Confusion Between "Nice" And "Good"

I have been talking a lot recently about men and women, and at this point I would like to tackle a probably more important issue. It is the distinction between being nice and being good.

Now there are people who think that nice people are good and not nice people are bad, but I have heard it stated by an American woman that sometimes nice people are worse than mean ones. That is because nice and good are not the same thing. The first is superficial mask; the second is rightful conduct.

I have discovered that it is not at all difficult to be nice. Any salesman and any player can do it. Whereas being good, I have discovered, is a much greater challenge. To actually be good you have to constantly be thinking and you have to constantly be scrutinizing yourself. You need to figure out how your actions – all of your actions – affect other people, and how. That requires all sorts of soul-searching and that requires all sorts of questing. And of course there are many situations in which you are likely to mess up.

Now different people have different ideas as to what it means to be a good person. Some people have seen me as a good person, and other people have seen me as a terrible person. In both cases, it appears that the judgment is based upon one's values. So I have gone to the effort of understanding what is the source of the values in each case.

Sometimes nice people really are worse than mean ones. A mean person will tell you what they think of you even if that stands to offend you, whereas the nice person will wear a smilie face then stab you in the back. For this reason I have no use for nice; I however have every use for good.

Of course I have had to figure out just what good means. I have known any number of genuinely good people. I have learned a lot from them. I cannot say that I have become as good a person as they are, but I have most certainly become a better person than I was when I was 18. For a long time I had a negative outlook because what I saw was all sorts of people pretending to be good people without actually being good. But the more I dealt with genuinely good people, the greater understanding I have had of the subject.

Many people make the mistake of confusing nice with good. These people end up falling for all sorts of fronts of all sorts of scammers, and many of them pay dearly for that mistake. I want more people to see through such a thing and to avoid what I have seen in some cases being a life-ruining error. Once again, any salesman and any player can put on a front. That does not make them good.

What does? A committed choice in that direction. A determination to treat others rightfully and to leave the world a better place than one has found it. That can be done by everyone, including people who are not naturally nice. If you are in a bad place there is hope. That hope is your choice.

I know enough about myself to know that I am capable of both good and bad. So is everyone. Even if one is not born with a good temperament, one can still do the right thing. Some things in character are inborn, and others are a result of one's own choices. And it is commitment to doing the right thing that will make anyone good, whatever his innate tendencies happen to be.