Choose The White Hat
Life is a series of choices that you should make and then live by.
Done right, your life is never going to be easy – what a bore that would be! But when you live by decisions you have made about how you’re going to live, and why, a whole lot of your life will be settled, resolved. You’ll be able to dedicate your mental capacity to solving interesting problems rather than revisiting what should have been simple choices made years ago.
This may sound vague, so let’s flesh it out.
Let’s start with this: What do you stand for? What one principle would you consider your bedrock, the thing from which all of your life’s choices rely?
Mine is, Be Good. Yes, Good with a capital G.
If it helps, think of the classic Western movie trope. The good guy wears a white hat, while the bad guy wears a black hat. I grew up on these movies, watching many with my Dad, who first watched them in the theater in beginning in the 1930s when he was a boy. We did not watch classics like Shane, The Gunfighter, and High Noon ironically.
You know from their headwear that the bad guy is going to be a real jerk. He’s a villain, out to make innocent people suffer because something’s wrong inside him. His brazen evil has brought him power over others. He’s not the type anyone would choose to go up against.
You also know that the hero, the man in the white hat, is going to have a moral struggle. He is hesitant to confront the bad guy. Maybe it isn’t his business, and he’s just passing through. The bad guy almost certainly has henchmen, so to stand up to him is a big physical risk on top of everything else. Maybe the man in the white hat knows he’s a powerful gunslinger, and that skill has him reluctant to use it – he’s Good, so he’s reluctant to kill.
But you know what will happen in the end. The good guy has no choice other than to protect the innocent townsfolk from the bad guy. A confrontation ensues. Against all odds, the good guy vanquishes the bad guy – maybe even facing injury or death himself as a result.
He has no choice, though. The man in the white hat has to do the right thing because he can, full stop. He chose that path long ago.
He does what is right because it is right. Even if it costs him almost everything – his life, his fortune, his reputation – doing the right thing does not cost him the one thing that truly matters in this world. By doing right, the hero in the white hat stands up for Good over bad, for right over wrong. He does the thing he must because he decided what he stood for long ago.
I want you to think of your life in terms of the one fundamental thing you stand for. And I hope you choose to wear the white hat, too. If you do, you’re setting yourself up to be the leader this world needs right now – and always, but yes, definitely right now. We live in black hat times.
When Matthew and I founded Benevolent Capital Group we asked AI to help us come up with our name. Matthew is a wizard at using AI to get actual useful results, so I trusted he could make it work.
The first thing we had to do, as you can guess, was feed it the right prompt. We made a list of what was most important to us in our new business: what it would do, what it would stand for. We crafted that into a short paragraph describing the business and set the chat assistant to work.
We had to refine the prompt a bit, but finally it gave us 10 business names that we could do something with. We ended up taking the three words of our name from three of those ten different suggested names. No, AI didn’t produce the name of our business, but it helped us a lot.
That first word, Benevolent, inspired a days-long conversation before we finally decided on it. We knew that we were setting ourselves up to look either horridly cynical or hopelessly naïve. Surely, with a name like Benevolent, we’d have a lot to live up to.
That’s why we like it. Our company doesn’t just fund and coach businesses to make them more successful and bring an enviable return to our investors. Our company is first and foremost in business to make the world a better place – through our example, through our efforts, and through the values that the companies we choose to work with will themselves choose to operate by.
Doing the right thing and proclaiming it from the rooftops puts a lot of pressure on all concerned, sure. But it’s great pressure – yes, we’re different! That’s why inspiring business founders and mentor-investors choose to work with us, starting with our new partner Ken Goldman. This eminently accomplished business leader is all-in with Benevolent because of what we stand for, not despite it.
Someone along the way pointed out that “Benevolent is kryptonite to psychopaths,” which I just love. I definitely couldn’t have said it better myself.
If you’re a black hat type, or even if you wear a gray hat, you don’t get what we’re up to. You think Benevolent is a company for foolish suckers, or that surely we can’t keep succeeding, or you think we’re up to something because, well, users think the rest of us are users like them.
Good. So long, psychos!
Meanwhile, I think Matthew is as surprised as I am by how many talented people are seeking us out to participate – as mentor-investors and as possible portfolio companies. Imagine when we start to promote our company at all!
In search of white hats
Early I pointed out what you probably already know, which is that the world seems chock-full of black hats these days. Everywhere you look scam artists and bullies are prospering. Temporarily, the rest of us hope. Even still, you hate to see it. It can be dispiriting if you let it.
Don’t let it.
Need inspiration? Check out this week’s Take 3, a new feature of this newsletter in which I recommend three things that will give you hope, give you direction, or help you keep your fire lit.
Read Dirtbag Billionaire, about Yvon Chouinard, the founder of Patagonia, who was so ashamed to see himself on the Forbes 400 list of billionaires that he restructured his company and donated his wealth to fighting climate change. Patagonia is now owned by Planet Earth, and Chouinard is no longer a billionaire.
Read The Seven Rules of Trust, by Jimmy Wales, founder of Wikipedia.
Check out what Amazon co-founder MacKenzie Scott is doing to make the world a better place.
Bonus:* Subscribe to The Atlantic. Another do-gooder billionaire, Laurene Powell Jobs, bought it in 2017 through her Emerson Collective - named after Ralph Waldo Emerson, who co-founded the magazine in 1857.
The point of capitalism, if you aren’t a psychopath, is to do Good. There are rich people doing Good with their wealth. They aren’t as media-hungry as the psychos in our newsfeeds all day every day, but if you look hard enough, you can find them. When you do, let their examples show you the way!
Until next time: Have fun building something your grandkids will be proud of :)
- Professor Ted
* Promise 3 tips? Overdeliver. Giving more than you promise is yet another way to make the world a little better than you found it.
Got this newsletter a day earlier than you’re used to? An inveterate tinkerer, I’m playing around with how best to share my weekly musings. If you prefer it on Sunday morning rather than Monday, or vice-verse, or if another day would delight you more, please let me know in the comments.