A friend today said that you can’t do good in this world without doing some evil. So true. If you want to really positively affect the world, you need to be live in the world, which inevitably means making some mistakes. Passion will lead to greatness and positive impact, but it also will definitely push one to do some “evil” as well.
Sometimes, I will sit and dwell on past mistakes. Once, I’d over-estimated growth potential in a certain office for ARIS and later had to close it down. I had negatively impacted everyone in that office. But that same ability to take risks, had allowed us to open offices in 12 other cities successfully, positively impacting a lot more people.
Realty is that living, getting involved, taking a stance all involve risk that may result in doing some evil. If the intent is solid, however, you will do more good than not. If you want to be perfect, or never do evil, you can’t really live passionately. That means you really can’t do too much good either.
Go on, live, and do some good in the world and understand you won’t always make the right decision. The key is being open and understanding that you will not always be right nor perfect.
