Author / Nathan Coumbe

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Posts by Nathan Coumbe

My mission is to learn, inform, inspire, and improve. I am a passionate teacher, an avid writer, a leader of people, and a strategic thinker. Wherever I am, whatever the work I am called to do, my goal is the same: make my little corner of the world better for everyone in it. To do this, I ask better questions and solve more interesting problems for those I serve. Think deeply. Think often. Keep exploring. Always be curious.
by Nathan Coumbe

Fear keeps the majority out of power

It only takes one person for something evil to occur. For example, one of the reasons many authoritarian countries haven’t changed their regime already is that the vast majority of people live in fear of the handful of people who would commit evil on behalf of the leaders.

This is a question of power. If every single person in the country realized that they only have power because they can get other people to do bad things, the leaders would no longer be in power. 

The flipside of that is that it only requires one person being willing to harm or kill another for these people to be able to keep their power. 

It’s contagious—one person begets another person willing to commit harm (or too scared to refuse). Pretty soon, a tiny minority of people grows who are willing to commit evil to keep this one person in power.

Because not everyone says no, the minority rules, and the majority seems powerless. As such, the people who are in the majority must seemingly be willing to face death at the hands of the minority to effect change.

by Nathan Coumbe

The system usually wins

The system may be wrong, but it often has more power than your individual will.

It doesn’t matter how good the change is you want to make. If the system is set up to prevent it, you’ll fail.

Therefore, you often have to work within the system to get the results you want, even if you don’t like it.

by Nathan Coumbe

Freedom has obligations

It’s not oxymoronic; it’s built into the very idea of freedom.

We have forgotten that personal liberty actually comes with obligations. We assume that it means that we’re free to do whatever we want, regardless of the consequences.

But liberty comes with a social contract. We are obligated to be decent to others, to be members of a society that considers the welfare of others, and to care about what other people think about our actions, especially when those actions affect them. 

Just as it’s easier than ever to get a divorce and leave your family—to leave that “obligation” behind—we seem to think that we can abandon principles because we are “free.”

Viktor Frankl, who survived the very worst of what humanity is capable of in the Holocaust, proposed that the United States build a second statue on the West Coast to accompany the Statue of Liberty on the East.

It was to be a Statue of Responsibility. He recognized, and I hope you will as well, that you cannot have the former without the latter.

by Nathan Coumbe

Let regret guide you

Don’t let it paralyze you.

If you failed to do something through inaction, hesitation, or indecision, remember the feeling of regret it left in your gut.

Not to punish yourself or

Another opportunity of some kind will come your way, and you’ll feel hesitant or indecisive again. But if you remember the regret you felt the last time, you’ll realize how much better you’ll feel this time if you act.

Use it to make better decisions in the future.

by Nathan Coumbe

Start from 0, not 100

Thanks to our school systems, our parents, and our bosses, we tend to default to a “100” mindset. We look at everything we should or have done from this framing: “how far from 100 am I?”

How far from perfect is my effort or my attempt?

It’s incredibly unhealthy and unhelpful for making progress or creating change.

So you didn’t attend the protests yesterday? What have you done instead?

Maybe you’ve written tons of letters, made dozens of phone calls to your representatives, and encouraged others to do the same. That’s more than most, so you can comfortably give yourself at least a 75/100.

You didn’t eat perfectly cooked meals that align with your macros to the thousandth decimal place or get in your intensive, tactical workout to help you look like Thor?

Who cares? Did you eat some vegetables? Did you go for a walk or do yoga? You did a lot more than nothing.

Instead of looking at everything starting from 100, why not consider how far away you are from 0?

It’s not just incrementally better, it’s infinitely better!

Doing something, however small or seemingly insignificant, is uncalculably better than doing nothing at all.

by Nathan Coumbe

Why would they do this?

There’s a line in Crucial Conversations worth memorizing:

“Why would a reasonable, rational, and decent person do what this person is doing?”

Most of our behaviors aren’t irrational. Some of them are unconscious, but people rarely do things for “bad” reasons.

Everyone sees themselves as the “good guy” in the story. This means they must be doing this action for a rational reason. It’s solving a problem for them. It’s in service to something they value.

And it might be completely and totally awful to a great many other people. But the first step in fixing something is to understand it.

You might not know why right away, but it’s worth sitting with the question. It might help you find the solution to irrationality.

by Nathan Coumbe

Fairness is based on expectations

If we don’t know what we mean when we talk of fairness, we can’t make informed decisions on whether something is fair or not.

The first step is to set an agreed-upon expectation of what fairness means to the group.

by Nathan Coumbe

Courage starts with you

It’s tempting to ask why people who have more power than you don’t use that power to change the situation.

But what about you? Why can’t you muster the courage to write a letter, make a phone call, or attend an event?

If you’re afraid to do something small in service to the change you want to make, how can you possibly expect someone else to do something bigger and potentially more consequential?

Often, the bigger the impact an action has, the more courage is required to act.

So, you must start small. Start with yourself, with the small things you know you can do.

Be brave in the little moments to model courage for others when the big moments come.

by Nathan Coumbe

If you value it, subsidize it

You would think that after what we saw with the COVID-19 pandemic and the ongoing shortage of doctors, nurses, and other healthcare practitioners, we would be seeing some sort of decline in the price of these educational programs.

Fewer people going into the field would mean lower prices for those programs, right? (Supply and demand.)

Let me hypothesize why this might not be happening.

We have deeply ingrained in our culture the idea that the most important thing you can do is make a lot of money. Therefore, the best thing you can do for yourself is obtain a degree that leads to a certain type of job that pays well.

This means that, because we’ve conditioned our kids to believe that money is everything, people will continue to borrow astronomical amounts of money to attend medical school, believing that they will earn enough to cover it afterward. 

I suspect that a similar pattern is emerging with other college degrees, where individuals are borrowing six figures to earn degrees that lead to jobs paying half that or less, and this will eventually affect medical students. 

This trend is already happening with dental students. There are now a few hundred dentists in the United States who owe more than $1 million in student debt!

Tuition costs are likely to continue rising while salaries remain stagnant. Consequently, we may have doctors with $1 million in loans earning $250,000 a year (or less).

I think one solution is collective action. To make a difference, we, as a society, must unite and declare that we will not continue this way. But that’s hard to do.

The other option is to implement some form of government intervention based on the values we hold as a country.

If we believe that we need more doctors, engineers, and teachers in this country, rather than more hedge fund managers and trust-fund babies, our policies have to match that belief.

One of my professors in college—a funny little self-described country boy from the Mississippi Delta—had something of a law he preached to us:

  • If you want people to start do something, subsidize it.
  • If you want people to stop doing something, tax it.

It works: this very idea is how we almost created a generation of non-smokers.

All the ad campaigns in the world about the dangers of smoking didn’t make a difference. What worked was taxing cigarettes to make them so prohibitively expensive that most Gen-Zers never started smoking them to begin with.

Now, we’re “taxing” the wrong things in the form of tuition increases and poor salaries.

Right now, we’re making it incredibly expensive to become a doctor or engineer. Or we’re making other fields financially unviable to work in (e.g., teaching) by failing to pay practitioners what they’re worth.

Our tax incentives and subsidies (the “rewards” our government doles out) don’t help these people, but they damn sure help those who are less visibly beneficial to society but make vastly more money. It’s why we have so many people entering finance and so few entering teaching.

I don’t know about you, but I think it’s time we flipped this.

by Nathan Coumbe

The wrong question

The question is not,”What do you want to do when you grow up?”

It’s, “Who do you want to be?”

How do you want to contribute?

What legacy do you want to leave when you’re gone?

It might be part of what you do for a living. It might not. More likely, it will be a whole-person approach to living.

Ask the right question and you’ll get a better answer.