From Great to Good

I was reading Ryan Holliday’s blog, the Daily Stoic, recently and learned about what things were marks of success for the great Stoic, Marcus Auerlius:  good character and acting for the common good.

As I read more on Marcus later in the week, I got to thinking about how I might bring that stoic wisdom to NOVA Lab with a bit of rebranding, and I thought about our slogan.

For the past two years, I’ve issued a daily call to my NOVA Lab students to “go do great things.”  And when marketing the class, it was an easy lift to simply adopt that as our slogan (see t-shirt mockup at right). But in thinking over what Marcus Aurelius said, I am wondering if “do great things” is too much license, or too much pressure.  Great things may be accomplished in many ways, and those ends might justify means I wouldn’t want to justify.  And given the rates of anxiety in our teenagers, the pressure to “be great” or “do great things” may be…well…too great.

So I thought about “Do Good Things.” 

I love the ambiguity there.  At first it seems like the statement of an underachiever, like “this is good enough.”  What entrepreneur would consider only ever being good?: “I make good soup.”  “I make good apps.” 

After all, we do live in an age of superlatives, and maybe we can thank PT Barnum for that, or the advantage of America’s ascension to dominance in the 20th century.   Whatever it is, it seems our wont to be the best, the biggest, the greatest.   And I wonder if in doing that we’ve missed the fact that great rests upon good.  If at its foundation the core motive of an act is not “good,” or “to do good,” then “great” becomes a facade, a label. And “Do great things!”, then, is mere entreaty without moral intention.

So the rebranding for NOVA Lab, strange as it may seem, is to step back and step down in order to step up. I want to tell my students to do “good things.” After all, that’s the end, the goal of Social Impact design.  And we can know good things, and do good things, and measure good things if we at least agree on moral standards of what it means to “do good,” or to act, as Aurelius reminds us, “for the common good.”

Some might look to this with cynicism. That is the habit of our post-modern world: To always question and distrust the motives of others. Some may even react with a bit of derision, “Who is he to believe that by doing good things he could change the world.”  I’ll take both challenges, for the greatest thing I can do, is to foster a focus on and belief in the common good and the role we must all play in it, however small that might be. 

For me, that role is in creating learning spaces where a focus on and belief in the common good is foundational to our community, both in and out of the classroom. And this is why NOVA Lab exists, because it allows me to live knowing I tried to do all I could to make the world a better place rather than simply bettering my own place in the world.