Last March I saw this video on the BBC website and loved it. That very morning, I looked up Professor Banerjee on the Internet, tracked down his telephone number and called him. Surprisingly he picked up!
I just wanted to say thank you for the work he’s done and continues to do around this subject. There were many parts of the video which had resonated with me and I sent him an email the following day with the excerpts that stood out. Clearly they reminded me of You Should Meet and what I had I strived to address with it, especially the need to create an environment to facilitate kindness:
It’s one of the big paradoxes of kindness, that an act of kindness that is intended to benefit others actually has some positive consequences for yourself.
Those relationships that are required for working cooperatively are founded upon basic social connections. So it’s pretty fundamental to how human beings interact with each other.
This can’t simply be a matter of instructing people in a given setting to be kind. Hey, you. You need to be kind. We need to change our environment so that it feels normative to be kind.
He was lovely to speak to and at the end of my email I used a line which I’d heard from Adam Grant in a podcast years ago, when you want to ask for someone’s help: ‘Given that you’re distinctly positioned in this field, I’d really appreciate and cherish any insights you may have.‘ He kindly wrote back to say it sounds like an interesting product, and will offer any helpful ways of contributing. We haven’t been in touch since so I should definitely pick up where we left off.
My Excerpts 