Applying the Principles of Mother Teresa and Princess Diana to Your Career—and Ultimately, Your Life

Two women from two different worlds, yet the same lesson: use your influence for good.

When I was growing up, there were two people I looked up to the most: Mother Teresa and Princess Diana. To bear witness to their lives felt like a true privilege and an honor. I believe it is something this world has somehow forgotten.

I was only 13 when both of them died within five days of each other in 1997. Two incredible, irreplaceable human beings—gone in a week. The world felt a little colder and darker. As Elton John put it: their candles burned out long before their legends ever did.

They came from completely different worlds. Mother Teresa devoted her life to people who were poor, sick, dying or forgotten. Diana was a princess under enormous scrutiny. What I saw in both was the same thing. Influence was not about power. It was about what you chose to do with it.

Kill 'em with kindness

Teresa sat with people the world had already filed as hopeless - the poor, the sick, the dying. Diana held the hand of a man living with HIV, back when a lot of people still thought you could catch it from a handshake. They were not doing it for the cameras. They were simply being decent to another human being.

Mother Teresa hung this on the wall of her children's home in Calcutta. She didn't write it, but she lived and embodied it:

"People are often unreasonable and self-centered; forgive them anyway. If you are kind, people may accuse you of ulterior motives; be kind anyway. If you are honest, people may cheat you; be honest anyway. If you find happiness, people may be jealous; be happy anyway. The good you do today may be forgotten tomorrow; do good anyway. Give the world the best you have, and it may never be enough; give your best anyway. For you see, in the end, it is between you and God; it was never between you and them anyway.

— Kent M. Keith, The Paradoxical Commandments

Diana put the same idea in simpler terms:

“Carry out a random act of kindness, with no expectation of reward, safe in the knowledge that one day someone might do the same for you.”

I think about that word—anyway—more than almost anything else.

Be kind anyway. Tell the truth anyway. Do the right thing anyway. Not because the other person has earned it, and not because you know it will come back to you, but because you have decided that is the kind of person you want to be.

Small things with great love

“Not all of us can do great things. But we can do small things with great love.”

— Mother Teresa

The gestures were often small, but the love behind them was not. I have learned that you don't need a grand title, a huge platform, or a remarkable opportunity to make someone's day different. You just have to pay attention to the moment in front of you.

Diana sat on hospital beds. She crouched down to a child's height. That was all. It was enough.

Most of a career is not a keynote speech. It's just an ordinary Tuesday - Remembering someone's name. Giving someone credit when it would have been easier to take it yourself. Taking five extra minutes to explain something to someone who is struggling. Checking in on the person who has gone quiet. None of these things matter in the grand scale of things, but they create ripples. Someone who feels seen may go on to make someone else feel seen. Someone who was given grace may be more willing to give it to the next person.

Sometimes the work that matters most is the work nobody applauds.

Be the change

They did not ask the world to become kinder and then get to work. Mother Teresa went to the people society preferred not to see. Diana walked through a minefield in Angola, deliberately bringing the world's attention to a problem that was easy to ignore. They did not ask permission to set the temperature. They were the temperature.

They did not wait for the world to change. They went first.

It is so easy to wait. Wait for the other party to become more compassionate, wait for the culture to change, wait for someone else to say something first. We wait until we have enough authority, enough money, enough experience, enough people listening.

The thing is, you already have the room. If you want a culture where people tell the truth, tell the truth. If you want people to treat mistakes as opportunities to learn, be the person who doesn't punish the first person who admits one. If you want a space where people are respected regardless of their position, start by respecting the person with less power than you.

You don't have to wait until it is popular. In fact, sometimes the whole point is that it isn't.

Let the work outlive the name

Titles expire. What people remember does not. What has stayed with me is not the pageantry, and it is not the halo. It is the dying man who was not left alone. It is the boy in a hospital who was treated as if he were worth a princess's afternoon.

I still think about them when I am tempted to treat my work as only my work. If you have a light, you do not owe the world a performance. You owe it the warmth. Keep the candle going. The legend, if there is one, will take care of itself.