Your Brother’s Keeper

Michael Oluwafemi Taiwo, PhD

We are all caught in an inescapable network of mutuality, tied into a single garment of destiny. Whatever affects one directly, affects all indirectly. We are made to live together because of the interrelated structure of reality.

– Martin Luther King Jr.

I will use a story to illustrate why being one’s brother’s keeper is profitable. And then use this to lay the framework for how we are changing the world by our actions – a topic I will deal with more in-depth in the next article.

Steve was a 6ft6 tall popular football player; he played well in high school and gained an easy entry into his college’s football team. He had an exuberant and energetic persona that allowed him to have his way with others. Everyone loved Steve. Down the hall in his dormitory, however, was a smaller socially awkward fellow that Steve was drawn to. Steve would spend time with his new friend, William, and frequently took him to games. Steve introduced William to a lot of people and helped him adjust to the social circles in college.

For a shy, reserved nerd, this was huge and it bolstered William’s self-confidence and enjoyment of college life. On the face of it, nothing was in it for Steve, he already had plenty of friends, he just wanted to make this funny looking lad from Seattle savor life as a freshman. William eventually dropped out of college while Steve went on to graduate with honors, got a job with P & G, worked there for about two years and then moved to Palo Alto to attend Stanford Graduate School of Business.

Where is this story headed? Well, William (Bill) dropped out to start a company called Microsoft and when the company grew large enough, he needed a business manager he could trust. Bill convinced Steve to drop out of business school and run Microsoft. Steve Ballmer is now the CEO of Microsoft, he is one of the richest men in the world with a personal net worth of over $15 billion USD and all this thanks to befriending someone with no friends, all this thanks to being his brother’s keeper. There are many lessons to learn from this story of Bill Gates and Steve Ballmer and one is that you should treat others with decency and respect just because.

Look out for people’s interest and help them in whatever way you can, not because there is anything in it for you but because it makes the recipient of your favors a better person. I am not advocating that you should assist others because one day they might be CEO (they very well may!) but because it is a way to enrich the world in and of itself.
We now know that there are at most six degrees of separation between any two people in the world.

This means that whatever good you do to one person finds its way to all others on this planet in varying degrees. This is a revolutionary idea if you stop to think about it. If you lift Mrs. A up, you lift up all those in her 2nd degree network also, albeit to a lesser extent. Of course those in her 3rd degree network are reached though to an even more remote extent and this goes on to all of human life because all of us are connected to one another by at most six layers. Hence, whatever you do, good or bad, affects all of us – citizens of this one world – indirectly.