Being good is not enough
Most of our default thinking is that if we’re a good person it will be enough. That’s just not true!
You can be a good person and a piss poor husband
You can be a good person and a lousy lover
You can be a good person and a poor loser
You could be a good person and be terribly unproductive
You can be a good person and a lousy listener
You could be a good person distracted absent father
You can be a good person and a terrible businessman
You can be a good person and a very Foolish investor
You can be a good person and a flimsy friend
You can be a good person and an unresponsive son
You can be a good person and totally ignorant and uneducated
You can be a good person and clueless to what’s going on around you and the needs of other people
Now if you’re not good at tennis, that’s OK.
If you want to be good at it you can work on it.
If you don’t want to be good at it then you don’t have to do anything.
But that’s not true of the other areas of your life like marriage and parenting and work and contribution and connection
In my mind working on those skills is nonnegotiable.
If you have children, for example, then you have A moral obligation to become a good parent with fully developed parenting skills
If you want to have a great marriage, healthy kids, and a good relationship with them, if you want to have friends, if you want to make a difference in the world, if you work, then you simply cannot settle for merely being a good person
We have to stop sucking at the things that really matter especially if it’s because we’re succeeding in the things that don’t
