Bob’s Corner – Being Good or Living Well?

Bob’s Corner – Being Good or Living Well?

“What do you mean ‘OR?!’” This was the response I got when I mentioned the title of this essay to a friend of mine. My response: When you are old and nearing the end of your days, would you prefer to look back on your life and say:

“I was good –I followed all the rules. I was consistent, considerate, and I am proud that I never did anything to which anyone – especially other good people – might object.”

Or:

“I created my own path, was occasionally crazy, and yes I broke some of the rules, and I frequently suffered for it. But I lived my life fully, in my own way. I take full responsibility, and have no regrets.”

These two positions are perhaps a bit extreme, but they help define the difference between a life focused on “Being Good” and one which I consider to be “Living Well.”

Obviously, our choice is not to either Be Good, or to Live Well. The two circles do overlap, considerably. In order to live well, we do need to live in a community, which requires Being Good (to a certain degree) and following rules (some or most of the time.) AND YET – many of the rules, customs, and traditions we are asked to follow are not meant to protect public safety and personal rights, but serve rather to homogenize human behavior, reduce inter-personal friction, and maintain a predictable (and uninteresting) social order.

Being Good manages risk and keeps us and others in our comfort zones. Being Good is living in alignment with conventional wisdom and the expectations of our community. On the other hand, Living Well demands that we assume risk, listen to our own hearts and follow our own passions – in spite of what we are told to do and how others would prefer that we act and live.

Being Good is primarily in the eyes of our community. By Being Good, we reinforce our community’s values, traditions, norms, and role models. The rules for Being Good are well-tested and proven; there is little risk in following them and they provide a well-defined path to respectability and “success.” There is often much hard-earned wisdom in those rules, and we ignore it at our peril.

There is certainly nothing WRONG with paying attention to that wisdom – in fact there is much that is RIGHT in it – unless of course, that is not what we truly want to do.

Living Well however, is primarily on our own terms, doing what we truly want to do, even though the community we love and depend on may have different plans for us. When we seek to fulfill our own dreams, we are seeking personal fulfillment as WE define it – or at least in terms that we accept and understand, rather than in the language and eyes of others. It is listening to one’s heart and passions, more so than to the chorus of those who desire that we choose and live as they would wish.

The most courageous of us believe that a strong sense of freedom and responsibility is fundamental to Living Well. That includes the freedom to break the rules of conventional wisdom, to make and try to live by our own rules, to learn from our own mistakes (as well as the mistakes of others,) and to suffer our own consequences. Courageous, innovative, and entrepreneurial people for whom freedom is important, frequently choose to leave communities where there is often a stifling mandate to Be Good within very narrow standards.

When Joseph Campbell wrote about the classic Hero’s Journey, he noted that in every culture, “heroes” break away from the conventional wisdom that says, “Stay put. Play it safe.” It is heroic to CHOOSE to assume risk, to take chances, to be eccentric, to venture into the unknown, struggle, fail, suffer, and grow. To me, this is Living Well. Yes, there is risk, danger, room for mistakes, failure, and suffering – which are almost always part of the deal. And some who break away in search of Living Well don’t come back – the stories of Chris McCandless (Into the Wild) and Pat Tillman are well known – and yes, even Cheryl Strayed, who did come back (Wild.) But these heroes also serve as role models – not for what NOT to do, but rather, what courageous individuals are willing to do – to break with conventional wisdom, even make mistakes, but to live their own lives.

A couple of quotes from John Stuart Mill, whose short treatise “On Liberty” written nearly 150 years ago, makes this point much better than I:

On Eccentricity: “In this age, the mere example of non-conformity, the mere refusal to bend the knee to custom, is itself a service…. Eccentricity has always abounded when and where strength of character has abounded; and the amount of eccentricity in a society has generally been proportional to the amount of genius, mental vigor, and moral courage which it contained. That so few now dare to be eccentric, marks the chief danger of the time.”

On Freedom: “The only freedom which deserves the name is that of pursuing our own good in our own way, so long as we do not attempt to deprive others of theirs, or impede their efforts to obtain it. Each is the proper guardian of his own health, whether bodily, or mental or spiritual. Mankind are greater gainers by suffering each other to live as seems good to themselves, than by compelling each to live as seems good to the rest.”

Our choice is not to Be Good or Be Bad, or to Live Well or Live Poorly. Our challenge is to find the nexus between meeting at least the minimum demands of our community and culture, while also meeting the demands and impulses of our heart, as we struggle to create our own unique destiny and path when there is constant pressure to conform. While we must Be Good at least to some degree, my choice is to first and foremost seek to Live Well, and to allow myself to be just a little bit – and occasionally more than a little bit – crazy or eccentric.

Finally, quotes from some great eccentrics:

Einstein, “Great spirits have always encountered violent opposition from mediocre minds.”

Emerson: “Do not go where the path may lead, go instead where there is no path and leave a trail.”

Churchill: “Great and Good are seldom in the same man.”

While we can’t all be “great,” we can all aspire to Live Well – and that means being willing to venture outside the box that conventional morality circumscribes around “Being Good.”

Bob Schoultz has an undergraduate degree in Philosophy from Stanford University and an MA in National Security Affairs from the Naval War College where he also served on the faculty as the first chair for Special Operations. Schoultz retired from the Navy in July 2005 as a captain after a 30 year career, nearly all in Naval Special Warfare. He commanded Navy Seals at all levels up to captain, lived overseas for four tours and participated in military contingency operations all over the world. His final tour in the Navy was at the Naval Academy where he completed a nine month fellowship with the Center for the Study of Professional Military Ethics and in his final two years was the director of Character Development and ultimately the director of Character and Leadership Development. He is also a certified instructor with the National Outdoor Leadership School.