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. ... view entire excerpt...

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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