Are you living up to your potential? Do you want to? Do you feel guilty for not doing so?

Is wealth bad? Is power bad? If you don’t acquire either does that diminish the quality of your life?

What constitutes a good life?

What constitutes a wasted life?

If you retire and spend your time just connecting with people, is that wasting your time? If you’re just spending time with your family and closest friends?

Just some things I’ve been thinking about recently.

Why Aren’t People More Courteous?

I think the primary reason people are discourteous is because it’s a way to let out whatever frustration we have without causing a scene and without showing our vulnerability. My guess for why the library patron didn’t drop the issue when he found out that Josh’s ticks weren’t intentional is that he was afraid of showing his embarrassment. He’d have to be vulnerable, admit that he was wrong and for some people that’s hard to do.

There’s a great anecdote from 7 Habits of Highly Effective People, which shows a similar scene that ends completely differently:

I remember a mini-paradigm shift I experienced one Sunday morning on a subway in New York. People were sitting quietly — some reading newspapers, some lost in thought, some resting with their eyes closed. It was a calm, peaceful scene.

Then suddenly, a man and his children entered the subway car. The children were so loud and rambunctious that instantly the whole climate changed.

The man sat down next to me and closed his eyes, apparently oblivious to the situation. The children were yelling back and forth, throwing things, even grabbing peoples papers. It was very disturbing. And yet, the man sitting next to me did nothing.

It was difficult not to feel irritated. I could not believe that he could be so insensitive as to let his children run wild like that and do nothing about it, taking no responsibility at all. It was easy to see that everyone else on the subway felt irritated, too. So finally, with what I felt was an unusual patience and restraint, I turned to him and said, “Sir, your children are really disturbing a lot of people. I wonder if you couldn’t control them a little more?”

The man lifted his gaze as if to come to a consciousness of the situation for the first time and said softly, “Oh, you’re right. I guess I should do something about it. We just came from the hospital where their mother died about an hour ago. I don’t know what to think, and I guess they don’t know how to handle it either.”

Can you imagine what I felt at that moment? My paradigm shifted. Suddenly I saw things differently, and because I saw differently, I thought differently, I felt differently, I behaved differently. My irritation vanished. I didn’t have to worry about controlling my attitude or my behavior; my heart was filled with the man’s pain. Feelings of sympathy and compassion flowed freely. “Your wife just died? Oh, I’m so sorry! Can you tell me about it? What can I do to help?” Everything changed in an instant.

In the anecdote, Covey is arguably being discourteous when he confronts the father. He assumes that the father didn’t care about how his kids were behaving and how their behavior was affecting the other people in the subway car. But after he finds out he was wrong, he — unlike the patron — doesn’t let his embarrassment keep him from being compassionate. It turns into a beautiful soulful interaction.

Would it have been better of Covey had kept his mouth shut and not confront the father at all? I don’t think so, even if it may have been more courteous.

What Would the World Be Like if Everyone was Courteous?

This question is not as straightforward as it looks. Courteousness is not a clear cut good trait. Someone can be courteous and be a doormat. Someone can be courteous and not a doormat. What’s the difference? Let’s examine.

The Courteous Doormat
The main characteristic of the doormat is the lack of ability to relate to others as an equal. When the doormat is wronged she takes it and does nothing about it. Maybe she fumes in private, but she does not take steps to correct the situation. She lacks courage. She lack’s strength of character. She probably lacks self-worth. Yes, she’s kind and courteous, but it’s not really all that healthy.

If the world was full of courteous doormats life would be not much different than it is now, except maybe worse. There’d be a lot of passive aggression. Kind words would lose their meaning, since you’d never know if someone actually meant them or was using them as a mask to hide their contempt. Not good.

The Courteous Non-Doormat
The difference between this person and the doormat isn’t that this person never gets stepped on. Anyone who is kind an courteous will eventually encounter someone who tries to take advantage of their good-naturedness. The difference is the reaction. The doormat does nothing. (Or effectively nothing if she fumes in private.) The non-doormat takes action. She courteously confronts the person. She asks what’s the problem is. She assumes it was a misunderstanding. If it wasn’t a misunderstanding, the non-doormat simply cuts ties with the person. If it was a misunderstanding she works with the person to fix the problem.

The courteous non-doormat is not afraid to see others as an equal. That is, she’s not afraid to confront them when she feels wronged. After all, why would you be afraid to approach someone who’s you’re equal? Also, because of her strength of character, she can act out of compassion — be vulnerable — without fear of injury. She has a thick skin without a wall.

To be a courteous non-doormat is without a doubt a positive trait. If the world were filled with this kind of person life would be much more pleasant. There’d be a lot more happiness, openness, and understanding. ^_^

See! Way too long for a comment!

Keeping score in general feels bad when it comes to service, and money is the ultimate way of keeping score.

Also, how much money you have isn’t an indication of how much good karma you’ve amassed. When we buy things all we see is the end product, and as we all know, the ends don’t usually justify the means. If the food you’re eating now was procured in such a way that the soil underneath has been depleted of nutrients, is it worth the cheaper price than the one that was farmed sustainably? The plastic option may be cheaper but it’s often not recyclable or biodegradable. Is the computer that ultimately ends up in an electronics junk heap poisoning the earth worth the affordable price? We don’t see these negatives when we buy a new product. And even when there is information on products (Organic! Free range!) it can often be misleading. You can meet all the standards of organic and still not produce your products sustainably. There’s no regulation on what “Free range” actually means.

So yes, it’s very clear that you can generate lots of money by doing things that are unsustainable. That is, the value you provided to the end user came at a cost to the earth or to others who don’t have a say in the free market.

And, of course, when you go to spend the money you can use it in very damaging ways: flights around the world, giant houses, more new stuff than you can count.

Money is like power. When you have a lot of it it’s tempting and easy to misuse it. It’s also tempting to do amass it in less than ethical ways.

I suppose, then, that it’s not surprising that a primary sustainability metric is income. The more money you make the less likely it is that you’re living sustainably. Why? Because of all the reasons I’ve listed above. To generate money you probably waste a lot and you’re probably will to spend money on things that are also wasteful.

It certainly seems like the only way to do good for the world is to be OK with living on virtually nothing. But that sounds less than wonderful.

Can you make money sustainably?

There are some occupations that don’t do that much damage to the environment. Blogging, for instance, is fairly low. People aren’t buying new computers for the sake of reading a blog, and there are lots of ways to get access to said blog without even owning a computer. In general anything where there is no physical product is very low on the impact scale. (At least that seems intuitive to me… I don’t know if that’s actually the case.) Also with blogging and other content type things, it doesn’t matter all that much as you get more and more readers. With something like making cars or electronic stuff or plastic candy dispensers or disposable diapers, the more customers you have the greater your negative impact on the earth.

I imagine with one of these low impact type careers (especially content generation) you could have the potential to make lots of money essentially guilt free. And if you’re wise in the spending of your money you could have an incredibly positive impact on the world.