The Inimitable Fulfillment of Serving the Public (Part II of II)

(Continues from Part I)

It’s not clear where the pull towards public service comes from, notwithstanding all my love for money.

My education probably has something to do with it. My alma mater, Boston College / Boston College Law School, instilled a call for service through an education grounded in liberal arts and Catholic morality. The slogan for the school is “Ever to Excel” but the corollary that I’ve added, “to make a difference” is fitting to the school’s mission.

Or perhaps it’s just innate. I’m a perpetually optimistic person who believes that every person has a role to play in the betterment of the world.

It’s for this reason that I’ve never shared in the general cynicism towards politics. Everyone should seek to make a difference, and I’m a strong believer that, while the legal profession can make a difference for individual persons and NGOs can make a difference in groups of people, only politics can make a difference throughout all of society.

I don’t dismiss politicians as a class because I know how incredibly difficult the job is. Similarly, I have the utmost respect for anyone who is committed to serving the public, if only because the job fails the most basic cost-reward analysis. The societal problems are grand and endless. The political disagreements are deep and entrentched. The institutional inertia is real and (although most people don’t realize it) for legitimate reasons. Serving the public is an unbelievably frustrating endeavor that rarely pays off.

I never contemplated returning to the public sector because I wanted to be on the rational side of this cost-reward analysis, yet I was never able to shake off the higher calling of serving the public.

I long thought that I couldn’t answer that call so long as I remained in the private sector, but one of the happy discoveries I’ve been making recently is that public service isn’t a monopoly of governments and NGOs. A truly effective public service, I’ve learned, is only achieved through a partnership between the public sector and the private sector because the latter can innovate, produce and provide goods and services that no public institution can on its own.

These days, my day-to-day is at a cross-section of the private and the public sectors. I haven’t felt the fulfillment that comes from this since the year I worked in government as a law clerk.

And that’s pretty exciting.