Do you ask often enough?

Today I was listening to the first Reith Lecture by Rutger Bregman on BBC Radio Four. It was thought-provoking and sometimes depressing.

For example, he referenced the American Freshman Survey, which has been tracking the values of first-year college students since the 1960s. Fifty years ago, when students were asked about their most important life goals, 80% to 90% indicated that developing a meaningful philosophy of life was their top priority, while only 50% mentioned making a lot of money. Today, those numbers have reversed. Now, 80% to 90% of students say getting rich matters most, and only about half still value a meaningful philosophy of life.

However, what particularly struck me from the lecture was his answer to a question about how things could be changed.

Bregman gave this really interesting response:

" I think that every great movement was grounded in a cultural shift, a more fundamental, deeper cultural shift, which was all about making doing good fashionable once again. I think this could be a kind of virus, a social virus that can spread. Let me illustrate it with one short story. I told at the beginning of this lecture that I've always been fascinated by resistance during the Second World War and endlessly ask myself that question: what would I have done?

For my previous book, I did a bunch of research into exactly that question, like what makes a resistance hero? And I expected that there would be some kind of psychology of resistance, right? Surely some people who had the courage to hide persecuted Jews in their cellars, for example, surely I don't know, maybe they were young or old or rich or poor or left-wing or right-wing. Surely there must have been something there, but the answer is no, there was nothing. This was a cross-sectional population. And hundreds of interviews have been done by researchers, and they couldn't really find anything after the war that suggested there was a kind of psychology.

Well, they did realise at some point that there was a sociology. So resistance was like a virus that spread. That explains why it wasn't spread out evenly across the country in which I was born, the Netherlands. And you know what? The most predictive factor was whether people had been asked to join the resistance. So, in 94% of all cases, when people were been asked to do the right thing, they said yes. So that's how I believe that moral revolutions can happen."

What we can learn

I aimed to convey that ethical behaviour increases the likelihood of success, including financial success, in "Winning by Being Good", and I do include questions to prompt ideas in people. But I haven't done the equivalent of asking people to join the resistance.

I will be working on what that might mean as I enjoy my holiday in the Caribbean, but I want to challenge you:

What questions should you be asking to change the world for the better, or even just to be more successful yourself?

Do you ask enough?

I put myself in the place of someone living in the Netherlands during the war, and worry that I would have been too afraid to join the resistance; I am a coward. But I believe that if I had been asked, and if I had known people around me were doing it, I would have, despite my cowardice.

A final thought

Just ask, you never know what might happen, and what have you got to lose?

Want more ideas for success? Read these, which also pick up on people joining together or creating a clear culture

Three ways to encourage people to buy from you or donate if you are a charity

Using collaboration to change the world

Is economic development only about the economy?

Share This Page:

Tags: success winning by being good

Find entries by tag

Do you ask often enough?

What we can learn

A final thought

Comments