Remember that line from “Santa Claus Is Coming to Town”? He’s making a list, checking it twice, gonna find out who’s naughty or nice. We sing it like it’s about behavior – did you clean your room, tell the truth, share your toys? But the deeper question cuts straight to the bone: Have you had goodwill toward people?

Real goodwill isn’t the greeting card sentiment we’ve made it into. It’s not about being pleasant or accommodating or swallowing your truth to keep the peace. Goodwill is a force. It’s fierce. It says to others: I will not let you harm me, and I will not let you harm yourself.

Recently someone accused me of trying to harm their reputation. The accusations were completely untrue. I hired a lawyer. Not out of revenge, but because goodwill toward myself – and toward truth – required that I not be diminished by falsehood.

Fierce goodwill sometimes means setting boundaries, walking away, refusing to let someone’s distortions define you.

You see this force working in the world today – in politics, between countries, in the way some cultures are treated as disposable. These aren’t abstract problems happening somewhere else. They’re what happens when millions of small choices to withhold goodwill accumulate into something monstrous. Or when enough people make the harder choice toward it.

The daily practice of goodwill is built in small choice points. The moments when you could stay silent but speak up. When you could go along with casual cruelty – the “harmless” joke that makes an entire group the punchline, the dismissive comment about the older colleague – but you don’t. When your own wounds want to dictate how you treat someone, but you choose differently.

Goodwill is a muscle. Every time you refuse to participate in gossip that diminishes someone, you strengthen it. Every time you insist on seeing someone’s full humanity – especially when they’re annoying or angry at you, disagreeing with you, looking for revenge, or belonging to a group you’ve been taught to dismiss – you’re doing the real work.

Goodwill is not passive kindness. It’s active love wearing work boots, not slippers. And we choose it, or we don’t, every single day.

Thanks – Michael (he, him)

Please share this Daily with your tribes.
This is crucial also – Respect and Contempt Have Consequences.

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