Be Kind

The strawberries taste like strawberries. The snozberries taste like snozberries. Hey, Greg. This is the Music Makers podcast where I read things out loud to you and then offer my unqualified opinions on them. Be Kind by Andrew Bosworth.

I almost got fired once. My friend and CTO at the time, Dustin Moskovitz, pulled me into a room one morning. He told me I would no longer be working on newsfeed, which was surprising because at the time, I was the only engineer keeping it running. Instead, they were going to hand it off to someone else and build a team around that person. With alarm in my voice, I asked if I was being fired.

Dustin relented only after a telling pause. No. But you need to find something else to do. I believe if you looked at what I had accomplished in my 2 years at Facebook to that point, it would not be obvious that I should be a candidate for such a stern conversation. In addition to building the back end and ranking for news feed, I had also launched a number of other popular features on the site.

I maintained our early anti abuse efforts in my spare time. I was one of a small group of people making decisions that would shape our infrastructure for years to come. I wasn't the best engineer at the company, but I was solid. I was dedicated, and I was clearly having an impact. So why was I being sidelined?

I demanded answers. Dustin did not disappoint. He gave me a single sheet of paper. On it, in dull, monospace font, were anonymous quotes about me from my coworkers. Boz is one of the better engineers at Facebook, one read.

And then the next, I would have a hard time working with him. The two statements struck me as incongruous. If I was a good engineer, why would it be hard to work with me? Of course, that question was the very foundation of my problem. He is most interested in the truth, but more inhibited members of the team avoid any discussions with him.

The realization hit me hard. In short, I thought my job was to be right. I thought that was how I proved my worth to the company, but that was all wrong. My job was to get things done, and doing anything meaningful past a certain point requires more than one person. If you are right, but nobody wants to work with you, then how valuable are you really?

How much can you realistically expect to accomplish on your own? I was winning my way out of a job one argument at a time. I headed home early that day to think about what I had heard. My future wife, April, was gentle, but she offered me little reprieve from the feedback. If you want people to work with you, you need to be kind.

It turns out this wasn't just a problem I had at work. Looking back, I'm amazed and grateful that my friends put up with me. Altogether, this feedback changed the course of my career and probably my life. I don't think I was ever outright mean to anyone. I was just callously indifferent.

And on a long enough timeline, that is indistinguishable from being mean. In a cruel twist of irony, I thought that was what it meant to be professional. In retrospect, it just seems inhuman. It will take me several posts to detail the many mistakes that got me to this point, but my biggest lesson was the importance of kindness. Being kind isn't the same as being nice.

It isn't about superficial praise. It doesn't mean dulling your opinions, and it shouldn't diminish the passion with which you present them. Being kind is fundamentally about taking responsibility for your impact on the people around you. It requires you be mindful of their feelings and considerate of the way your presence affects them. Being kind hasn't hurt my effectiveness at all.

Being thoughtful about the emotions of my colleagues hasn't made me any less right or wrong. It has simply made me more likely to be asked to help in the first place. Being invited to more conversations has allowed me to scale my impact in a way that would have been fathomable on my own. I'm still not as good as I would like to be at any of this. When I'm under stress, I can sometimes fall back into my old habits.

But believing deeply that I am responsible for how I make others feel has been life changing for me. Being kind turns out to be a long term strategy for maximizing impact. In episode 16, I read an article called, but you did not persuade me. And the premise of that article was you can be right, but if you're not persuasive, it's not good enough. And I said if you're analytical or you're hyper logical, you may not wanna hear that.

Right? You may want to believe that if you have the truth on your side, you don't have to be persuasive. We're back at it again in this article. But in this one, instead of talking about being persuasive, we're talking about being kind. The premise is still pretty much the same.

We're coming from an angle where we say the truth is on our side. We are objectively correct in this situation. But if you're correct and you're not kind, in the long run, it's not enough. Just being right isn't enough. It's better to be right and to be kind than it is to just be right.

The author of this article didn't believe he was being mean even. So it wasn't being kind as opposed to being mean. It was being kind as opposed to being indifferent. I think we all know a person or maybe have even been the person who valued truth only. Now I do think it's important to value truth above all other things, but you also have to throw in a dash of being kind and a dash of being persuasive.

You shouldn't be kind and lie, but you also shouldn't tell the truth and not be kind. I mean, even the Bible says be kind one to another. And if there's anyone who cares about the truth, it would be Jesus who said, I am the truth. But he also cares about being kind because his word says, be kind one to another. Okay.

But some people don't believe that. Some people don't believe that being kind is objectively better than being indifferent. Some people say truth is the only thing that matters, And if your feelings get hurt by it, that's fine because it was the truth. Right? I had the right side of the argument, and I pummeled you with it until you realized that I was objectively correct.

And you know what? It's not my fault that your feelings got hurt because now you know the truth. And those people may not care at all what the Bible has to say about being kind, and that's totally fine because I wanna argue the same point from a different angle. The author says being kind hasn't hurt my effectiveness at all. And then at the end, he says being kind turns out to be a long term strategy for maximizing impact.

So I wanna put this out to the people who don't really care about being kind for kindness sake or for the sake of other people. If you are 100% selfish, and nobody's a 100% selfish. But if you are 100% selfish, it is still better to be kind. It is in your best interest to be kind because being kind makes you more effective. Being kind makes people want to work with you more in the future.

Being kind means you're gonna get pulled into more conversations, put on more projects, get more referrals in the future. You can still be really smart and hyper analytical and stick to your guns. But if you add kindness in there, people are gonna like you more, and they're gonna wanna work with you more. So I I don't think there's an argument that can be made for not being kind. There's not an argument that can be made for being a callous jerk.

If you're completely into yourself and only care about yourself, well, it's still better to be kind because it will go better for you if you're kind and for everyone else with even a shred of empathy or care about other people. When you have the truth on your side, when you know beyond a shadow of a doubt that you are correct, it is still your duty to be kind. It's still your duty to present the truth in a loving manner. But the good news is you've got the truth on your side. You're right.

Your solution is the best solution. So now you just gotta work on being kind. The Musicmakers is released every Monday at 9 AM CST. You can find show notes online at musicmakers.fm, or please send me an email and tell me what you think. Aaron@musicmakers.fm.

I would love to hear from you.