Do nice folk finish last?

Mark Franklin
Feb 24
4 min read

Do nice folk finish last?

I've always had a problem with that saying.

'Nice' is such a wishy-washy word, and nobody wants to be thought of as wishy-washy. I get that. We also want to protect our boundaries – our time and our energy – so we draw certain lines:

"You can't just pick my brains"
"I don't do coffee and catch-ups without charging"
"Let's not do a clarity call. You either need my help, or you don't"

Harsh? Maybe. But I wonder whether we've been asking the wrong question altogether.

It's not about the podium position

We draw those lines because we don't want to finish last. We set boundaries to avoid defeat. But what if the problem isn't where we're finishing; what if it's the race we've chosen to run?

Because there's a real difference between being nice (people-pleasing, wishy-washy, easily taken advantage of) and being kind (genuinely wanting good things for others).

HR Magazine (1) makes exactly this point, tracing the word 'nice' back to the Latin nescius (meaning ignorant) and contrasting it with 'kind', which comes from the Old English for treating others as family. One is about pleasing. The other is about doing good.

So, the real question isn't whether nice folk finish last. It's whether kind folk do. And the answer (backed by a rather satisfying amount of research) is that they don't.

Success vs happiness... why not both?

So many of us have spent too long following a path to success that someone else mapped out:

Concentrate at school
Go to university
Get a good job and work your way up

The bills get paid. The house gets a little bigger. The car gets shinier. That's success, right? Race won... possibly at the expense of happiness?

Except research keeps revealing: we've had the formula backwards. We've been assuming that if we work hard enough to become successful, we'll eventually become happy. But study after study suggests it works the other way around.

A landmark review of hundreds of studies by researchers Lyubomirsky, Walsh, and Boehm (2) found that happy people consistently outperform their less happy peers across almost every career measure; including income, job performance, social support, and resilience.

Happiness doesn't follow success. Happiness precedes it.

As Shawn Achor, Harvard researcher and author of The Happiness Advantage (3), puts it: most of us think "If I work harder, I'll be more successful, and if I'm more successful, I'll be happy." But that's precisely backwards in terms of how the brain actually works. Every time you hit a success target, your brain simply moves the goalposts. Happiness stays out of reach.

What does happiness actually look like then?

Not the kind that comes with a caption and a filter on Insta. The quieter kind. The kind that looks unremarkable from the outside but feels like breathing room: like coming home to yourself. It might look like:

Following what genuinely energises you, even if it seems unconventional
Ignoring the pokes and prods from those on the "success treadmill"
Running your own race, at your own pace, towards your own finish line

And here's where it links back to kindness. UK research surveying 2,000 working adults (4) found that people who describe themselves as genuinely kind are twice as happy at work as those who rarely or never are.

Separate research from the Greater Good Science Center at Berkeley (5) found that organisations led by kind, prosocial managers don't just feel better to work in; they actually perform better too. As the headline rather satisfyingly put it: "Nice companies finish first".

This is where I'm supposed to offer the answer...

That's good marketing, isn't it? I tease you with a familiar pain – the tension between success and happiness, between protecting yourself and being open – and then I offer salvation with a custom-made solution (which is on special offer today only, obviously).

There's just one problem:

It's your custom-made solution. Not mine
It's your story
It's your version of success, happiness (or both)

The 'success treadmill' seemingly works because it offers a ready-made script. You don't have to think too hard about what you want, because someone else has already decided for you.

School, university, good job. Tick. Tock. Tick. Tock (or is it TikTok, TikTok?).

The trouble is that when the treadmill eventually stops – through redundancy, burnout, a quiet Tuesday afternoon when the kids have left home – many people find themselves standing in a life that was built to someone else's specifications.

That's finishing last in the wrong race.

You deserve to win your own race

You're nice folk. Not wishy-washy nice. There's a real difference, and it matters.

That's why I do do clarity calls, coffees and catch-ups.

That's why you can pick my brains.

Not because I don't value my time (I really do), but because the most important work I do is helping people like you figure out which race is actually theirs to run. What does success look like when no one else is watching? What does happiness feel like when you stop measuring it against someone else's highlight reel?

Those are the questions worth asking. And they're rarely answered on a treadmill.

Ready to choose your own race?

If any of this has landed – if you've been quietly wondering whether you've been running someone else's race – let's talk.

I work with nice folk who are ready to question the race they're running, challenge the definition of success they've inherited, and start building something that actually feels like theirs.

No time-limited special offer. Just a conversation about your finish line.

Book a 30min Clarity Call

P.S. I'm nice folk too. ;-)