trenches about what’s causing the boom. Here are my theories:

• There are still many people working from home or furloughed, and they’re bored. Buying another car is usually a time-consuming project, and people have a lot of time on their hands to do it.

• Eager to get selling again, manufacturers put a lot of “cash on the hood” (rebates) and special financing offers (0% for extended terms), so there a lot of good deals in the market.

• The federal government has flooded the economy with money. Customers are getting stimulus checks and finance rates are at historical lows. Even the unemployed have been getting an additional $600 per week on top of state benefits, an amount large enough that many people are seeing more income than when they were employed.

• Even with all the general uncertainty and anxiety in the zeitgeist, most people are not terribly worried about signing up for another car payment because they assume their jobs are relatively safe as long we have the V-shaped recovery that many economists expect.

• Some people who traditionally took public transportation, and/or relied on Uber and Lyft, have decided that the risks of being in close proximity to strangers are significant enough that they want their own vehicles.

Jeff and Christa speak at the 2019 Automotive News Leading Women Conference

Planet Subaru Co-founder Jeff Morrill and Service Manager Christa Collins discuss the challenges they’ve overcome in creating a service department staffed by a large number of people traditionally excluded from the opportunities in the automotive retail. Click to watch the video.