Right Thing, Right Now Ryan Holiday
5 Big Ideas
Big Idea#1 Be an Open Book
Big Idea#2 Integrity is Everything
Big Idea#3 Be Decent
Big Idea#4 Practice Pragmatism
Big Idea#5 Stop Asking for the Third Thing
Big Idea#1 Be an Open Book
The Rome that Marcus Livius Drusus lived in was not an honest or an honorable one. As a young man, he watched his uncle, the Stoic Rutilius Rufus, driven into exile by powerful interests for not taking bribes. The courts were a farce, the political process even more of a joke. Rome’s oligarchy had all but given up any pretense of legitimacy and lapsed into indulgent luxury.
The system looked like it was collapsing, and political violence was commonplace.
Into this mix stepped Drusus, the inheritor of enormous wealth, the head of a powerful political legacy. He could have been corrupt like all the rest. He could have debauched himself like all the rest.
Instead, he built a reputation on being the opposite. As a politician, he was a reformer. He fought to grant citizenship rights. He expanded the Senate. He tried to resolve class conflicts. As a private citizen, he was so generous it was said that all that’s left to give was mud and air. He was clean, he was respected.
One day an architect came to Drusus with an offer. Noticing that Drusus’s home was partly exposed to public view, the designer proposed some simple measures that would allow the man some much deserved privacy.
“Double your fee”, Drusus replied,” and make my whole house visible, so that every citizen may see how I live my life.
The word we have for this today is “transparency,” and sadly, very few powerful men or women seem to think they are obligated to practice it.
Not only do they live in mansions between high walls, surrounded by guards, but they hide their businesses between shell corporations and tax havens. Our politicians refuse to disclose their income or conflicts of interests. They meet in secret. Their publicists spin and deflect.
Why? So they can get away with stuff of course. So they can keep prying that is, judging – eyes aways from what they know would not go over well with the public, with their investors, with the law.
Imagine if you have a reporter follow you around and write down everything that you did. How would I think and act differently?
Big Idea#2 Integrity is Everything
In 1935, Martha Graham got the opportunity of a lifetime. She was invited to present her work at the forthcoming Olympics. It was dance on the world stage, the kind of opportunity that no talented or ambitious person could afford to turn down.
Yet there she was, turning it down.
“Three-quarters of my group are Jewish,” She told the emissaries from Berlin. “Do you think that I would go to a country where they treat hundreds of thousands of their coreligionists with the brutality and cruelty that you have shown Jews?”
Shocked that self-interest had not been enough, that she wasn’t interested in looking the other way as everyone else they asked had been, the delegation of Nazis tried a different tactic. “If you don’t come,” they told her, “everyone will know about it and that will be a bad thing for you.”
But Graham knew it was precisely the opposite. “If I don’t come,” she replied, “everybody will know why I didn’t and that will be a bad thing for you.”
She may have been a starving artist, well into her forties at that point, and could have used the money and the exposure. But it was not worth her integrity. It was not worth her soul.
We have to define success. Who succeeds? The only person who succeeds is the person who is progressively realizing a worthy ideal. It is the person who says, “I am going to become this”, and then begins to work toward that goal.
A success is the school teacher who is teaching school because that’s what he or she wants to do.
A Success is the man who runs the corner gas station because that was his dream.
A success is the woman who is a wife and mother because she wanted to become a wife and mother and is doing a good job of it.
Church Hill says “ there comes a time in everybody’s life where destiny taps you on the shoulder; it would be a shame if you weren’t ready. Everybody thinks they’re ready. Everyday just gets a little better.
Get 1% better each day isn’t particularly notable, sometimes it isn’t even noticeable. If you get 1% better each day for one year, you’ll end up thirty-seven times better.
Big Idea#3 Be Decent
The famed lawyer Clarence Darrow was traveling by train along the Pacific coast when he and his son had a bad experience with a steward. The line snaked through the dining car. Passengers grew impatient. The underpaid staff seemed to be interested in helping only those who could afford to tip them, and everyone was upset with each other.
“Will you report him to the Chicago and North Western when you get back?” his son asked about the rather rude waiter, knowing that his father had contacts at the railroad for years of representing the owners. “No,no,son,” his father said, brushing off the slight. “Never hurt a man who is working for his living.”
In his later years, Darrow, needing the money, was hired to do a speaking tour where he would debate other personalities onstage across the country. He was contracted for $500 per event with $50 for his expenses. But then he heard after the first debate that the promoter was clearing barely $150 after costs and speaker fees.
That was fair and he wouldn’t have it.
“That’s not enough,” he told the man, “you forget the expense money and take a hundred dollars from my check in addition.” Later in the tour when the profits had risen, Darrow still kept himself only to his original fee, forgoing thousands of dollars of the proceeds. “Mr.Darrow always leaned over backward to give men the best part of the deal,” his partner explained with awe.
To Darrow, it was just the decent thing to do.
Successful people are not people without problems. They are simply people who learned to solve their problems.
Living successfully from life is a matter of solving the problem which stands between where we are not and the point we wish to reach.
We must THINK, ACT, TALK, WALK, AND CONDUCT himself in all of his affairs as the person he wants to become. Before a person can achieve the life he wants. He must become that individual
Big Idea#4 Practice Pragmatism
Jimmy Carter did the right thing on inauguration day in 1971. It didn’t cost him much as a governor because in Georgia at that time it was a single-term job.
Six years after his stunning speech in Georgia, he was elected president of the United States. On his very first day in office, just hours after his inauguration parade, he held a 4:35 p.m. meeting — literally his first appointment – with a disabled army veteran named Max Cleland to discuss another stunning announcement.
After asking Cleland, who’d lost both legs and an arm in the Battle of Khe Sanh, to head the Veterans Administration, Cater instructed him to begin working on a blanket pardon for everyone who had evaded serving in Vietnam.
It would “heal the nation’s wounds,” allow Americans stuck in Canada to come home, allow people to come out of hiding and remove shame and stigma.
He believed the time for forgiveness and understanding had come. Cleland , who supported the idea, warned the president that it would be unpopular in the Senate and might be worth delaying, perhaps until his second term. “I don’t care if all 100 of them are against me,” Carter replied. “It’s the right thing to do.”
And then he did it – second term be damned.
As it happened, despite what was actually a surprisingly effective presidency, Cater would not get a second term, losing in a landslide in 1980 to Ronald Reagan, a defeat some trace to that decision he made on his first day in office.
Carter always said that he never wanted to do anything to hurt his country – that’s why he refused to delay doing the right thing.
President Carter gave HOPE back to the country.
In the 1950s, a Harvard-trained researcher based out of Johns Hoplins named Curt Richter ran some fascinating experiments.
He wanted to see how long rats could swim in two different conditions.
In the first condition, he simply let them swim as long as they could before giving up and drowning. They lasted 15 minutes.
Then, in the other condition, right before they were about to reach their maximum threshold of 15 minutes, he picked them up and dried them off and let them rest briefly before putting them back in.
Guess how long they were able to swim after that quick reprieve.
Only a few more minutes? Another 15 minutes? Maybe 30 minutes? Try 60 hours.
After being saved those little rats swam for an absolutely astonishing 240 times longer.
15 min vs 60 hours
Why? How is that possible?
Richer said it was because of one very simple thing: HOPE.
The rats that had been saved had “seen” a better future. They “knew” there was a chance to survive so they just kept going and going and going.
Basic idea: When we have hope we believe our future will be better than our present. When we don’t believe our future will be better, we are, literally, hoopless.
Big Idea#5 Stop Asking for the Third Thing
What the writer Dawn Dorland did was incredible. She gave her kidney to a stranger. By literally opening up her body and giving away a piece of herself, she saved someone’s life. Even more beautifully, her donation inspired the spouse of the recipient ( who was not a match) to give their own kidney to someone else.
What an angle
Most people who knew her saw her that way.
Except one.
As Dorland began to post about her donation and the recovery process, her friends were supportive. But as nice as they were, what stuck out to Dorland was that one of them, an acquaintance and fellow writer named Sonya Larson, was oddly silent. And so in a moment that they both would rue forever, she wrote the woman to ask why.
What would ensue was a tragic, almost comic conflict whose escalation even the most imaginative novelist could not have escalated even the most imaginative novelist could not have predicted.
Dorland’s very human desire for recognition, to be appreciated for what she did, Larson’s cynicism and sensitivity, the social faux pas, the fragile egos, the whims of the creative process, and the power of social media would collide first in a fictional and unflattering short story Larson wrote about a women with a “white-savior” complex, and would culminate in lawsuits, accusations of plagiarism, and a flood of publicity.
The nicest thing that Dorland had ever done was turned into a farce, portrayed as an act of narcissism or worse.
Larson in turn spent thousands and thousands of dollars she didn’t have to defend her art in court from Dorland, whose thin-skinnedness and need for attention all but proved the caricature Larson had portrayed in her fiction.
But this is what the ancients would have told us, that nothing good results from trying to chase down gratitude or recognition for what you’ve done.
“When you’ve done well and another has benefited from it, why like a fool do you look for a third thing on top – credit for the good deed or a favor in return?”
OG Mandino’s say to count your blessings. Once you realize how valuable you are and how much you have going for you, the smiles will return, the sun will break out, the music will play, and you will finally be able to move forward toward the life that God intended for you… with grace, strength, courage, and confidence.
We want to be like the tomato vines. It produces a tomato and moves on to the next, doing its job. It doesn’t expect any recognition, it’s just doing its job.
Don’t let recognition, result, bank account, how many followers you have affect your thinking.
