New Year Thoughts
On Being Kind
Key Goal: Be Kinder
Wrote this for my newsletter a few days back. Sharing it here as-is.
Hello everyone,
I have been writing Could be Worse for four years now. Since I started this in 2019, I’ve quit two jobs, we’ve all lived through a pandemic, N and I have moved countries and I’ve become a marginally better version of myself.
I’d like to believe that I have become kinder and more benevolent toward people over the last few years.
It’s partly age. At 40, I do not feel like the things we are fighting for like health, happiness, and wisdom are scarce resources. I’ve been able to shed large parts of the “cracking exams and getting into places” mentality that had been conditioned growing up. I increasingly believe there are lots of good, sincere people in the world and the mutual mistrust you see in high-intensity places like elite schools or high-performing companies isn’t representative of the world. And Twitter most definitely isn’t representative of the world as well.
This post is as much a reminder for myself as for the reader that one of my key goals going forward is to be kind.
An Ex-Boss
“You are kind and reasonable — won’t work here. You need to be abrasive and thump the table and demand things.”
That was my boss at Amazon back in 2018 telling me the most wtf things a boss has ever said to me.
I listened with increasing incredulity until my rising anger got the better of me and I rose and thumped his face. Well, not really — I imagined doing all that. Pretty soon I left Amazon partly to get away from his toxic self.
A younger me would have tried to change. This is the toll to pay to cross the corporate bridge, I’d have thought. But in my mid-thirties, I felt secure enough in who I was. Was I going to diminish a part of my personality I considered a strength so I could get ahead in an organization? No way!
Conflict as rigor
Amazon has 14 leadership principles — kindness isn’t one of them. Most high-performing corporate cultures veer toward conflict. Amazon loves it when employees are on the edge of a war. The belief is that friction creates rigor and rigor creates results.
From an old NYT article:
“You walk out of a conference room and you’ll see a grown man covering his face,” he said. “Nearly every person I worked with, I saw cry at their desk.”
Nearly all companies I’ve worked for encouraged a certain amount of brashness and conflict. Ideas are to be debated and thrashed out. Sounds Socratic in theory but it’s often an emotionally bruising affair.
You pay for it through unintentional metamorphosis. Over time it fundamentally alters the way we see the world — purely objective, full of ideas, and solvable through smarts. You begin to love the friction and see combative ideation as the right way to approach everything in life.
Where then is the place for kindness?
Kindness is uncool
For a long time, I had the following equations in my head on kindness
- Kind = Meek
- Kind = Boring
- Kind = Ineffectiveness
- Kind = Fake
- Kind = Uncool
The problem was that kindness didn’t fit the value equation. If you grew up in an environment that placed competitiveness, smarts, and performance as pre-eminent (like most of us did), kindness didn’t have much of a place.
Talk to any young kid and you will struggle to find kindness as a trait they admire. Winning is cool as evidenced by awards on the shelves. People ooh and aah when you excel at singing, writing, sports, academics, etc. Credentials like IIT, IIM, Founder, Dr., VP, Head, etc. signal smarts and hard work.
So then, kindness becomes a liability almost. Being kind to your peers is seen as a weakness — a refuge of the inept. This gets transplanted into the workplace, especially in India where the idea of competition and beating your peers continues to remain intense.
Kind vs. Nice
Being kind is not the same as being nice. Niceness is easy. Niceness can be faked. Niceness can be manipulative.
- A kind person is often self-assured; A nice person is often needy
- Kindness doesn’t expect returns; Niceness expects quid pro quo or more
- Kindness helps; Niceness pleases.
- Kindness is a strength; Niceness is a weakness.
- Kindness starts with self; Niceness starts with others.
Niceness is performative. It’s the act of being socially pleasing. It’s about showing the world how wonderful a person you are — often putting up grand shows of what appears as kindness for the sake of being seen.
Kindness on the other hand just is. There is no other option but to be kind. It can exist in the dark without a performance and doesn’t want to be revealed in any grand gesture.
Not to say the world doesn’t need niceness. There are nice people in the world and there are kind people in the world. Sometimes, the two overlap. But sometimes they don’t. Don’t fall for niceness. Don’t ignore kindness.
Replace annoyance with kindness
“Be kind, for everyone you meet is fighting a harder battle.”
― Plato
Increasingly, I have begun to seek kindness towards those who induce anger at smaller interactions in my life. This is hard.
Someone who cuts you on the road; A grumpy shopkeeper; A boss who is not kind to you; A maid who comes late; or A government employee who is not moving on things as fast as they should. We live in a world of victims. Everyone has a story that causes them to be where they are.
Outrage vs. Kindness
Righteous outrage is not the same as kindness.
Today, social media is full of anger. Well-intentioned people, all over the world, look to be the voice of victims around the world. Whether it’s Ukraine, China, Gaza, India, or the US, global collective activism is predicated on fighting the injustice, genocide, or harassment that these groups face around the world.
It quite easily morphs into anger.
Imagine you are sitting in a restaurant and you see another customer abuse the waiting staff. There is a clear victim here and an injustice that triggers the warrior inside of you. At this point, there are two options: a) Kindness and b) Anger. More often than not we will all gravitate to option B. This is what movies tell us. Pull the guy by the collar and ask him to apologize. Get the bully to submit.
Option A is having a few kind words with the person on the receiving end. Option A is perhaps leaving a very generous tip as some kind of recompense. Option A is quietly asking the manager if they can institute a policy where customers can’t get away with abusing the waiting staff. Option A is looking at the victim and seeing what can be done to ease or solve their pain.
Doing both is impossible — it requires different states of mind. Once the anger is triggered, one becomes laser-focused on the perpetrators. The perpetrators’ every action is analyzed and they need to be brought to justice. The victim becomes a mere symbol — not a person. A sign of the fight that needs to be won at all costs. Sometimes even at the cost of the victim.
Anger is justified at times when you have to fight for justice or to break a powerful system. It is how laws change, revolutions start and systems get rahauled.
But social media anger is:
- Learn about an injustice
- Get pissed
- Channel the anger as attacks on the perpetrator
- Feel better
Knowing this, increasingly, propaganda machines (on all sides) continue to churn out content that provokes. The conversation is now between two angry mobs with pitchforks screaming at each other. The victim is now a postcard; a weapon in your fight. The more gruesome the image, the better your chance of making a deeper dent in the other camp.
Kindness ripples outwards
In the event of decompression, an oxygen mask will automatically appear in front of you. Place it firmly over your nose and mouth, secure the elastic band behind your head, and breathe normally. If you are traveling with a child or someone who requires assistance, secure your mask first, and then help the other person.
Wear your oxygen mask first. Then your child’s. Then look around. You will find a hundred different instances to be kind — to your neighbor, a maid, a shopkeeper, a security guard, etc. that you may soon realize you do not have time to outrage on Twitter. Drop little stones of kindness in the water every day and watch the ripples travel.
Key goal: Be Kind
We are in the era of AI and data. We measure everything. The great battle of our era isn’t social media or fundamentalism or even climate change, it’s the battle for our fundamental selves. Measurement over feelings.
For a man who’s known primarily for his silent movies, Charlie Chaplin’s speech in The Great Dictator is profound. Even in 1940, he said this:
“Our knowledge has made us cynical; our cleverness, hard and unkind. We think too much and feel too little. More than machinery, we need humanity. More than cleverness, we need kindness and gentleness.”
Even the man who created the bruising culture of Amazon had this to say about kindness during a Princeton graduation speech back in 2010,
“What I want to talk to you about today is the difference between gifts and choices. Cleverness is a gift. Kindness is a choice. Gifts are easy — they’re given, after all. Choices can be hard. You can seduce yourself with your gifts if you’re not careful. And if you do, it will probably be to the detriment of your choices.”
Several research studies have linked kindness with well-being and happiness. So, even if the axiomatic nature of my preaching doesn’t appeal to you, look at it for self-improvement reasons. Being kind is good for you.
I am going to take a lot of goals in 2024 but a key one is to be a bit more kinder than I was the year before. There are no downsides.
Could be kinder,
Tyag
P.S. — This post isn’t preaching. I am guilty of many of the things I have called out here. Think of it as an affirmation post wherein by writing out a desired end state, I would hopefully get myself there.
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