laws of human flourishing

If we heed the advice to judge a person by the company they keep, Peter Kaufman is someone worth listening to.

A long-time friend of Charlie Munger and Warren Buffett, he’s the CEO of a Californian aerospace company.

He’s also a voracious reader and consumer of knowledge across a wide horizon of topics.

Across his lifetime, he’s settled on two fundamental laws for individual human flourishing.

He claims these hold true across the three big “buckets” of data - the inorganic universe; the biological universe; and human history.

Mirrored reciprocity - the universe gives back what you put out into it
Compounding - being constant in how you invest your time and talents (not just your money ... but that, too)

Yet, most of us remain reticent to put out unremitting positive energy into the universe. We forgo the potential benefits of mirrored reciprocity (because, he suggests, we are psychologically loss averse - the loss in question often being of status).

We also tend towards switching our focus, or giving up on our endeavours, far too soon to benefit from compounding. We expect or hope for immediate success and are irredeemably short-term in our outlook.

Instead, we should heed Kaufman's Trinity in everything we do:
Be Positive - Go First - Be Constant.

Kaufman’s Trinity converges with the conclusion of psychologist Carl Rogers that, having spent his career seeking to help people change, he’d figured out the only successful approach was this:

Relationship

Or, perhaps, seen through the lens of Kaufman's Trinity:

Be positive (deeply empathetic, genuine and honest)
Go first (don’t wait for your counterpart)
Be constant (keep turning up with positive intention)

Peter Kaufman may be on to something…
What do you think?