If you do good, people will accuse you of selfish ulterior motives. Do good anyway.

A client said to me the other day “No matter what my motives are, everyone else believes I’m making some sort of land grab with my suggestions. How do I get them to see I’m not trying to control things, I’m just trying to come up with some good answers to our problems?”

My answer was to do good anyway. Not a very satisfactory answer in their mind. We want people to see us as being honorable and pure in our motives. They won’t. Our minds are very good at both projecting and remembering. People tend to project their own motives and intentions on others. If they would act in a less than honorable way in this situation they assume you will also.

We also have an interesting memory system that continually revises our memories. If we’ve had experiences in the past with people who didn’t have very good motives or intent, we’ll assume that may be the case here as well.

Do good anyway. It’s our only viable approach to life. We can’t worry about what other people believe our motive to be. We can only do good or not. Do good anyway.

Headlines from a wonderful little book titled Anyway by Kent Keith