【商业往事】第49话：没有掌声的善良

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没有掌声的善良

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「你必须随时准备好，在没有掌声的情况下工作」

——海明威 「老人与海」

一个十岁的男孩和他的祖父母加入了大篷车车队，在美国各地旅行。这个小男孩尊敬也爱他的祖父母。在这次旅行中，他的祖父开车，他的祖母坐在前排乘客的座位上，男孩坐在汽车后座的大长椅上。整个旅途中他的祖母都在吸烟，而男孩讨厌这种气味。

这个小男孩有一些数学天赋，他用他的天赋来估计他祖母在旅途中，因为吸烟而失去了多少寿命。

几十年后男孩描述当时的状况，他说：「当年，我总是想尽办法去做估测或小算术。我会计算油耗还有杂货花销等鸡毛蒜皮的小事。我听过一个与吸烟相关的广告，但记不清细节了。广告大意是，每吸一口香烟会减少几分钟寿命，好像是两分钟。管它几分钟呢，我决定为祖母做个算术。我估测了祖母每天吸几支香烟，每支香烟吸几口等等，然后心满意足地得出了一个合理的数字。接着，我把头探入汽车前排，拍了拍祖母的肩膀，骄傲地宣称：「如果每吸一口烟少活两分钟的话，你的寿命已经少了九年！」」

我怀疑这个男孩高估了吸烟危害的计算，但这对这个故事来说并不重要。不管怎样，在宣布他的结论后，这个男孩没有得到他所期望的赞美。事实上，他的祖母在听说她已经失去了九年的生命后，开始哭泣了起来。

当他的祖母哭的时候，他的祖父默默地驾驶着汽车，然后把车停到公路的边上。他的祖父下了车，转过身来，打开门，等待男孩出来。当时，男孩知道他有大麻烦了。

他的祖父是一个聪明和安静的人；他从来没有对他说过一句严厉的话。男孩认为；也许这将是第一次。祖父看了看这个男孩，沉默了一会后，他温柔而平静地说，「杰夫，总有一天你会明白，善良比聪明要难得多」。

这是亚马逊公司CEO杰夫·贝佐斯的故事。这也是贝佐斯名言的原始出处，「聪明是天赋，而善良是一种选择」，他补充说，「天赋得来容易——毕竟与生俱来。而选择并不容易」。

我知道这些话已经成为一句非常流行的格言。然而，在我第一次听到这句话的很多年之后，我对「善良是一种选择」有了自己的体会。

一些宗教为了说服人们做善事，会承诺如果他们死后，可以进入天堂。或承诺做了善事，未来有一个很好的回报。而有些人做善事是为了得到别人的赞扬。在这种情况下，这种「善良」看起来像个交易，就像做生意一样。许多人说，这种交易性善良不值得任何奖励或赞扬。然而，善良的行为就是善良的行为，不因目的而减损善良的价值，至少对于接收者来讲事情就是这样。无论善良行为的目的是什么，接收者所接受到的好处并没有消失。就算这种善良行为是试图要与上帝做生意，或提高自己在同辈人群中的声誉，也是一样的。

我们可以有许多善良的行为，比如捐钱给穷人或成为某种志愿工。然而，我认为，表现「善良是一种选择」的最好方式之一，就是做一些与个人的能力无关的事情。例如，在开车时放慢速度，让行人有足够的时间穿过我们面前的街道。或者，可以捡起一些别人扔在地上的垃圾然后扔掉。我喜欢做的善良行为，是在退房前整理一下我的旅馆房间，因为我想尽量减轻清洁人员的负担。

虽然这种善良的行为很容易做，但我们经常忽略做，因为我们觉得这些事可以不用做。但我觉得选择做我们不一定要做的事情，但我们把它做了是很重要的。这种善良的选择是可以完全由我们自己掌握的。没有人强迫我们要善良，我们做这些善良的行为，我们没有任何收获、也没有任何损失。这种善良的行为很大程度上是匿名的，而且通常没有人会意识到我们为某人做了一些善事。做这种好事也不会带给我们任何赞扬或奖励，至少在生活上是这个样子的。我们这样做，不是为了要得到回报；我们做这些事，是因为善良的行为本身就是一个奖励。也就是说，我们做这种好事只是为了让自己成为一个善良的人。这是一个人标准，我们坚持，我们选择。

故事来源：Jeff Bezos: 'Cleverness is a gift, kindness is a choice', Princeton - 2010

30 May 2010, Princeton University, New Jersey, USA 

A Kindness with Without Applause

“You must be prepared to work always without applause.”

——The Old Man and the Sea 

By Ernest Miller Hemingway

A ten-year-old boy and his grandparents joined a caravan to travel around the US. The young boy respected and loved his grandparents. In this travel, his grandfather drove, his grandmother occupied the front passenger seat, and the boy sat on the big bench seat in the back of the car. However, his grandmother smoked during the entire trip and the boy hated the smell.

The young boy had some mathematical talent and used his talent to estimate how much of his grandmother’s life had been lost just from smoking on the trip.

In describing this decades later, he said, “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 day, 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!’”

Now, I suspect that the boy overestimated the damage from smoking considerably, but that doesn’t really matter for this story. Anyway, after announcing his conclusion, the boy didn’t obtain the praise that he expected. And, in fact, his grandmother started to cry after hearing that she had lost nine years of her life.

When his grandmother cried, his grandfather drove the car in silence for a while before pulling over onto the shoulder of the highway. His grandfather got out of the car and came around and opened the door and waited for the boy to get out. At that time, the boy knew that he was in big trouble.

His grandfather was an intelligent and quiet man; he never said a harsh word to him. The boy thought that perhaps this would be the first time. The grandfather then looked at the boy, 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.”

This is Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos’s story. It is also the original source for Bezos’s famous words, “Cleverness is a gift, kindness is a choice,” adding, “ Gifts are easy -- they're given after all. Choices can be hard.”

I know that these words have become a very popular maxim. However, many years after I first heard these words, I got my thinking about “Kindness is a choice”.

Some religions try to persuade people to do kind things by promising them that they can enter heaven after they die if they do so. Or promise that they will have a good reward in their future. Some people do kind things in order to obtain other people’s praise. In that case, such “kindness” may seem very transactional, like doing business. And many people say that such transactional kindness does not deserve any reward or praise. However, good behavior is good behavior, at least for the receivers. No matter what the purpose of the behavior, the benefit for the recipients is still present. That’s true even if the kind behavior was an attempt to do business with God or to enhance one’s reputation with one’s peers.

There are many acts of kindness that we can do, such as donating money for the poor or becoming a volunteer of some kind. However, I think that one of the best ways to exemplify “Kindness is a choice” is to do something that is not related to one’s ability. For example, when driving, slow down to give pedestrians plenty of time to cross the street in front of us. Or one could pick up some litter that someone else tossed on the ground and throw it away.  One act of kindness that I like to do is to tidy up my hotel room a bit before checking out because I don’t want to be an undue burden on the housekeeping staff.

Although such acts of kindness are easy to do, we often neglect to do them because we don’t have to do them.  But I feel that it’s important to choose to do the things that we don’t have to do. Such choices to be kind are fully under our control. No one is compelling us to be kind. We can be kind or not without gaining or losing anything. Such acts of kindness are anonymous for the most part, and often no one will realize that we have done something kind for someone. Doing such kind things usually doesn’t result in any praise or reward, at least not in this life. And we don’t do them to be rewarded; we do them because the act of doing them is a reward in and of itself. That is, we do such kind things just to be a kind person. It’s kind of a personal standard that we hold ourselves to.