#43 - Mr. Right
"Do the best you can until you know better. Then when you know better, do better." - Maya Angelou
Hello,
This week I got interested in being right.
The word "right" has two meanings. One is "morally good, justified, or acceptable". Another is "true or correct as a fact".
Oh, how sweet it could be - as business leaders or as private individuals - to be right and to do the right thing 100% of the time! But we all know too well that it is impossible in our complex world of uncertainty and moral dilemmas.
Then, if doing the right thing all the time is impossible, is it pointless to even try?
And, If being right all the time is impossible, why do we waste so much energy to prove to others that we are right even when we are ourselves not sure?
The key ideas I've curated for this newsletter:
There is a place for moral philosophy in business and in private life. Two great books - one, hilarious and profound, by a famous Hollywood screenwriter Michael Schur, and another by a group of business school professors - friendly introduce us to the world of moral philosophy so that we could figure out for ourselves what doing the right thing means. Both books see the ultimate goal of moral philosophy as human flourishing. I love the idea.
We can make peace with not being right all the time. First, trying to be right or to prove we're right when you don't know enough can shut us out from trying to listen and understand. Second, being right 51% of the time is already good enough - why not striving just for that? And third, there are a couple of mental models that help us being right a bit more often - and how we interpret reality will affect the way we experience life.
Finally, sometimes being right is not right - as you will learn from a great story by Jeff Bezos.
How to Be Perfect: The Correct Answer to Every Moral Question
"Most people think of themselves as "good", and would like to be thought of as "good". Consequently, many (given the choice) would prefer to do a "good" thing instead of a "bad" thing. But it's not always easy to determine what is good or bad in this confusing, pretzel-twisty world, full of complicated choices and pitfalls and booby traps and bad advice from seemingly trustworthy people. And even if you do somehow navigate the minefield of modern life and success at being good, you're just one person! The planet contains eight billion people, and a lot of them don't seem to care at all about being good.
It's hard not to wonder if one person being "good" even matters.
What the hell am I supposed to do? This question - how can we live a more ethical life? - has plagued people for thousands of years, but it's never been tougher to answer than it is now.
To make it a little less overwhelming, this book hopes to boil down the whole confusing morass into four simple questions that we can ask ourselves whenever we encounter any ethical dilemma, great or small:
What are we doing?
Why are we doing it?
Is there something we could do that's better?
Why is it better?
That's moral philosophy and ethics in a nutshell - the search for answers to those four questions."
Book: "How to Be Perfect: The Correct Answer to Every Moral Question", by Michael Schur
Doing the Right Thing, or Why We Need Moral Philosophy as Business Leaders
"For decades, business schools have placed finance and economics center stage. These disciplines tell us that the better workplace is one that uses resources - including you - more efficiently so that all can prosper.
Latterly, management psychology came to the fore. Psychologists go beyond economics to tell us that efficiency and wealth are not enough; the better workplace is one in which we are more emotionally engaged, attuned and feel more positive about work.
But there is a missing voice - we need to hear from philosophers. Beyond material goods or feeling good, what is good for us? That's the central question that moral philosophy seeks to address. What is good for us is what enables our development and flourishing as human beings.
Instead of treating others as commoditised resources and becoming those resources ourselves, we explore what it will take to enable human flourishing in the workplace"
"Philosophy cannot offer prescriptions. But it can give us tools, discipline, encouragement, and inspiration to figure out ourselves what's the meaning of doing the right thing, especially when it's not obvious, when there are hard choices and no playbook to rely on; when there are dilemmas of the "lose-lose" variety. Philosophy can give people a moral compass to navigate through the world of uncertainty. We need philosophy because when we can't rely on data sets, we only have our judgement. And this judgement comes from what we care about and stand for."
I'd Rather Learn Than Be Right
"It does take a lot of presence to listen, to tune in and to decide, ultimately, I am going to do the best I know how. That's all I can do. And for me, I keep using this mantra in my head, which is, I'd rather learn than be right. I'd rather learn. We're going to learn about what happens here, because if I try to be right, I'm just going to miss on something else.
And when I say about "be right", I mean righteous, when I want to prove that I'm right. Now, I just would rather learn something. And when you are in "by me" leadership stance, learning is the most important thing. And it's being in a state of awe. Like, "It's a wild world out there. Let's find out. What's going to be like?"
Podcast: "The Knowledge Project: Trusting Your Instincts, with Diana Chapman"
Try to Be Right 51% of the Time
"Own something, make lots of decisions that have outcomes, try to be right 51% of the time, do that often and repeat.
You could be wrong an awful a lot and still come out ahead. And I think that in managing decisions and managing people and feeling good about your work and yourself, it's easy to get down very quickly in any business because you're going to have a whole bunch of things that don't work. I mean, we're all human. No one likes to have their stuff not do well. No one likes to fail the test. Learning to be wrong and accept that as a process or indeed an inevitable outcome if you're doing things correctly means that you can be correct and wrong at the same time, if that makes sense. Yeah, I'd much rather be right 80% of the time and hopefully we drive towards that. But I grew up, I was a derivatives trader, really becoming the house of the casino is the goal. You don't need a lot of edge in running a blackjack game. You just need a little bit and then you need a lot of players. And that's all that this is."
Podcast: Know What You Are Selling, with Nick Kokonas - Colossus® (joincolossus.com)
How to Be Right More Often - the Occam's Razor and the Principle of Charity
Okkam's Razor
"Simpler explanations are more likely to be true than complicated ones. This is the essence of Occam's razor, a classic principle of logic and problem-solving. Instead of wasting your time trying to disprove complex scenarios, you can make decisions more confidently by basing them on the explanation that has the fewest moving parts."
Book: "The Great Mental Models Volume 1: General Thinking Concepts"
Principle of Charity
"The principle of charity is that when you're confronted with this ambiguous situations when you're interacting with someone, when you're hearing someone speak and it sounds like they're saying something stupid, rude or offensive, Step One is to recognise that it is an ambiguous situation. Step Two is to see whether you can find a charitable interpretation: an interpretation of what was said or done that would make the person reasonable.
The long term investment is do I want to get upset or do I want to live my life well? The reality is ambiguous, that it's subject to interpretation, so I face the decision problem right now how I am going to interpret it because the way I interpret it is going to affect the way I experience things. And the way I experience things is going to determine how I'm going to live life between now and the fat, bolder and more wrinkly version of myself in 30 years, and I personally want it to be a good life. The world of a happy man is very different from the world of an unhappy man."
When Being Right is Not Right
"My grandfather was driving. And my grandmother had the passenger seat. She smoked throughout these trips, and I hated the smell.
At that age, I’d take any excuse to make estimates and do minor arithmetic. I’d calculate our gas mileage -- figure out useless statistics on things like grocery spending. I’d been hearing an ad campaign about smoking. I can’t remember the details, but basically the ad said, every puff of a cigarette takes some number of minutes off of your life: I think it might have been two minutes per puff. At any rate, I decided to do the math for my grandmother. I estimated the number of cigarettes per days, estimated the number of puffs per cigarette and so on. When I was satisfied that I’d come up with a reasonable number, I poked my head into the front of the car, tapped my grandmother on the shoulder, and proudly proclaimed, “At two minutes per puff, you’ve taken nine years off your life!”
I have a vivid memory of what happened, and it was not what I expected. I expected to be applauded for my cleverness and arithmetic skills. “Jeff, you’re so smart. You had to have made some tricky estimates, figure out the number of minutes in a year and do some division.” That’s not what happened. Instead, my grandmother burst into tears. I sat in the backseat and did not know what to do. While my grandmother sat crying, my grandfather, who had been driving in silence, pulled over onto the shoulder of the highway. He got out of the car and came around and opened my door and waited for me to follow. (...) We stopped beside the trailer. My grandfather looked at me, and after a bit of silence, he gently and calmly said, “Jeff, one day you’ll understand that it’s harder to be kind than clever.
Will you be clever at the expense of others, or will you be kind?"
2010 Baccalaureate Remarks - by Jeff Bezos (princeton.edu)
Let You Be Right
Stay healthy and enjoy figuring out what "right" means for you
Arina