Be a Good Person, It Will Pay
Being a good person is a must for doing good. Being a good person is also necessary for making good profits, meaning making money by creating real value for society. This is an argument in favour of capitalism, free market economies, and classical liberalism. Making profit, but not any profit, is the right path for creating a world of peace, progress, and beauty.
Unfortunately, being a good person isn’t as straightforward as it sounds. And what does it mean to do good anyway? Let’s start with what it’s not and finish with what it is.
It’s not exercising power and control over other people. In fact, the will for power and control is precisely the opposite of what makes a person good. It’s the opposite of serving and helping others to achieve what they want. Contrary to what many believe, an outcome of an action isn’t enough to judge the goodness of a person either. An outcome that is good today might not be good tomorrow. Judging the goodness of a person by their actions is wrong too. Because the goodness of an action is dependent on its context.
The virtues that drive and direct our actions make us good or bad. The right virtues ensure that in any context we select the right actions that lead to good outcomes. Ideally, they help create good judgment no matter the context, and when there is no rule forcing us to act in specific ways.
Being good by embodying the right virtues can be learned. It’s constant work. Only once we fully commit to that, we will be able to truly create good profits. It makes good people a company’s most valuable resource.
On top of embodying the right virtues, a person who wants to create good profit must understand people and their wants, this includes anticipating future wants and making the possible actual by meeting these wants through the creation of products and services. In business language: creating real value for the customer.
Wants always change. It’s a continuous process in which we must always look for new ways to create value, to innovate. The need for someone to help someone else to meet their wants will always exist.
Unfortunately, a good person can only become wealthy through good profit in a specific system. One in which economic value emerges in the spontaneous order resulting from the actions of good people with the right values helping others to improve their lives. People benefiting other people. This is also the only system that protects good people from those who are seeking power and control. This is a true market economy with rule of law and rules of just conduct. A truly free society in which people and businesses gain by serving others.
“In a true market economy, one in which prices are allowed to freely adjust, profit and loss is the market’s objective measure of the value a business is contributing to society. To succeed, a business must not only develop profit and loss measures, but also determine their underlying drivers, in order to understand what is adding value, what is not, and why. This knowledge informs its vision and strategies, leads to innovations, creates opportunities to eliminate waste, and guides continuous improvement.”
This quote is from a book called Good Profit written by Charles Koch. The book is so full of valuable and timeless insights, that I can’t possibly aim to summarize or pick out the important or useful parts. It must be read in its entirety. It’s the only business and management book that I would recommend.
As is this article, the book is a guide to how to do business right and what systems we need in order to operate in a beneficial way for the whole of society. In my opinion it’s the only way anyone should be doing business today, if their intentions are to do good.
The main takeaway here is to constantly focus on becoming a good person. It’s probably hard, but it will pay, in financial and non-financial ways, in business and in life.