I grew up in a family that showed me how being kind toward others is a superpower. I wasn't taught it as a rule or moral theory. It appeared in small choices: noticing when somebody felt left out, helping others without expecting anything in return, answering with care, showing interest in others, and never disregarding an interaction with anyone, or at least always approaching it with positive intentions.
That is still what kindness means to me. It begins with attention. It is the effort to notice another person, take their experience seriously, and respond with care. It does not require affection or endless patience. It does require remembering that the person in front of me has fears, hopes, pressures, and a history I may know nothing about.
Kindness is not the same as niceness. Niceness can be a performance: smiling while withholding the truth, agreeing while resentment grows, or avoiding a difficult conversation because silence is easier. Real kindness can take the form of an honest disagreement, clear feedback, or a firm boundary. Kindness does not avoid discomfort; it tries not to create unnecessary harm.
I call it a superpower because it changes what becomes possible between people. It makes interactions more human and less tense, and it creates trust without demanding submission. It also helps me resist a world that repeatedly invites me to see everybody else as competition.
Living life as a contest
Wherever I turn, life seems to present itself as a contest. We compete for jobs, recognition, attention, and even affection. When competition bleeds into so many core areas of one's life, you really start to think that you should compete too.
Sometimes I have come to think that our motto in life is Mors tua, vita mea—your death, my life. This can feel like the principle underneath it all. If I get the job, somebody else does not. If I move ahead, somebody else may be left behind.
In a world where competition seems to bleed into everything, making our relationships unnatural, kindness can lead to things that isolated self-interest cannot. I want to be kind because I believe it is right, not because every gesture earns a return.
What competition takes away from me
Competition becomes dangerous when it stops being something I occasionally participate in and becomes the lens through which I see everyone. A colleague becomes a rival for a promotion. A stranger becomes a threat. Somebody else’s hardship becomes proof that they failed. The more isolated I am from lives unlike my own, the easier it becomes to lose empathy.
This loss is increasingly presented as strength. Elon Musk said that “the fundamental weakness of Western civilization is empathy,” describing an “empathy exploit.”1 I understand the narrower warning: care can be manipulated, and compassion without judgment can produce bad decisions. But turning that risk into a case against empathy itself seems profoundly backward. Without the ability to imagine another person’s experience, power becomes much easier to exercise without responsibility.
When I am busy proving that I am more deserving than the person beside me, I am less likely to ask who designed the contest, who benefits from it, or what we could improve together. Systems of power benefit when the people below them understand one another primarily as competitors.
This is why kindness can be more than good manners. It asks me to look beyond labels such as colleague, rival, or stranger and see the person behind them. Attention breaks the abstraction: once I understand what somebody fears, needs, or hopes for, it becomes harder to reduce them to an obstacle. Kindness does not erase real conflicts of interest, but it can stop those conflicts from defining the whole relationship.
Attention is where I practice it
I started my first full-time job at around twenty-two, just after graduation. Since I was little, I have been relatively good at reading a room, although I am more empathetic about some things than others. From the beginning of my career, I was struck by how carelessly some people treated those around them. I saw it in inexperienced people and in highly experienced ones. What surprised me most was how little it would have taken to make many of those relationships better.
The difference appears in ordinary moments: whether I let somebody finish a sentence, how I deliver difficult feedback, whether I share context instead of guarding it, or whether I acknowledge the work that made mine possible. It means looking up when somebody speaks, remembering a name, noticing a change in mood, or asking a question and caring about the answer. These are small actions, but they tell another person whether I consider them worthy of my attention.
That attention should not be a technique. A smile or a remembered detail means little if I am only performing warmth to get something. Curiosity matters because it moves me beyond my assumptions: where did this person come from, what do they care about, and what might I be missing?
I have often heard people say that they do not want to make friends at work. I understand. Work does not need to provide my closest friendships. But it does require me to spend a substantial part of my life communicating, solving problems, making decisions, and building things with others. Those relationships are not an interruption to the work. They are part of it.
I want the process to matter, not only the result. I do not try to treat people well because I think it will earn me a promotion. I do it because it aligns with who I want to be and makes our shared time better. If recognition follows from being kind, working hard, and making an impact, it is a by-product.
Kindness in leadership
For me, kindness is closely tied to vulnerability. Vulnerability means refusing to protect my status at the expense of the truth. It means admitting my mistakes, taking responsibility, learning, and moving on rather than calculating whether accepting blame will make me look less capable.
This matters especially in leadership. At Supabase, I found myself helping to build and lead a team of more than five engineers. I suddenly had to work out what leadership meant in practice, and I still have a lot to learn. One thing I have deliberately tried to practice is making sure that people feel valued, know they can talk to me openly, and feel that somebody is on their side.
I think one of the best ways to make people feel that someone is on their side is to show them that, whether we are colleagues or leaders, we are all equally human, vulnerable, and imperfect. It is also important not to let our roles define how we relate to one another. This does not mean neglecting what our jobs require of us. It means refusing to tie our identities to our roles or to behave as though a title makes us better or more valuable than the people around us. I always try to keep my ego separate from my role at the company.
I know that vulnerability can make me a target. If every honest admission becomes ammunition, I may need to protect myself or leave when I reasonably can. Kindness does not require passivity, and it does not ask me to remain available for mistreatment. The ability to set a boundary is part of the same superpower.
I also try to make room for lightness. Strictness is not strength, and seriousness is not competence. Sometimes kindness means organizing something outside work; sometimes it means making room for a joke or a relaxed conversation during the day. Those moments can turn a group of people competing for recognition into a team with a shared purpose.
Beyond work
Work is where I first became conscious of these choices, but it is not where they end. I practice the same attention when a waiter seems overwhelmed, when somebody is moving too slowly in front of me, when a friend cancels, or when a stranger reacts more sharply than the situation seems to warrant. I rarely know what happened in the hour before our paths crossed.
Meeting a situation with compassion does not mean excusing every behavior. It means pausing before I react, considering that I may not know the full story, and trying not to make a difficult moment worse.
I do not always manage this. I get impatient, retreat into myself, misread people, and sometimes notice too late. The point is not to construct an identity in which I am the kind person. That can become another way of protecting my ego. The practice is to pay attention, repair what I can, and try again.
The strength I want to keep
Organizations and societies do not always reward the qualities they claim to value. Kindness will not always be returned, and it will not protect me from every person willing to exploit it. But reward is not the only measure of value.
Kindness gives me a way to move through competition without letting competition determine who I become. It helps me build trust without domination, remain open without abandoning boundaries, and recognize common ground where I have been encouraged to see only rivals.
Its power is quiet. It starts with noticing. Then it changes the next choice I make.
References
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Elon Musk, interview by Joe Rogan, The Joe Rogan Experience, no. 2281, February 28, 2025, 1:16:45. ↩