Ryan Byrd’s Ramblings

The other day at my MBA party, the Dilemma of Good and Great came up in conversation. Several in attendance were unfamiliar with the theory, so for their benefit and yours, I’ll explain it here. You’ll note that I speak about good and great in a binary sense of all or nothing. Obviously, real life instances are vectors along a continuum rather than the ends themselves.

First some definitions: A Great person makes a positive, lasting, significant impact on society, often overcoming tremendous obstacles in the process. Great people include: Benjamin Franklin, Martin Luther King, Jr. and Abraham Lincoln. Great people affect us all by shaping our world, and we are unquestionably indebted to them. They inspire us to strive further, to aspire higher and to persevere longer. They know how to work, they know how to fight, and they relentlessly endure. These fiery personalities are commonly the ones we choose to be our heroes. (If you force me to apply a metric, I would say that a great person impacts positively at least 1,000 people.)

A Good person is a moral person. He/she is kind to both friends and to the unfriendly. Good people have strong familial connections; they love their spouses and their children. They personify honesty, integrity and virtue. Their hearts are pure. To be Great, it seems sometimes necessary to break rules, but to be Good one must obey moral and ethical codes. As well, it’s more difficult to name famous Good people, because most such individuals have smaller (yet arguably deeper) spheres of influence.

As people reflect over their lives and notice moral shortcomings, it is not uncommon to want to perform great acts in order to compensate for those black spots of weakness (or badness). Perhaps we believe that, in the end, our bad deeds will be weighed on a scale against our great works and, if we do enough great things, in the end they’ll balance out. I’ll leave it as an exercise to the reader to divine the truth in that assumption. (Ancient Egyptians evidently thought this was the case.)

Some people are both Great and Good, though I think the combination is exceedingly rare. Indeed, many frequently confound the two descriptors and wrongly conclude that great people are already good. As much as we might wish that to be true, history tells us otherwise. For example, Benjamin Franklin, the iconic American who rose from the ranks of the peasantry to the gentry, capturing the hearts and minds of Americans ever since, played a pivotal role in the founding of our nation and convinced France to help us win the Revolutionary War, but he emotionally battered his wife, ignored his children and committed adultery with countless French women. He was Great, but not particularly Good. Don’t be mislead, however, what remains is that Bad people (or at least people who aren’t Good), can do Great things.

It’s a simple fact that only a minority have the combination of intrinsic capacity and talents and environment and circumstances to be Great. On the other hand, we all have the ability to be Good. As much as the world needs Great people, it needs Good people even more. Great people give us confidence in ourselves, but Good people give us confidence in others.

Maybe a third designation is needed, that of Truly Great. We’ll define Truly Great as someone who is at once Great and Good. Who’s on your list of Truly Great people?