Introduction

Lasting Contribution demonstrates how to create meaning in your life, take sophisticated action, manage your career, and make a lasting contribution to the world. It synthesizes the thought of Aristotle, Sun Tzu, Gödel, Frankl, Confucius, and many others. It draws insights from information theory, sociology, Zen, psychology, the history of art, management theory, the philosophy of science, and a dozen other fields. Using the Titanic, avatars, Santa Claus, skateboarding, muses, cocktail parties, Oprah’s shoes, and an array of other vivid examples to make its points clear, Lasting Contribution is deeply thought-provoking and marked with moments of great wit and humor.

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Excerpt

Getting Started

THINKING CAUSALLY

The greatest use of life is to spend it for something

that will outlast it.

—WILLIAM JAMES

Sooner or later every thinking person asks the immortal

question: have I made a difference in the world?

If you ask this question later in life, your next step is

an exercise in ethical accounting: you once spilled tea

on your friend’s new shirt, but made up for it by saving

his life after he was in a car wreck. If, however, you ask

this question sooner, then your next question is: how

do I make a difference? Actually that shouldn’t be your

next question, because it is easy to make a difference. A

single match can burn down a forest and what a difference

that makes. A better question is: how can I contribute

to the world?

There are many answers to this question. You can

run errands for your elderly neighbor, pick up litter

in the park, or leave a generous tip for your footsore

waiter. But while these activities are important, they

point to the limits of the question. Imagine that cars

always speed near a certain playground, and it’s only a

matter of time before a child is killed. You could make

the world a better place if you were to stand by the road

and wave a flag at the speeding cars to encourage them

to slow down, but your contribution would stop the moment

you stopped waving the flag. Or you could post

a sign that says, “Slow.” For this to be a contribution,

however, drivers would have to read and heed the sign.

The sign is ineffective, because the speeders might be

driving too fast to see it. So you decide to change the

nature of the equation. You get a speed bump installed.

The speeders slow down, and the kids are safer.

So the question isn’t just: how do you contribute?

The question is: how do you make a contribution that

lasts? Unfortunately the solutions to most of the world’s

problems aren’t as easy as installing the occasional

speed bump, so the question becomes: given that the

world is big and complex, how do you make a lasting

contribution? In other words, how do you accomplish

something that matters? How do people like you and

me achieve not the ephemeral, but the enduring; not the

trivial, but the significant? The answer is that just like

everything else in the world—from tea stains to speed

bumps—lasting contributions are caused. Simply put,

you cause a lasting contribution to happen. The problem

is that the way people usually think about causality

does not serve them well when it comes to thinking

about taking action.

People tend to think of causality as one billiard ball

striking another that ricochets into another and another.

On a wintry mountain a squirrel drops an acorn.

It falls and dislodges some snow. The snow slides, knocking

free yet more snow, causing an avalanche. The distant

roar of the avalanche startles you as you pour tea. It Lasting Contribution spills on your friend’s new shirt. You apologize to your friend, but in a sense, it was the squirrel that caused the tea stain.

But even if the world does work this way, this may not

be the best way to think about taking meaningful action.

Suppose you want to help people by healing them. You

plan to use your existing skills and knowledge to attend

medical school to become a doctor. This thought raises

some problems with our notion of billiard-ball causality:

healing people, which started the whole chain of

events, hasn’t happened yet. Does this mean the future

causes the past? Probably not. Maybe it is your desire to

help people that starts the chain of events. But is your

desire caused or is it free will? Aren’t your existing skills and knowledge, your passion to contribute to the world, and your plan of going to medical school all part of the cause of your becoming a doctor?

When it comes to human action, skills, passions, and

plans are part of causality. Some 2,300 years ago, Aristotle

argued that it is useful to think in terms of four

causes:

1. Of what a thing is made, also called the material

cause. Clay is the material cause of a brick. Steel,

rubber, and plastic are part of the material cause of a

car.

2. How something is made, also called the efficient

cause. The efficient cause is billiard-ball causality,

the action that brings something into being. It is

the gathering and firing of clay to make a brick. The

workers on an assembly line are the efficient cause

of a car.

3. What a thing is, also called the formal cause. The

formal cause is the essence, idea, or plan of a thing. The essence of a brick is that it is an expression of an

idea of the right size, shape, and strength of an object

needed for building. The engineer’s design is the

formal cause of a car.

4. Why a thing is, the sake for which a thing is done,

also called the final cause. The final cause of a brick

is to make a wall. The final cause of a car is that it

helps you get from here to there.

What is the cause of climbing a mountain? The material

cause is your climbing gear—oxygen, ice axes,

and tents. The efficient cause is putting one foot in

front of the other. The formal cause is the route you

plan to take. The final cause, explained British mountaineer

George Mallory, who died on Everest, is “because

it is there.”

Bricks, cars, and mountains, however, are simple.

How do the four causes work in a complex, dynamic,

and messy world such as the one in which we live?

The intent of this book is to help you make a lasting

contribution to the world, because when doers think

before acting and when thinkers take action, remarkable

results follow. When doers don’t think before acting

and when thinkers don’t act, good people’s efforts

fail to achieve their full impact. It is not that that doers

are stupid or that thinkers are lazy; they merely lack a

theory to guide and facilitate their actions. Using Aristotle’s four causes to guide and facilitate your actions

can help you to think more clearly and act more effectively,

which will help you to achieve lasting results—

results that are worth achieving.

At this point, you may be concerned that you are not talented enough to make a lasting contribution. In the

course of this book, I will show that this concern is chimerical, but for now, here is an example of the sort of

lasting contribution that is within your reach. It comes

from Peter F. Drucker’s book, The Effective Executive:

A new hospital administrator, holding his first

staff meeting, thought that a rather difficult matter

had been settled to everyone’s satisfaction, when one

of the participants suddenly asked: “Would this have

satisfied Nurse Bryan?” At once the argument started

all over and did not subside until a new and much

more ambitious solution to the problem had been

hammered out.

Nurse Bryan, the administrator learned, had been

a long-serving nurse at the hospital. She was not particularly distinguished, had not in fact ever been a

supervisor. But whenever a decision on patient care

came up on her floor, Nurse Bryan would ask, “Are we

doing the best we can do to help this patient?” Patients

on Nurse Bryan’s floor did better and recovered

faster. Gradually over the years, the whole hospital had

learned to adopt what came to be known as “Nurse

Bryan’s Rule”; had learned, in other words, to ask: “Are

we really making the best contribution to the purpose

of this hospital?”

Though Nurse Bryan herself had retired almost

ten years earlier, the standards she had set still made

demands on people who in terms of training and position

were her superiors.Every person is capable of accomplishing as much as Nurse Bryan.

Finally, a word of warning. You will be disappointed

if you believe that contribution is a nail, and this book a

hammer. The world and what you must do in it to make

a lasting contribution are far too complex for such a

simple perspective to be effective. This book was written

to help you not in the way a hammer helps you to

build a house, but in the way a blueprint does. It prepares

you for action. view abbreviated excerpt only...

Discussion Questions

1. Think of the example in the book’s second paragraph of installing a speed bump to make cars slow down so the children in the playground will be safer. Suppose local authorities told you that regulations did not allow them to install a speed bump. Should you secretly put it in yourself? More broadly, what do you think of the activist notion of ethics that the book advocates?

2. French author Anaïs Nin said, “I knew . . . that our concept of the hero was outdated, that the modern hero was the one who would . . . struggle with his myths, who would know that he himself created them, who would enter the labyrinth and fight the monster. . . .” What do you think about self-conscious mythmaking? Can a story you tell yourself about yourself be meaningful?

3. The extremely knowledgeable Albert Einstein said, “Imagination is more important than knowledge.” Throughout this book, you are asked to “Imagine that….” and to “Suppose you….” What role does imagination play in ethics? In getting results? In a meaningful life?

4. Literary critic Harold Bloom said, “Falstaff and Hamlet are considerably livelier than many people I know.” What do you think of the notion that something may not exist in the world the way a brick does, but that it may have a powerful functional existence?

5. The way this book approaches both ethics and knowledge is based on the idea that everything can potentially interact with everything else. In this sense, the view of ethics grows out of the view of knowledge. Is there a better approach?

6. A theme that runs throughout this book is the power of interpretation. This thought relates to your ability to choose your reactions, which is, said philosopher Hannah Arendt, “an act of existential choice unconstrained by principles or norms.” What does the power of interpretation imply about freedom? Does the text support the idea that anything goes? That you are free to interpret a trout as a zebra?

7. Supreme Court justice Oliver Wendell Holmes held that, “A word is not a crystal, transparent and unchanged; it is the skin of a living thought and may vary greatly in color and content according to the circumstances and time in which it is used.” Similarly, this book suggests that things, such as bricks, are a function of the formal cause and, thus, of ideas. Does this help you to see solid objects as manifestations of thought? Should it? Is this a useful way to see the world?

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