Kelly welcomes Scott Curran back to the podcast. He is the founder and CEO of Beyond Advisers and a former general counsel of the Clinton Foundation. His new book is called “Better Good: A Simple System for Creating Lasting Impact.” 

How did you find yourself writing a book about doing good in the world? 

“Success leaves clues. And the people who have been most successful at doing good in the world, whether that’s individuals, institutions, across every sector, and really since the beginning of humankind, all follow the same pattern. And it’s funny because it took me a long time to realize what this pattern was. I set out to write a completely different book for a very specific audience; specifically, the nonprofits, the two million of them in the United in the United States alone. And I wound up writing a bigger book about doing good. I felt like my professional expertise as a corporate lawyer, turned nonprofit lawyer, turned social impact lawyer, now professor, et cetera, was that I helped people solve the hardest parts of doing good well: the meaty, hard things like governance, compliance, legal systems, strategies, et cetera. I’ve helped people move intractable needles on hard issues that the social impact and philanthropy and business and government haven’t solved. And so, I really thought it should be about that: the hard parts. And I realized that across everybody with whom I’ve ever worked, famous household name or hometown hero who nobody’s ever heard of, but whose work should be famous, they’re all following the exact same pattern.” 

And one of the themes is that although it can be hard – doing good is not reserved for saints or the uber-privileged. 

“There’s a lot of value in the struggle, but you don’t have to struggle with those parts of it to know that it’s immediately accessible to you. No matter who you are, where you live, or what you do, how much you do or don’t have, because you have more than you think you do, you’re doing more than you think you are and you have an opportunity to build on that right now. No waiting for any other set of circumstances, resources, or some other someday that so many of us tend to defer to that stops us from taking action right now.” 

There’s so much crossover in your book with improv philosophy: working from a place of abundance, tapping into your curiosity, making something out of nothing. 

“Yeah, strong agree and I also agree that it is uniquely taught at Second City and that’s a huge part of the book with regard to the fact that I incorporate ‘yes, and’ and I talk about improv and The Second City Training Center at several points throughout the book, because it profoundly impacted my life. But that was kind of why I wrote the book, as you know, I originally started off writing the other book for the nonprofits and then pivoted into this bigger book that was more about this common pattern that everybody can use and anybody can and should use.”