Mean People Fail: Why Kindness Correlates with Success in the Modern Economy

What struck me recently is how few of the most successful people I know are mean. There are exceptions, but remarkably few. Meanness isn't rare—the internet has shown us the long tail of meanness that was previously hidden. But among the most successful people I know, there are next to none.

This observation comes with an important caveat: selection bias. I primarily know people in certain fields—startup founders, programmers, professors. I'm willing to believe successful people in other fields, like hedge fund managers or drug lords, might be mean. But there are big chunks of the world that mean people don't rule, and that territory seems to be growing.

My wife Jessica, who has x-ray vision for character, came to the startup world from investment banking. She's always been struck by how consistently successful startup founders turn out to be good people, and how consistently bad people fail as startup founders.

Why does meanness correlate with failure? Several factors are at play.

First, being mean makes you stupid. Fights never produce your best work because they're not sufficiently general. Winning is always a function of the specific situation and people involved. You win fights by thinking of tricks that work in one particular case, not by thinking of big ideas. And yet fighting consumes as much effort as thinking about real problems. For someone who cares how their brain is used, it's particularly painful: your brain goes fast but you get nowhere, like a car spinning its wheels.

Startups don't win by attacking. They win by transcending. The way to win is to race ahead, not to stop and fight. There are exceptions, but this pattern holds.

Another reason mean founders lose is that they can't get the best people to work for them. They can hire people who will put up with them because they need a job. But the best people have other options. A mean person can't convince the best people to work for him unless he's super convincing. And while having the best people helps any organization, it's critical for startups.

There's also a complementary force: if you want to build great things, it helps to be driven by a spirit of benevolence. The startup founders who end up richest are not the ones driven by money. The ones driven by money take the big acquisition offer that nearly every successful startup gets en route. The ones who keep going are driven by something else—they're usually trying to improve the world. People with a desire to improve the world have a natural advantage.

The exciting thing is that this pattern isn't limited to startups. This kind of work is the future.

For most of history, success meant control of scarce resources. One got that by fighting, whether literally in the case of pastoral nomads driving hunter-gatherers into marginal lands, or metaphorically in the case of Gilded Age financiers contending with one another to assemble railroad monopolies. For most of history, success meant success at zero-sum games. And in most of them, meanness was not a handicap but probably an advantage.

That is changing. Increasingly the games that matter are not zero-sum. Increasingly you win not by fighting to get control of a scarce resource, but by having new ideas and building new things.

There have long been games where you won by having new ideas. In the third century BC, Archimedes won by doing that. At least until an invading Roman army killed him. Which illustrates why this change is happening: for new ideas to matter, you need a certain degree of civil order. You also need to prevent the sort of economic violence that nineteenth century magnates practiced against one another and communist countries practiced against their citizens. People need to feel that what they create can't be stolen.

That has always been the case for thinkers, which is why this trend began with them. When you think of successful people from history who weren't ruthless, you get mathematicians and writers and artists. The exciting thing is that their m.o. seems to be spreading. The games played by intellectuals are leaking into the real world, and this is reversing the historical polarity of the relationship between meanness and success.

So I'm really glad I stopped to think about this. Jessica and I have always worked hard to teach our kids not to be mean. We tolerate noise and mess and junk food, but not meanness. And now I have both an additional reason to crack down on it, and an additional argument to use when I do: that being mean makes you fail.