Just Do It

I’ve been reading Spencer Ante’s Creative Capital: Georges Doriot and the Birth of Venture Capital (Amazon) whenever I get a chance to breathe - which hasn’t been often lately.  Doriot’s story is a fascinating one for anyone interested in business, and Ante has been blogging some of his notable quotables (“suck it Trebek!”) for a while on the book’s blog.

This one caught my eye recently:

“A real courageous man is a man who does something courageous when no one is watching him.” — Georges Doriot

Like many things about this man, there’s little glitz to the substance - it’s simply factual, universal truth.  I would further argue that you can replace “courageous” with almost any other adjective and it would hold up: honorable, genuine, ambitious, evil, loving, hard-working, the list goes on.

The point is this: anyone can look/act good under the glare a spotlight… people always act when the boss is looking, politicians kiss their wives when the cameras roll, and people will go to unimaginable lengths to do good for a stadium of onlookers; but it’s when there is no spotlight, no charade, no “thank you” at the end of the act that people’s root self is genuinely expressed.

This is not new, novel or particularly insightful — it’s simply factual, universal truth to live by.  I would think the world a better place if assholes would simply be assholes all the time, regardless of circumstance - at least then you know.