Good Trumps Evil.

I just spent time with a good friend who asked me: “Why do you believe in Progress?”

I’ve been hard at work building a firm dedicated to this deep faith in Progress for over a year now. This philosophy of Progress is absolute. I believe in the long run, Transparency, Empowerment and Wellness will emerge. That Equality and Justice will prevail and Health and Sustainability will become the norm.

But my friend makes a good point:

How can I believe this when at the same time the headline of this article reflects a current reality that makes our stomachs turn?

How can Progress be Inevitable when we see police brutality, wealth inequality, racial tensions, poverty, violence and other ills everyday? How can Progress exist when our politics have devolved to name-calling headline-stealing marketing tactics?

The truth is: Progress is inevitable, but it takes time. Progress can be ugly. It involves setbacks and failure and all sorts of the normal sometimes painful realities of life that we experience everyday as individuals and society.

The true reason I believe in Progress is highly personal and involves faith. I believe in a higher power that is here caring for us and helping to make the world a better place each day; and that the miracle of how this works is that it shows up in each of our individual small actions each day.

That at the level of companies, when we band together around a mission with a set of values in tow, we actually can make the world a better place through our collective actions and that the same even happens in bigger organizations. Like countries. Like even in our Country ‘Tis of Thee.

Even Reason supports this faith the closer we look. Transparency means that the videos we see of unnecessary violence shines a light on that Evil so that it can be eradicated.

When a light shines on darkness it can no longer exist.

Reason shows us that somehow we have these supercomputers in our hands allowing us to connect with billions of people on the planet in real time. That we are each individually empowered with these tools to learn, to grow, to strive and to become the people we have the potential to be.

But yeah, it is hard. Damn hard.

The evils in the world we see and experience are real. And it takes time for Progress to unfold.

But Progress happens through the efforts of individuals doing things in small and big ways everyday.

My friend pointed out that the opposite of Faith is Fear.

And I definitely feel both, especially when contemplating the almost inevitable failure of my attempt to build a mission driven investment firm, because almost all startups fail. That is a fact.

But I’m trying harder to retain my faith. In Progress and in a higher power, because that is what I believe despite the messy, volatile, sometimes pain-filled reality of the Cycles through which Progress unfolds.

Thanks for reading this and for doing your part, whatever that might be, to be part of the inevitable Progress we need. Because it is going to take all of us to make the headline of this post true :-).

(Thanks to Vincent Benjamin for asking and encouraging me to share these thoughts).