Quote · TED Talks Daily
Does working hard really make you a good person? | Azim Shariff (re-release)
Where this was said
The Cobra Effect: A Parable for Modern Work Culture
At 15:30 · chapter starts 14:20
The talk's climax arrives with a story that is almost certainly apocryphal but devastatingly apt. Desperate to solve a cobra infestation in colonial Delhi, British authorities offered a bounty for every dead snake brought in. Enterprising locals began breeding cobras specifically to collect the reward. When the scheme was finally cancelled, the breeders released their stock into the city — making the cobra problem catastrophically worse. [1] — Azim Shariff "A bounty for dead cobras in colonial Delhi accidentally made the snake problem worse — and Shariff argues we've done something eerily simil…" 14:15 Shariff draws the explicit parallel: we've built a culture that asks for the wrong thing. By rewarding effort rather than meaning — by demanding the imperfect signal rather than the actual outcome — we've created a world full of hard labor and cobras. The corrective is the episode's most memorable line: if instead we asked each other to produce something meaningful, we'd create a world full of meaning. And what, Shariff asks, could be more moral than that?
If we keep asking each other for effort, we'll get a world full of hard labor and cobras. If we ask for meaning instead, we build a world that actually matters. This is the simplest and most radical shift Shariff proposes.
