All tagged Having principles
In times of uncertainty, we want to look for comparisons. Situations that are analogous to what we’re going through so that we can identify trends or find indicators - some sort of sign(s) - that allow us to better predict what’s going to happen. It’s a natural thing to do. We want comfort. We want certainty. We want to see a way out.
But, of course, that’s not how things work.
For every comparison to previous pandemics, there are several others that can point to how this one is different.
It feels like I’m at that age where the loss of family and friends I’ve grown up with is becoming less and less of a rarity. People who have been instrumental, in ways large and small, to how I’ve grown up, what I’ve learnt, what I believe.
This past weekend, we lost one of our closest family friends, a man my family affectionately referred to as Malik Uncle. He was someone my father befriended early on, when we moved to Hong Kong (when I was still very young). His wife was an important influence in our lives, and his three sons became close friends with my brothers and I. We all grew up together, never living more than a few blocks apart until our late teens.
It’s easy to be nice (or virtuous or kind or thoughtful) when the eyes of the world - or even a single person, for that matter - are on you. It’s much harder, and frankly, far more telling and meaningful when they’re not.
This is true in all walks of life, but especially so in the business world, where we allow ourselves to use the “capitalist filter” to make decisions that, if we were to step back and assess them in a broader social or moral sense, we likely would have acted otherwise. (Putting aside why people are so completely comfortable divorcing moral or fairness considerations from economic ones. That’s a conversation for another time.)
