Make Doing The Right Thing A Habit
Lying liars start with a little white lie
Doing the right thing is ringing in my head because I just completed two books — Lance Armstrong: Cycle of Lies and Flash Boys — that turns the idea of what is right on its head.
Lance has been famously flayed for his lies about systemic doping in competitive racing on his way to an unprecedented 7 Tour de Frances victories. He’s been categorically exiled but one wonders if he believes what he did was wrong. In his “apology” interview with Oprah Winfrey, he showed some remorse for wrecking people’s lives but was unapologetic about what he did to make it to the top of the heap. After all, everyone doped. He just happened to do it the best.
In Flash Boys, Michael Lewis (author of Moneyball) revealed the dark underbelly of High Frequency Trading on Wall Street. In a nutshell, HFT firms were able to take advantage of the bid/offer spread that was created from how stock transactions were signaled to the various exchanges. This provided them an informational advantage on how a certain stock would be priced. It’s like knowing the future for a few seconds, and utilizing high speed computers to make a killing on it. One might say that is classic arbitrage, but it is in actuality an unfair informational advantage. And the worst of it is that it appeared to be sanctioned by the various stock exchanges and the U.S. Securities laws.
In each case, the actors were not able to do the right thing because they did not know they were doing wrong. They got to that point because external systems and regulators not only reinforced that what they were doing was right, but also financially rewarded their actions. That should have been the tell tale sign of doing something unfair, but rarely can the mouse with the cheese give up the cheese.
What went wrong here was that Lance and the Flash Boys did not do the right thing from the get go. They must have known they were doing wrong in their hearts until the money, power and fame tricked the mind.
That is the key: do the right thing early, often, and always. Every time you lie and get away with it, you don’t. You know you’ve lied. Your soul corrodes a little more each time. Lies extend to acts of omission. If you don’t correct someone’s obvious misimpression, that’s a lie. If the waiter miscalculates the bill in your favor, it’s not ok to remain silent. Do the right thing even if no one is looking.
You may get away with these little lies everyday and think them harmless. Trust me, they’re not. It’s you who will get hurt the most at the end.
Be true to yourself and you’ll be amazed by the person you truly are.
