Between sainthood and nicety
Nice people seldom achieve a lot. If this is true, then isn’t it worth pondering over the reasons why niceness turns into a deficiency instead of an asset? The answer, as should be the case with anything humane, is complicated. Generalizing is not the ideal way of understanding human behavior but then, it’s difficult to push every breathing soul into a common cohort. There are way too many of us—close to 8 billion and counting — and we’re never going to cover all grounds.
That said, we can always put special boxes for different categories. In this particular scenario, let’s create two: nice and non-nice. The nice folks are the ones who care about others. The non-nice are the ones who seem to only care about themselves. These are narrow perceptions, of course. Given a certain situation, various people act variously depending on various factors that play a part in the stimulation and reaction. For example, if you’re hurrying toward airport, you might overlook your niceness credentials after overlooking a random stranger who needed help on the highway. You didn’t want to miss your flight. On the other hand, a non-nice person could be forced to be nice by peer pressure. 3 out of 5 passengers hand some changes to the professional beggar in the local train and you don’t want to be be in the minority so you reluctantly become the 4th passenger.
A classic case of show and tell.
The distinction between nice and non-nice can be established in a more familiar setting. Let’s say, in a team. That’s when the objective supersedes the personality. XYZ is the goal and the team leader shouldn’t leave no stone unturned. If the person worries too much about their niceness credentials, tough decisions won’t be taken. Without which, the system will suffer. Some of the biggest achievers in history are often portrayed as ruthless in their execution. And this MO applies even to those we’ve come to view as saintly. Florence Nightingale, according to her aide, was a nightmare to work with. And this is true even for the likes of Gandhi, Teresa and Mandela. They may have earned their respective halos but they’ve had goals to accomplish, walls to fall and aspirations to raise. They can’t always hide behind the proscenium of niceness. That’s not how it works.
Shrewdness matters.
