Editors’ Blog

How do you make kindness a requirement in gainful employment? It can be done.

Florida resident, journalist and humorist T.M. Shine, chose to document his experience of being laid off from a large corporation in 2008 following 18 years of service, and has written about it (in a fictionalized way) since.

Writing about his circumstances brought some livelihood, but not nearly as much as he’d expected. A visit to a job fair was very discouraging.

Then he had an epiphany of sorts. He wanted to work at a job where kindness was important.

He made a change to his CV. “I just wanted to find something to do where I could just be nice to people,” Shine told National Public Radio's Michel Martin. On the top of his resume, he wrote, “Looking for a position that both utilizes my job skills, and provides a work environment that values being nice to everyone.”

It worked; within a week he had a job with a nonprofit retail business.

Typically, Shine used a smidgen of humor to describe to Martin his efforts to be nice.

“I think you have to work at it. I was thinking that I don't think most of us realize how nice we are, really, when we want to be, or when we just let go. You know, I kid about random acts of kindness because my—I'm not random. I work at it. You know, mine are cold, calculated acts of kindness.”