Thoughts on Being a Good Person

Finn teaches at Starvard and is writing a book called Thoughts on Life. This essay is his opinion: one person's thinking, offered in the open, not a lesson and not a rulebook.

Every year or so, a student catches me in the hallway with the biggest question there is. Not how do I pass, not how do I get the job. How do I be a good person?

I never have a short answer, and I have stopped apologizing for that. But I have noticed something about the question itself: the people who ask it are usually already closer to the answer than they think. The ones who worry me are the ones who never ask.

Why there is no course in this

People ask why Starvard has no course on being good. We have a course on nearly everything else. The honest reason is that goodness is not a subject. A subject has a syllabus, and a syllabus has an order, and being good refuses to sit in an order. It is unique to each person, and personal in a way that a curriculum cannot be. Your temptations are not my temptations. The moment goodness mattered most in your life looked nothing like the moment it mattered most in mine.

There is a second reason. If we made it a course, we would have to grade it, and grading goodness would corrupt it by Friday. People would perform virtue for the points. What I can do instead is what a teacher can always do: think out loud, in public, and let you argue back. So here is my thinking.

Attention is the first kindness

Most unkindness is not cruelty. It is hurry. It is the unanswered message, the name not learned, the person talked over in the meeting because the clock was loud. Almost nobody I know is trying to be bad at life on purpose; nearly everyone who hurts people is doing it by not noticing.

So the first practice is embarrassingly small: pay attention. Learn the name of the person who cleans your building. Watch the face of the friend who says they are fine. Goodness begins as a quality of noticing before it becomes a quality of action, and you cannot give what you have not first seen a need for.

Small promises, kept

Character is not built in the grand moments. It is built in the five minute decisions nobody will ever check. I will call you back. I will send that today. I will be there at six.

Keep the small promises and the large ones tend to keep themselves, because you have become the kind of person for whom a word is a weight. Break the small ones often enough and you will find, some hard day, that you no longer believe your own announcements. Neither will anyone else.

Honesty when it costs a little

Telling the truth when it is free proves almost nothing. The practice that counts is honesty with a small price on it: admitting the error before anyone finds it, saying the unflattering sentence in the meeting, telling a friend the thing a friend is for.

Notice I said a small price. Start there. People who try to become radically honest overnight usually become cruel by Thursday and call it integrity. Kindness and honesty are not enemies. If your truth needs a victim, deliver it again, slower.

Going back with glue

Here is a secret the self help shelf will not tell you: good people break things. They say the cutting sentence, miss the important day, fail the person who counted on them. The difference is not that good people never break things. The difference is that they go back with glue.

A real apology has no defense attorney living inside it. It does not explain, at length, why the breakage was understandable. It says: I did it, it hurt you, I am sorry, here is what changes. Then it changes. I have been repaired by apologies like that, and I have tried to hand a few out myself. The glue is never as strong as the original. It holds anyway, and sometimes the mended place becomes the strongest part.

The hard cases

It is easy to be good to the people who are easy: the grateful, the charming, the ones who can return the favor. The practice gets interesting with the difficult list. Family, where the old wounds live. The person who can do nothing for you. The person who disagrees with you in public and enjoys it.

I am not saying let people harm you. Boundaries are part of goodness, not its opposite. I am saying watch where your kindness stops, because that border is the honest map of your character. Everyone is generous inside their own fence. The work is at the fence line.

Goodness is not niceness

Somewhere along the way we confused being good with being pleasant. They are different projects. Niceness avoids the hard conversation; goodness has it, gently, and stays in the room. Niceness agrees; goodness sometimes says no, and means it as a kindness. Niceness wants to be liked. Goodness wants the people around it to be well, which is a much more demanding employer.

A practice, not a personality

Here is the part I most want my students to hear. Goodness is not a trait you either have or lack, like height. It behaves like a skill. It responds to practice. It has good days and bad days. It grows in small repetitions and it atrophies in neglect, exactly like a language or an instrument.

That is good news, though it may not sound like it at first. It means nobody is finished, and nobody is excused. The saint and the scoundrel are both just further along their own practice. You are always practicing something. The only question is what.

Three questions for the end of the day

I give my students three questions to ask at night. They fit on an index card, which around here is high praise.

Did I notice? Did I keep my word? Did I repair what I broke?

Most days you will score two out of three, and some days one, and the score is not the point. The point is that the questions keep the practice in front of you, the way scales keep the song in front of a pianist. You are not grading yourself. You are tuning.

You will not finish becoming a good person. That is not the bad news; that is the whole design. It is a direction, not a destination, and the direction is available to absolutely everyone, starting with the next five minutes.

I will see you in the hallway.