Green connected the experience of being a nobody — working entry-level jobs, being called by the wrong name, struggling to justify your college degree — to the development of moral character. The indignities of starting over, he argued, are not obstacles to be endured but lessons to be absorbed. If you can remember what it felt like to be an underling, you will treat other people with greater kindness for the rest of your life. He then proposed what he called 'the actual definition of a good life': being the kind of person that others think about in their own quiet moments of gratitude, years from now at their own commencements. Not Selena Gomez or Justin Bieber, but the generous, sacrificing people whose contributions we may not even have noticed at the time — the mentors, the parents, the friends who made our lives possible.