Character Before Craft

startup

I was watching a programme in the evening and it quoted an old saying: before you learn to do things, learn to be a person; before you learn a craft, learn its ethics. I found I agreed with it completely.

There is nothing new in the line, which is why I have filed it under “old sayings, said again”. But for about a year now, every evening as I walk home down the same alley, the first half of it surfaces in my head — before you learn to do things, learn to be a person. Perhaps it is because I am always a little anxious in social settings, so I overthink after every event I attend. Having heard, and said, a great deal about how “we do business models”, “we do market segments”, “we do industry consolidation” — all these ways of doing — I find myself having to remind myself again and again, over all that noise: whatever you do, first be a decent person. My own reading of that comes down to two things. First, keep the desire to possess in check. Second, find your own line and defend it.

Everyone probably wants to possess something. Held badly, that want becomes the source of a great deal of unhappiness. Within a family, an excess of possessiveness can breach the last line of individual independence and produce resentment that seems impossible to explain. That familiar phrase — I’m doing this for your own good — is, to a large extent, “I” claiming rather too much ownership over you.

In business I have been revising myself continually. I began cautious, terrified of coming off worse in any exchange, and moved gradually towards open collaboration. When it is necessary, I am now willing to take the smaller half myself, as long as the objective gets met. The benefit of this is, first, that things actually get done quickly. Second, and more importantly, my energy stops going into fretting over gains and losses and goes into what matters. There is a third benefit: playing down the wish to own something lets me judge it from a more objective, more quantitative position. The player at the board is the one who cannot see it. Once you let go of treating a thing as your own flesh and blood, you can look at the position from outside it.

The coldness that the first principle produces has to be corrected, constantly, by the second. The hardest part is discovering your own line — or, put differently, your final objective. In building a company there are voices all around you. Without much experience of my own, I am one of the blind men with the elephant, and each voice describes some other part of the enormous animal in front of me. What I need is to find the best available answer under incomplete information. One way is to listen to more opinions and gather more viewpoints. The other is to work through the logic behind those different viewpoints and the relationships between them. There is a further difficulty: the optimum I am after should be a global one, so across time I also have to avoid one-sided judgements that trap me in a local optimum. And once you have found the objective, you have to hold it against every temptation. Like the foal crossing the river in the fable — having heard a great deal of advice, you still have to go and find out for yourself.

So the two halves of “being a decent person” while building something, as I understand it: find a suitable objective and a way of describing it, then go at it boldly — but never let yourself sit in my idea is unique for so long that self-admiration costs you your basic objectivity.