Harvard Case: Designing for Generosity

I was recently at Harvard for a few events, including Harvard Business School talk. Prior to the event, they created this caselet that was distributed to students.

Joy in Service: Nipun Mehta on Designing for Generosity

An excerpt:

The two pillars of my life are meditation and service. They are the inhale and the exhale of the same breath.

Any time I'm still, I see reality more clearly. Meditation gives me insight into the nature of clinging — my deep habit of holding on. Service helps me flip that habit pattern. Any time I practice the smallest act of service — even holding a door, but with full heart, may I be of use to this person — that giving changes the deep architecture of my mind from everything being me-centered. In that brief moment, there is other-centeredness. Over time, all of those small moments lead to a different state of being where, ultimately, it becomes effortless. It becomes who I am.

Service is not something I do. It is an expression of inner transformation.

There is a distinction I return to often: grit and grace. I had over-indexed on grit. When you overindex on grit, you over-index on your ego, because you are indexing on the known and the controllable. Grace is the idea that when conditions ripen, you receive — even when you aren't there to control the whole line of causation. That letting go, that leaning into grace rather than over-indexing on grit, is what allows you to reconnect with the ocean and discern with wisdom.

For anyone navigating leadership, this has direct implications. As an individual actor in your own finite world, you might have clarity: this is right, this is wrong. But in leadership, you constantly navigate between two rights. This is right, and this is right, and you must decide. So what is your algorithm? If you use only your big data analysis — all the cognition you're capable of, all your opportunity-cost analysis — you will have a certain kind of discernment. But that discernment will not hold the wider arcs of causation.

What is the discernment that can bridge the narrow with the broad, with the infinite? That is wisdom. And this is why the inner life is so critical in leadership. How you cultivate inside shapes how you discern, which shapes how you lean into the infinite game, which shapes everything you do and touch.

How do you live with a decision? How do you live with the ripple effects of that decision? How do you not have all of that weigh you down? I can only say what I've found: find something that gives you an inner compass, and commit to it through daily practice.

As a personal practice, I haven't charged for my labor for more than twenty years. Can you imagine what that does to one's mind? Without price tags, the idea of transaction loses its grip on you. When there's nothing to gain, you stop negotiating with your likes, dislikes, and biases. Is this grunt work? Is this beneath me? Those questions dissolve. It's all just work. Or it's all just joy — and you can't tell the difference.

Gandhi put it in two words: renounce and enjoy. It doesn't work the other way — you can't enjoy and renounce. Renounce means to let go. Stop trying to stand out as an individuated self. Stop trying to be a wave, and trust in the ocean. The ocean is always going to do its dance, always forming different waves in different patterns. Our job is not to control the wave but to ride it. When you start riding the wave, you stop negotiating with nature. And when you stop  negotiating with nature, you're much more yourself in your natural state — and that's joy.