Small Things with Great Love

I follow Harvard Business Review on Twitter (@HarvardBiz) because of my job, and I read useful things there all the time, but not usually about love.

But the first sentence of Bill Taylor’s “The Values Proposition: Do Small Things with Great Love,” reached out and grabbed me.

The world confronts vast uncertainty, from unrest in the social climate to accelerating shifts in the climate itself.

I felt the usual chill as he listed off the world’s ills, but kept going as he discounted the usual business advice to “make bold bets,” or as I’ve also heard it put, “Go Big or Go Home.” Instead, Taylor advocates something like the Path of Love—for business.

But I’ve come to believe that a better way to respond to uncertainty is with small gestures that send big signals about what you care about and stand for. In a world defined by crisis, acts of generosity and reassurance take on outsized importance.

He then tells two stories, about an airline pilot and an ophthalmologist, and concluded with a quote from Mother Teresa, from which he drew his title.

We cannot do great things, only small things with great love.

As I also wrote in The iMan’s Path, Taylor says, “Few of us will ever do ‘great things’ that remake companies and reshape industries. But all of us can do small things with great feeling and an authentic sense of emotion.”

Take it just one step further, and do those small things with no thought about how they might benefit you, and you are on the Path of Love.