What Is Your Contribution?

I have accomplished a lot in my life. Degrees, awards, money, books, etc. I am pretty proud of my accomplishments—I have a very long and illustrious curriculum vitae.

Is that how I measure my contribution to this world? No, it is not.

I think back to my time at Lehman Brothers. I was an ETF trader, a block trader, providing liquidity in exchange-traded funds to hedge funds and other institutions. If I saved a client $10,000 on a trade, that was $10,000 that was passed along to investors, which were often rich people, but also pension funds for teachers and firemen and stuff. The job wasn’t socially useless. Providing liquidity in the financial markets is an important function, but it’s easy to lose sight of that. You are very disconnected from your positive impact on other people. I never got any thank-you notes from the teachers or firemen. Still, after a day of knife-fighting with hedge funds, it certainly did feel like a socially useless job, and after a while, you start to think about your purpose in life, and you start to believe the people in Zuccotti Park who think you are a drain on society.

On the other end of the scale are social workers, and also teachers. With those jobs, there is a very tangible connection between the work that you do and the effect you have on other people’s lives, which is why people do those jobs. As a teacher, I can tell you that I do occasionally have an impact on a student’s life, but most of the time, I am pissing into the wind. Not everybody wants help. And help is for the people who want it, not the people who need it. As a social worker or a teacher, you spend an entire career trying to fix problems that are essentially intractable, with only a handful of success stories. It’s not that there aren’t social workers in the Tenderloin; there are hundreds of them. And they make practically zero progress.

As I get older, I think less and less about padding my stats and more and more about helping other people (and animals), with the knowledge that a lot of help is iatrogenics and often counterproductive. And I really am powerless to change someone’s life. I am powerless to get someone to stop using drugs. I am powerless to keep someone from killing themselves. I am powerless to turn a lazy slob into a productive member of society. The addict is being told by everyone to stop using drugs. So what you do is you spend some time with the addict, and maybe you say the same thing that everyone else is saying, but you say it in such a way so that it finally clicks, and they decide to get sober. That is the best you can hope for. But this doesn’t happen unless you give someone the gift of time. It’s easy to throw money at a problem and hope it goes away—we do that all the time. If you really want to change the course of someone’s life, it takes time. Lots and lots of time. And nobody has time, right? We don’t even have time to answer text messages.

But there are a lot of ways to help people. Driving a tow truck is helping people. Painting a house is helping people. Doing someone’s taxes is helping people. Being an entertainer is helping people. Pretty much everything is helping people except for sitting at home, playing video games. I’m hard-pressed to come up with a job that doesn’t help people in some way. Lloyd Blankfein said that he was doing God’s work, and he got roasted for that—but it was true. It is true about every occupation. If you start a small business and hire people and pay salaries and service customers and pay taxes, you are doing a lot of good in the world. And I also think that doing good and making money are not two mutually exclusive things. Jeff Bezos has done a lot of good in the world—he has saved us all thousands of hours going to the store. Elon Musk is doing a lot of good in the world, cutting carbon emissions and sending stuff into space. He also has a thing for free speech. They both got fantastically rich in the process, but it doesn’t diminish their contribution to mankind. Where would we all be without Steve Jobs? Etc.

I have recently been asked to serve as a board member on a local nonprofit animal shelter. I’ve yet to be approved by the board, but it seems like a formality. The animal shelter runs fine—it doesn’t really need my help. But I’d like to have some kind of positive influence in some way. I’m almost 50, and this is my first opportunity to serve on a board of directors. As a board member, I am expected to spend about 10-15 hours a month hanging around the shelter, chipping in where I can. 10-15 hours of month of petting cats? Sounds good to me. This is really the first community service that I’ve done, at least, formally. As you know, I’ve been a big advocate for people with mental illness, and I’ve worked on a one-on-one basis with many afflicted people, but I’ve never been the kind of guy to hand out mac and cheese at the local soup kitchen. I am a businessman, and businessmen grow things, but the animal shelter doesn’t really need to grow. It is fine. In situations like this, nonprofits are looking for non-crazy people with safe hands.

We all contribute in different ways. Some of us swing a hammer. Some of us take out the trash. I write. Lots of people will read this essay, but my goals are very modest: if I can reach one person with my writing, and change their life for the better, then I am happy. Sometimes I write to gratify myself, sometimes my aim is to entertain, and sometimes I have altruistic motives. If these essays didn’t enhance your life in some way, you would unsubscribe in a second. This is my small contribution. Would I like ten times as many subscribers so I could have ten times the contribution? Absolutely, but word-of-mouth is slow and none of the content I create goes particularly viral. I was poking around on Amazon today, looking at some of the best-selling books. Morgan Housel’s book has about 45,000 reviews, and it has sold four million copies. James Clear’s book has 150,000 reviews, which means he has probably sold 15 million copies. That is helping a lot of people. I’d like to have that kind of reach someday, not just to stroke my ego, but because I think I have good ideas that could help people, so why not reach as many people as possible? There’s no cap on the number of books you can print. There’s no limit on how much an email can be forwarded. My contribution is small, but I would like it to be larger.

I learned recently that I have more money than Alyssa Milano. I don’t like to think of myself as rich, but I probably am. My financial goals are as follows: have a place in Pawleys Island, have a place in Miami Beach, and maybe have enough for private air travel back and forth between the two. Everything else is gravy—I don’t have material needs beyond that. It will all go to charity, mostly because I don’t have any kids to leave it to. But that’s not the point—to accumulate as many gold coins as possible, unless you plan on doing a lot of good with the gold coins. There are competing philosophies on how much money you should leave to your kids. You can make them rich and spoiled, or bitter and resentful. There are no good answers. Maybe you think that your kids should make their own way in the world, but then you think that you’re making things unnecessarily hard. I have met useless heirs and useful heirs. But I have heard some stories. A friend of a friend inherited close to a billion, and is an actual large-C hammer and sickle Communist, though tellingly, he hasn’t given any of the money away. Stuff like that. If your contribution to the world is going to be money, it takes a great deal of forethought and planning. Charity is a better use for the money than taxes, but even charity can be wasted. Giving money away is actually one of the hardest things you can do. I talk to people who say that if they won the Powerball that they would give it all to charity. Number one, that’s pure horseshit, but number two, good luck giving $400 million away without creating some powerful misaligned incentives.

But like I said, we can all contribute in our own way, through our work, or our wealth, or our efforts. My derision is reserved for the people who do not contribute at all, who consume more than they produce, and criticize others. I have my share of detractors. What I say to them is: how many people have you helped?