So, I dug up the notes from the retreat taken during a session on Distinctive Impact in Community. I read the twenty-nine crowdsourced bullet points. There were no names attached to the bullets, but the sheer number of them, the depth of thought in them, meant that people truly cared. They felt a duty to give. For the first time since I joined the Firm, I saw an acknowledgment of social issues like education, hunger, and homelessness, with suggestions like making internet available to more people; providing online courses for kids in remote areas; meeting with people who are unemployed and helping them with their résumés; wiping out poverty—other than this word here, nowhere else on these pages was there a recognition of unequal distribution of assets or anything that might suggest how hedge funds and private equity, before they gave back, took too much. But there was a focus on less privileged people and underprivileged kids, vague terms for a firm obsessed with precision. Less privileged by race? Gender? Class? All of the above? I printed these slides and wrote down notes in thin blue ink next to this fourth Collins concept with the hope of forming, what I was calling in private, the Carbon Initiative.

I looked down. I read my notes. I saw the four Long-Term Goals packaged into neat little compartments—BHAG, Twenty-Mile March, Distinctive Impact, Distinctive Impact in Community—and it was too late. A thought trespassed into my mind. At once I understood something upon which my salary depended on my not understanding: many of the social challenges mentioned in the notes for the fourth section would be easier to solve if the first section on making billions and giving those high returns to the already wealthy and privileged, thereby perpetuating inequality—that is, if Carbon itself—did not exist.