I remember Darwin from school. Here is what I remember:
- Darwin traveling…ship and plants…blah blah blah
- Evolution dude…blah blah blah
- Survival of the fittest….blah blah blah
Yes, my school life invited me to regurgitate answers to get a good test grade not really learn which is probably very obvious. Actually, I love biology. I just didn’t retain facts very well.
Survival of the Fittest as a Career Credo
But that list bit stuck…survival of the fittest…not just because of science but because people quoted it into my career. So I took that lesson to heart. If you want to survive (actually to win), you had to dominate, crush the competition and beat others. And even if I didn’t get excited about doing any of that, it didn’t matter because science said it was the way
But did you know that researchers more correctly say now that Darwin advocated for “survival of the kindest.” In two of his books “The Descent of Man” and “Selection In Relation to Sex” Darwin said what caused us to survive was “the greater strength of the social or maternal instincts than that of any other instinct or motive.” What?! Social instincts? Maternal instincts?
Survival of the Fittest or Survival of the Kindest?
If you go a little deeper, the very crude bottom line was that the more sympathetic individuals raised healthier offspring and those kids or offspring were more likely to survive and reproduce.
Why does all of this matter? Big ideas live in our minds and they impact how we think we should be. So we literally make a world that fits those beliefs. We now have companies whose goal is to crush the competition at all costs because that is THE WAY. Leave your empathy for humans at the door because winning the most dollars matters most.
Don’t get me wrong. I love money. I love winning. I think winning and money are fantastic things and when you can pair them together I am delighted. But if you ask me to win and get money at the cost of harming others, leave me out.
I have gotten feedback on multiple occasions, overt and covert, that my kindness and caring were a problem at work. But the older and wiser I got, the more I realized that was complete BS. My caring was a superpower and the more I cared or was kind about people and projects, it wasn’t a problem at all. In fact, I got more done in less time when I was in that mode.
I wonder how we all might act differently if we knew that the better strategy, in the long run, is survival of the kindest.
