A Kindness with Without Applause

“You must be prepared to work always without applause.”

——The Old Man and the Sea 

By Ernest Miller Hemingway

A ten-year-old boy and his grandparents joined a caravan to travel around the US. The young boy respected and loved his grandparents. In this travel, his grandfather drove, his grandmother occupied the front passenger seat, and the boy sat on the big bench seat in the back of the car. However, his grandmother smoked during the entire trip and the boy hated the smell.

The young boy had some mathematical talent and used his talent to estimate how much of his grandmother’s life had been lost just from smoking on the trip.

In describing this decades later, he said, “At that age, I’d take any excuse to make estimates and do minor arithmetic. I’d calculate our gas mileage — figure out useless statistics on things like grocery spending. I’d been hearing an ad campaign about smoking. I can’t remember the details, but basically the ad said, every puff of a cigarette takes some number of minutes off of your life: I think it might have been two minutes per puff. At any rate, I decided to do the math for my grandmother. I estimated the number of cigarettes per day, estimated the number of puffs per cigarette and so on. When I was satisfied that I’d come up with a reasonable number, I poked my head into the front of the car, tapped my grandmother on the shoulder, and proudly proclaimed, ‘At two minutes per puff, you’ve taken nine years off your life!’”

Now, I suspect that the boy overestimated the damage from smoking considerably, but that doesn’t really matter for this story. Anyway, after announcing his conclusion, the boy didn’t obtain the praise that he expected. And, in fact, his grandmother started to cry after hearing that she had lost nine years of her life.

When his grandmother cried, his grandfather drove the car in silence for a while before pulling over onto the shoulder of the highway. His grandfather got out of the car and came around and opened the door and waited for the boy to get out. At that time, the boy knew that he was in big trouble.

His grandfather was an intelligent and quiet man; he never said a harsh word to him. The boy thought that perhaps this would be the first time. The grandfather then looked at the boy, and after a bit of silence, he gently and calmly said, “Jeff, one day you’ll understand that it’s harder to be kind than clever.”

This is Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos’s story. It is also the original source for Bezos’s famous words, “Cleverness is a gift, kindness is a choice,” adding, “ Gifts are easy -- they're given after all. Choices can be hard.”

I know that these words have become a very popular maxim. However, many years after I first heard these words, I got my thinking about “Kindness is a choice”.

Some religions try to persuade people to do kind things by promising them that they can enter heaven after they die if they do so. Or promise that they will have a good reward in their future. Some people do kind things in order to obtain other people’s praise. In that case, such “kindness” may seem very transactional, like doing business. And many people say that such transactional kindness does not deserve any reward or praise. However, good behavior is good behavior, at least for the receivers. No matter what the purpose of the behavior, the benefit for the recipients is still present. That’s true even if the kind behavior was an attempt to do business with God or to enhance one’s reputation with one’s peers.

There are many acts of kindness that we can do, such as donating money for the poor or becoming a volunteer of some kind. However, I think that one of the best ways to exemplify “Kindness is a choice” is to do something that is not related to one’s ability. For example, when driving, slow down to give pedestrians plenty of time to cross the street in front of us. Or one could pick up some litter that someone else tossed on the ground and throw it away.  One act of kindness that I like to do is to tidy up my hotel room a bit before checking out because I don’t want to be an undue burden on the housekeeping staff.

Although such acts of kindness are easy to do, we often neglect to do them because we don’t have to do them.  But I feel that it’s important to choose to do the things that we don’t have to do. Such choices to be kind are fully under our control. No one is compelling us to be kind. We can be kind or not without gaining or losing anything. Such acts of kindness are anonymous for the most part, and often no one will realize that we have done something kind for someone. Doing such kind things usually doesn’t result in any praise or reward, at least not in this life. And we don’t do them to be rewarded; we do them because the act of doing them is a reward in and of itself. That is, we do such kind things just to be a kind person. It’s kind of a personal standard that we hold ourselves to.