Greatness

What, exactly, do you contribute to the world?

Lots of people go to work and come home. Good enough. A trader might have an infinitesimal contribution to market liquidity. A house flipper might, after great effort, provide someone with a home. A teacher might change the course of someone’s life. A doctor might save someone’s life. An engineer might design a road or a bridge. A journalist might inform the public.

Those are all worthwhile contributions. But what, exactly, do you contribute to this world? I mean, aside from your job and your genetic material.

Elon Musk and I disagree on this point. I don’t necessarily think that having kids, on balance, is a positive contribution to the world. Depending on your parenting abilities, it might be a negative contribution to the world! Just because you can put part A into slot B, commingling drops of semen with clots of blood, that may one day become like us, does not confer any special abilities. We can all do it. You had four kids—so what? I will be impressed if they all contribute something to the world.

So we do the jobs that we do and we have the kids that we have, but did we leave the world better than we found it? Or did we merely—exist?

Here are some ways in which we can make a lasting contribution above and beyond our lunch pail job and our DNA:

1)    You can invent something that will improve people’s lives

2)    You can endow a scholarship

3)    You can write a book

4)    You can record music

5)    You can build a building

6)    You can perform important academic research, advancing human knowledge

7)    You can develop a lifesaving medicine

8)    You can work with one alcoholic, addict, or mentally ill person and turn their life around

What I’m driving at here is making a contribution that will endure long after you are gone. I’ll go further and say that all lives do not matter—some matter more than others. Someone who merely consumes and never produces has lower moral status than someone who produces more than they consume. This is the crux of my morality, and this is the crux of your morality, too—you just don’t realize it. No tears are shed when a career criminal is murdered. But when Matthew Perry dies—an entertainer who figured prominently in a show that entertained millions of people and will be enjoyed for decades—there is an outpouring of grief. All lives are not created equal.

What I’m further driving at here is the concept of greatness—agree or disagree, like or dislike, Elon Musk is a great man. Agree or disagree, like or dislike, James Patterson is a great man. Pat Sajak is a great man. And so on. And the great thing about greatness is that we can all aspire to be great.

Years ago, when bitcoin was bubbling up, I did a podcast with Marty Bent, who had the Tales From The Crypt podcast. It was the strangest podcast I have ever done—he came to my office building in Myrtle Beach in the middle of the night with a small recording device, and we recorded it in my spare office. Subsequently, Marty got involved in politics of the right-wing variety, has had some appearances on InfoWars, and renamed his newsletter Truth For The Commoner.

I thought about that for a while. Who would aspire to be a commoner? Believe it or not, people do—their self-image is tied up in being an Average Joe. Like pretty much everyone who belongs to the UAW, or any other union. The thing I philosophically disagree with about collective bargaining is that it should be individual bargaining—hey, I work harder and faster than all these other stiffs, so I should get paid more. That’s how it is on Wall Street, and a lot of other places. There is no room for greatness in a union. There is plenty of room for greatness in finance, tech, or elsewhere. It’s about trying to be the best, which is a lesson that we are taught in tee-ball, but we forget as adults, when we work our 9-to-5 lunch pail jobs.

We gave the middle finger to a king 250 years ago, and Americans in general don’t have high opinions of absolute monarchy, but here is the funny thing about royalty—these families have been groomed for leadership for decades. By virtue of work or effort or ingenuity, they are nobody special, and yet they are great—I think the one thing we learned from the Prince Harry debacle is that some people are cut out for that job, and some are not. When the royals are in the news about one thing or another, a lot of Americans are like, who the fuck cares? It is actually pretty important.

You also don’t have to have money to be great. Dumb example, but true example: Mother Theresa. Lasting impact. Great writers are poor. Lasting impact. You don’t have to donate a $150 million building to Princeton to be great. I frown on that sort of thing, anyway—you’re helping the people who don’t need help. That’s more about ego gratification than anything. John Paulson donated a bunch of money to Harvard years ago, and Malcolm Gladwell, who never tweets, went on a tear on Twitter about what an idiot he was. It’s Paulson’s money, and he can do what he wants with it, and it’s not really our place to say how he disposes of it, but gee whiz—he could have potentially helped a lot of people, if he wanted to.

In the hierarchy of greatness, inventors are at the top. Light bulbs. Cell phones. The internet. Talking about making billions of people’s lives better over a period of centuries. There is this ongoing debate on internet memes about who was better: Edison or Tesla, the difference between them was that Edison was profit-motivated, while Nikola Tesla was not. I don’t think there is anything wrong with inventing something and profiting from it—I don’t think it makes your contribution any less noble. I present as evidence the pharmaceutical companies. Immunotherapy drugs cure cancer. With the billions spent in R&D and the length of the FDA approval process, nobody is going to do this for free. And nobody is going to do it at cost. It kills me when politicians go after the pharmaceutical companies and their lifesaving drugs. Remember when Jimmy Carter got brain cancer, and then…he suddenly got better? This wouldn’t have been possible even ten years ago. If you invent something, you get to be stupendously rich, and it does not detract one ounce from your greatness.

So how do you strive for greatness, if you are not blessed with raw intelligence, business acumen, or artistic ability? The answer is simple. Absent these qualities, you simply show kindness to everyone you meet. Not everyone can be great, in the traditional sense. We can’t all be Thomas Edison or Matthew Perry or Elon Musk. I know my limitations: I’m smart, but not that smart. Here’s the answer: you want to live your life in such a way that a lot of people show up at your funeral. That’s pretty much it. I had a good friend in Myrtle Beach commit suicide about 7 years ago. 350 people at the service, with overflow out onto the sidewalk. That hit me right between the eyes. He was part of Myrtle Beach’s upper class, working in commercial real estate, but people from all walks of life showed up to that service, and that is because he was cheerful and outgoing and kind to everyone he met. I never heard him say anything bad about anyone. Let me say that again: I never heard him say anything bad about anyone.

Greatness comes in all different shapes and sizes. There are billions of people in this world. The vast majority will not be remembered when they pass. Great people are remembered, and talked about, and revered for years to come.