Hello Kind and Curious Leader,

I grew up in a house in Toledo that adored Dolly Parton. Her records came out on weekends, and somewhere in my twenties "Two Doors Down" became the song I reach for when there is a microphone and a crowd. Steel Magnolias is the movie I put on when the world has been too much, and Truvy is my favorite character because she is Dolly playing the best version of herself: warm to everyone who walks into that salon, without a shred of pretense.

She died last Tuesday in Nashville at 80. I made a donation in her name that week and cried more than I expected to. A week later, I want to say something about her that the tributes have mostly missed.

Every obituary called her kind. They said it the way you would describe eye color, as if kindness were a trait she was born with and carried around for six decades. I do not think that is what happened. Kindness was her operating system. She chose it, over and over, in rooms where it cost her something, and she never let anyone talk her into calling it nice.

Consider what she was standing in. For most of her career she was a punchline about hair and chest size before she was a songwriter, and she wrote more than 3,000 songs. She spent forty years being pressured from every direction to pick a political team. She refused, and she refused just as firmly to abandon the people that politics was fighting over. Picking a side is easy. Keeping every seat at the table while the table is on fire is a discipline.

I want to call that discipline the Dolly Standard, and I want to show the receipts, because a claim about kindness without evidence is only sentiment.

She launched the Imagination Library in 1995 as a tribute to her father, a sharecropper who could not read. The program mailed its 200 millionth book in 2023 and now sends out 2 million books a month. One in seven American children under five gets one of them in the mail. Her family has asked that memorial gifts go there, which is where mine went.

In April 2020 she gave $1 million to Vanderbilt University Medical Center for coronavirus research. The money funded three pandemic projects, including one tied to the Moderna vaccine, and she is credited as a financial supporter in the preliminary New England Journal of Medicine report on it. When she later got her own shot on camera, she had waited her turn; she told the AP she did not want it to look like she was cutting the line because she had donated. She gave a million dollars and then worried about looking like she had bought a privilege.

In 2022 Dollywood's parent company began covering full tuition, books and fees for all of its roughly 11,000 full-time, part-time and seasonal employees, about 3,000 of them at the park. Seasonal workers, from day one. Most companies our readers lead do not offer that to their vice presidents.

She did the same for people like me, and the order matters. In 1991 she put a line about gay relatives in a song called "Family" and told the listener none of them get turned away. Fourteen years later she wrote "Travelin' Thru" for a film about a transgender woman; it upset part of her conservative base and she did not back down. When a Dollywood employee made a lesbian visitor turn her marriage equality T-shirt inside out in 2011, Dolly apologized publicly, in her own name, four years before the Supreme Court made that marriage legal everywhere. She chose us when choosing us could have cost her the room. I am one entry in a long list of people she refused to leave outside. I never needed to be the headline. She made sure I was on the list.

That is the League of Radical Kindness in one human being. Nice keeps the peace. Kind changes the world. Nice would have stayed quiet about the T-shirt, skipped the trans film, and let the seasonal workers fend for themselves. Kind wrote the check, wrote the song, and wrote the apology.

Kind also stayed, which is the part leaders skip. She did not walk out of country music when it was cruel to her, and she did not walk out of the country when it split down the middle. She kept singing to both halves, and she stayed the same person to both. Last week I wrote about the scan people run before they enter a room, the half-second where the body decides whether it is safe. Dolly passed that scan for millions of people who never met her, for sixty years, because she never made anyone guess who she would be that day. Consistency, like kindness, gets decided again every morning.

I built the League because I got tired of watching leaders confuse those two words, and I confused them myself. Early at Gap I stayed quiet in rooms where I should have spoken, because I wanted the promotion more than I wanted the conversation. That was nice. It kept the peace and it cost people something. Dolly is the proof, at a scale and under a spotlight I will never stand in, that a person can choose the other word every day and still be loved by nearly everyone.

The ask this week is small, and it will cost you something. Do one kind thing at cost. Say the true thing in the meeting. Apologize in your own name for something your organization did. Pay for the class someone on your team wants to take. Give to the library in her name if that is your kind thing, and tell someone why.

Two notes before I go.

Registration is open for "Your Silence Has a Cost," a live community session on September 15 at 1:00 pm Eastern, open to anyone.

The Limited Edition of All Pride, No Ego is also available today, signed, numbered, and inscribed by hand, with a 30-day place in The Room inside the League. Find the book at

Thank you, Dolly. You set the standard. The rest of us have to decide whether to meet it.

In Community and Conversation,
Jim