Three Practical Principles

There’s an ongoing “debate” in intellectual and academic circles about the idea of free will. “People don’t have free will because our brains rely on electrical impulses and chemical messengers,” or some variation thereof is the gist of the argument. Sometimes you see it expounded or extrapolated into theological discussions or discussions of social constructs over personal agency. These are all lovely high minded discussions, but they often result in a discourse that is disconnected from reality. “You don’t have free will. So what?”

As financial planners, we often find ourselves operating within some de facto frameworks. For example, the tax code is what it is; we can disagree with how it’s written or the motivations behind the design of certain features or facets of it, but we and our clients gain nothing by jawing about what we don’t like about it, rather than playing within the rules as aggressively and prudently as possible. You might argue this is a utilitarian framework, but as I’ll discuss shortly, there’s a stronger underlying principle behind this point of view.

This week, I’m sharing three decision-making constructs that I use, both personally but also professionally, and how they inform a better and more practical approach on the road to living a life more meaningfully.

Always Kindness, Never Niceness

A long time ago, I explained a core philosophy I hold with respect to other people: “Always be kind, never be nice.” At face value, you can get a knee-jerk reaction from people that this philosophy means you’re somehow the most well-meaning wrecking ball of a person. Some might even perceive that as true, when their lens in discourse is limited to a finite sample of your behavior, that might very well be the truth of the matter as far as they’re concerned. Here, defining “kind” and “nice” are helpful.

Kindness is a philosophy to act with positive intentions and with the aim of the best possible outcome, while nice is a behavior aimed at being inoffensive or otherwise ingratiating yourself to your audience with selfish intent. You are kind when you want the best for other people, you are nice when you are polite or complimentary to get something you want.

Kindness regularly expresses itself in the same behaviors as niceness because there is no reason to be unduly harsh, rude, or otherwise to behave in an unkind manner. However, kindness is driven by a motivation to the good. This means that kindness can often be fairly characterized as impolite or even rude behavior. Telling someone that they’re mistaken about something and explaining why can be contradictory and evolve into a disagreeable discussion or even an argument. Yet, for example, the Greek philosopher Epictetus suggests we should pity those who misunderstand because they would not say incorrect things if they better understood them. You tell your friend they don’t look good in that hat not because you aim to offend them, but because you don’t wish for them to look foolish or  become embarrassed when someone with less kind intentions simply tells them it looks stupid.

In turn, the motivation and consequential behaviors of “nice” are entirely performative. Their sole aim is to deceive, ingratiate, or otherwise avoid conflict without care for what harm it causes. The behaviors of “nice” are always pleasant at face value, but for those familiar with the southern saying, “Bless your heart.” A nice person is your friend who always compliments others and then promptly goes about criticizing them the moment they’ve left the room. A nice behavior is telling people what they want to hear rather than what they need to hear. Be mindful that the nice people you know are quite often being just as “nice” to you. As the old adage goes: When people show you who they are, believe them.

The principle of being kind rather than nice means that you will find yourself at odds with others more frequently than you’d like. You’ll disagree on otherwise perfectly agreeable subjects and with people you otherwise like and respect. You might find that being consistently kind over time is a long term strategy rather than a churning behavior aimed at short-term gains. The longer you maintain a decorum of kindness over being nice in the moment, the more you will come to be recognized as a person of good principles rather than a Machiavellian politick; you become known as being a contributor to the good, not an adherent of the convenient or the profitable.

Separate the Person from the Professional

One of the most difficult things we are faced with on an interpersonal level is finite lens through which we get to know people. People often enter our lives through either a personal lens or a professional lens; we are invited to get to know them as “Juliet, the project manager” or “Gary, our brother’s friend from college.” This framing often leads us to inextricably associate our understanding of these people by how we meet them and through that point of view, what kind of person they are.

Actor-observer bias tells us that there is context for what we do and that other people do things because that is who they are. Dr. Megan McCoy explains this succinctly as: “You cut someone off because you’re trying to make your exit from the highway before you miss it. Someone else cuts you off because they’re a terrible person who doesn’t know how to drive.” But the inverse positive corollary can also work against us. Charlotte is an executive because Charlotte has always been an executive; in fact, she was born in a power suit and running a billion dollar division of her company. Because “Charlotte” sprang into our consciousness as a successful and driven person, she is and always has been a successful and driven person, and consequently, we struggle to see her as anything but that.

A meaningful tool to apply to your understanding of people is to know them both personally and professionally. Lest you think this is the most obvious advice in the world, let me frame this with two examples, one based around the personal and the other around the professional.

In the first instance, you have a colleague you’ve gotten to know at professional conferences you both attend regularly over time, and from time to time you text or share about working experiences. When your colleague complains about not being recognized for their accomplishments at work, you naturally sympathize with their plight and lend an ear to their woes. But keep in mind that you don’t actually work with this person. You’ve never been to their office, shared a client meeting with them, or seen their work product. Because you want to see the good in your colleague, you believe them when they tell you they’re being treated unwell at work, and you want to believe they’re an A+ team member of their firm because they’re an A+ person you’ve gotten to know and like.

But keep in mind what you don’t actually know. You don’t know if they’re regularly late or miss deadlines. You don’t know if their work is slapdash or rushed, such that it often requires corrections or amendments. You don’t know if their polite and warm affect with you extends to how they speak to clients or their colleagues in the office. What you have is a friendly relationship, despite the professional context, and therein that relationship is more personal than professional. Consequently, you can easily find yourself ascribing positive professional qualities to this individual, when you in fact only know them personally.

Imagine then, in our second example, being on the professional side of that relationship. You work with this colleague every day, and as a stroke of good fortune, you actually think their work is exceptional. They’re polite and polished with clients, speak well of their colleagues in the office, and deliver effectively and efficiently in every manner you’d expect of them. You advocate for them professionally because you approve of their work ethic and demeanor, and by extension, you’re fond of them individually. This person is a good employee or team member, and thus it follows that they are a good person.

Would it then surprise you to learn that this person has nothing but nasty, cruel, or maliciously untrue things to say about you, the team, or the firm when they’re at home or talking to their friends about work? Would you think entirely differently of them if you’d heard them speak ill of your spouse, or had shared confidential firm information with their friends to make a mockery of their team or the mission they’re working on? Would you disapprove or wish to disassociate with them entirely if you learned they held deeply racist, sexist, or other unreasonably and entirely disagreeable opinions about other types of people? Of course you would, because you’ve only been exposed to that professional side of them. You want to believe they’re good people because that is how they show up at work, and by extension, you believe they will show up in their personal lives.

Consequently, whether we think of people as our professional colleagues or our personal friends, the framing by which we get to know someone can substantially bias our perception of them in other contexts. It’s meaningful to take a step back when you evaluate someone or what you know and think about them to think hard about what you actually know, such as those experiences and observations you’ve made personally, and what you believe about them without evidence, such as the qualities you ascribe to them because of the unrelated experiences and observations you’ve had.

In a practical sense, this can mean politely recognizing that when your conference colleague complains about work, that they might be entirely truthful in what they’re describing and that you’ll respond on that basis, but also openly acknowledging that you don’t actually know the quality of their work and that your feedback is given with that in mind. It returns to the principle of being kind, ultimately wanting the good for the people in your life, but without falling into the temptation to treat them as entirely reliable narrators or even yourself as an entirely reliable narrator in your understanding of what’s true and what’s to be believed.

Principles Aren’t Exclusive from Pragmatism

Given the two prior frameworks, you might come away with the impression that the ideas I’m trying to share here are “always do the right thing and don’t trust people to be completely honest with you.” Principled and practical as each of those ideas might be, I’m here now to argue that you don’t have to make a tradeoff in principles to be pragmatic or vice versa. Being kind rather than nice is a long-term oriented behavior because while it might not win you any friends in the moment, it means you’ll live in harmonious congruence with your long term identity as a person who means well and does well by it. Trusting the people in your life that you know but also acknowledging that you only know them in a certain way and a certain context is both practical but also provides you with a guardrail against being taken in by face-value judgments.

The problem with exchanging your principles for any short term gain, whether it be being nice to get what you want or being too focused on what you believe rather than what you know about others, is that you inevitably will find yourself backed into a corner you do not wish to be in. Being nice only when it suits you inevitably produces the outcome that you’re likely to find yourself in the company of others who are similarly performative, because as time goes on you will both know and be known as someone who only aims to get what they want without regard for others. Being entirely sympathetic or judgmental of others without regard for the broader truth means you may find yourself supporting or advocating for someone or something that you’d otherwise not have gotten involved in had you known the full story to begin with. Both of these are easy mistakes to make, particularly when our cognitive dissonance bias can make it so easy for us to double down on the decisions we’ve already made rather than reflecting on the mistakes we might have made along the way and aiming to learn from them.

This is where the point of living in alignment with your principles is made the most important. Being principled is a fundamentally long-term behavior, and one that is both easiest to follow in practice but also a type of behavior that is likely to reduce the costs of regret. We often find that we regret behaviors and decisions that we’ve made in the moment or with short-term emphasis, because they are often dissonant with who we think of ourselves as being. “I’m a good person because ___________. A good person wouldn’t have done ____________.” The more you can adhere to the former and avoid the latter, the happier you’ll be.

So take the principled and long-term pragmatic approach. Be honest in your opinions and your advice. Ask more questions before rushing to sympathy or judgment. Be mindful that no matter how compelling or severe the story one party tells, that there is always another perspective on the events they’re sharing and describing. Or, to borrow the words of Walt Witman popularized by Ted Lasso: “Be curious, not judgmental.” Take the time and put forth the effort to be kind rather than nice, and try your best to separate your warm or not-so-warm feelings about someone personally or professionally from the part you know less well. You might find they’re better, or worse, than you thought. How you then deal with that is a matter of your own character.