Our family moved to Maine a couple of years ago, and though it has taken some time to settle in, we’ve really started to enjoy life here. I’m not sure if it’s the pace of life, the long winters, or the friendly people, but I have definitely felt something within me shift. And I've found myself wrestling with a question that feels both simple and profound: What does it mean to be good?
Millions of us have read Jim Collins's legendary book, Good to Great. It is a major contribution to the world of business and leadership, and we owe him a tremendous debt for the work that he and his team have done over the years. In 2016, several colleagues and I had the opportunity to spend a day with Jim at his offices in Boulder, and I can assure you that he is as impressive in person as he is in print. Throughout my professional career, I've leaned on the "flywheel" and the "hedgehog concept", and have done my best to try and become a "level 5 leader". These ideas are all, at least in my experience, very helpful in the pursuit of greatness.
But what if greatness isn't the real goal?
With all respect to Jim Collins, I've been wondering lately if we'd do well to start thinking less about greatness and more about goodness.
I'm not exactly sure when it started, but for at least my entire lifetime, we've had a collective preoccupation with greatness. And while the markers and standards of what it is to be truly great are often debated, at least they are being talked about. Those of us who grew up in the 80's and 90's had a fairly clear playbook for what it meant to succeed in the world. There were a few well-defined paths that all included some combination of money and status. It may look like getting into a good college, landing a high-paying job, and buying a big house. For others, it might have been getting famous playing sports or making music, then buying a big house (and several cars). But almost regardless of the path, the destination had mostly to do with money and status...and for some, power.
Living in a small town in Maine has really helped bring this into focus for me. It isn't perfect here, but from the time we arrived, I could feel something different about the place, something like...humanity.
We live in a world where greatness is like a skyscraper – towering, visible from miles away, impressive in its engineering. We marvel at its height, its ambition, how it pierces the clouds. Our culture has taught us that this is what we should aspire to.
Goodness is different. Goodness is more like a lighthouse – sturdy, reliable, built not to dominate the landscape but to serve it. A lighthouse doesn't compete for attention; it simply offers guidance when it's needed most. Its value isn't measured in height or grandeur but in how many ships it safely guides to harbor during storms.
So many of us have spent decades constructing our own skyscrapers. We followed the blueprint that was handed to us: achieve more, climb higher, get more visibility.
We didn't realize how empty and isolating those upper floors can feel. But we kept building because the currencies of greatness are familiar to us all: wealth, influence, recognition, power. They're clearly quantifiable, comparable, and easy to display. These are what we often call “resume attributes”.
But goodness trades in a different currency, one that doesn't always register on our cultural exchange rates: Was I helpful to that person? Did I choose the longer, more sustainable path? Did I stand for something when sitting would have been more comfortable – what we think of as “eulogy attributes”.
I never ignored these kinds of questions, and I’m sure you don’t either. But they probably haven’t driven our career decisions or lived at the front of our minds. They just aren't the metrics we use to evaluate our progress or success. And they aren't the measures by which we think others will measure our worth.
And yet, as I watch my children grow, and try to navigate the middle chapters of my life, these are increasingly the only questions that seem to matter. Maybe I'm just getting old. Maybe I've had enough "success" to take it for granted. Or maybe I'm realizing that I'll never be "one of the greats", so I'm just trying to change the game. Maybe. But I know I’m not the only one.
There seems to be a quiet revolution happening in certain conversations and corners of the internet. I’m starting to see people of my generation, and encouragingly those much younger, starting to move toward lives that are centered around purpose, community, and family. It hasn’t captured the headlines yet, but it is starting to look promising. People who climbed every prescribed ladder are asking if they were leaning against the right wall all along.
This personal reckoning is happening within corporations too. We've witnessed corporate greatness often coming at the expense of goodness – chasing growth at all costs and ultimately undermining any good they sought to do in the first place. We still have a long way to go, but we’re starting to see that companies built solely on the foundations of profit and scale, will eventually discover that without purpose, humanity, and stewardship, their towers are unstable. Perhaps the ethos of "move fast and break things" should be replaced by "first, do no harm”...or as Google used to say more pointedly, “don’t be evil”.
To be clear, this isn't about rejecting ambition or excellence. Rather, it's about asking whether our ambition is aimed at the right targets and whether our excellence serves the right ends. It's about recognizing that perhaps the most revolutionary act in our achievement-obsessed culture is to be thoroughly, consistently good – to your family, to your community, to yourself, to this world we share.
Living in Maine has been clarifying to this end. My neighbors here are as driven and motivated as anybody, but that drive and motivation seems to be oriented a bit differently. I notice this in subtle ways. It looks like a family playing cards at the local pizza place or eating a bag lunch at the ski hill. It looks like people closing up shop on Sundays (or every Friday afternoon in the summer). These little things reveal something about what makes life not just successful but meaningful. It’s the pursuit of all of the wonderful things that money can’t buy.
I don't think we all need to move to small towns. Surely, these values exist and these realizations are available in all sorts of places. But for me personally, there has been something about changing pace that has allowed me to see, and to feel, this more clearly.
So what does this mean for our work? For me, it's not a wholesale change, but a deliberate recalibration. I still want to do great work. I’m still challenging myself to grow and improve. And I certainly still appreciate recognition when it comes. I just try to regularly (with Brandon’s help) ask myself, “For who and for what?”
And this isn't about lowering standards – in many ways, the standards of goodness are far more demanding than those of greatness. Greatness might require exceptional talent or ambition, but goodness requires caring and consistency and patience, and the ability to apply both without any applause.
Perhaps the most liberating realization has been this: greatness is comparative and scarce. By definition, only a few can achieve it. But goodness is available to everyone, every day, regardless of circumstances. So going from great to good isn't a step backwards. It's an opportunity to move forward – to be our best, and to do our best, without having to outdo anybody else in the process.
And maybe, just maybe, in our collective pursuit of goodness, we can create something great.
