“You can be rich in spirit, kindness, love and all those things that you can’t put a dollar sign on.”
—Dolly Parton
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The Picture He Didn’t Take
What is doing the right thing? What does that even mean? We hear the phrase constantly, but I’m not sure we all agree on it.
As the stories about Dolly Parton keep coming this week, so many of them circle back to the same thing: helping people, doing good, expecting nothing in return. It reminded me of something my wife did a while back. She came across a cash machine at our bank with a couple hundred dollars just sitting in it. She didn’t think twice—she walked it straight inside and handed it to a teller. I still wonder whatever happened to that lost cash, and whether whoever left it ever knew how close they came to never seeing it again.
That’s the kind of decision nobody would have faulted her for skipping. It’s the same kind I keep hearing about this week with Dolly.
You’ve seen the tributes by now. The songs, Dollywood, the millions of books mailed to kids through the Imagination Library. The story I heard earlier in the week, and loved, wasn’t really about her, yet represented everything about her. It was about a teenager who snuck a camera into a TV studio because he loved her music, and what that same camera didn’t do years later.
In 1987, Dolly hosted a variety show called Dolly. It only lasted one season, but a California teenager named Ron Davis showed up to 20 of those episodes, skipping school at times to get there. Cameras weren’t allowed in the audience, but he brought his anyway, sneaking shots from his seat all season during the show.
Dolly noticed the kid who kept showing up, walked over, and asked to see what he had. Davis handed her a stack of photos, bracing for the worst. She looked through them, reminded him he wasn’t supposed to have a camera in there, and smiled.
“I won’t tell,” with her unmistakable southern drawl.
It was a star at the height of her fame doing a teenager the small kindness of not getting him in trouble. The story gets better. Davis would later come home from school one day and his mom had a message: Dolly Parton had called. She wanted to know if he could come photograph an event at Dollywood.
He was still a teenager, and that phone call became a career—backstage photographer for Dolly, his first professional shoot at seventeen, later album covers for artists including Reba McEntire. Davis never forgot, “If not for Dolly Parton, I would not have become a photographer.”
Fast-forward to October 31, 1993. River Phoenix—23, an Oscar nominee, one of the brightest young stars in the country—collapsed outside the Viper Room in the middle of a drug overdose. Ron Davis was standing right there. Still a photographer and at the ready with his camera.
Davis watched Phoenix seizing on the pavement, ran into a nearby liquor store to get someone to call 911, then flagged down a passing sheriff’s deputy. River Phoenix was pronounced dead a short time later.
Davis was a member of the paparazzi, yet never raised his camera. By his own later estimate, a photograph of River Phoenix dying on that sidewalk could have earned him $250,000. Fellow photographers mocked him for passing it up. He never backed away from his decision. When asked about it years later on the Today show, he said he didn’t regret the choice—taking the picture was something he couldn’t have lived with. Eventually, Davis walked away from Hollywood. By 1997, he was running a newsstand in Nashville, and refusing to sell tabloids.
As we remember Dolly Parton, these stories go great together because neither needed anybody watching to happen. Dolly didn’t cross a studio floor to talk to a strange kid because she thought he’d be worth knowing someday. Davis didn’t decline to take a picture because he thought someone would write about it thirty years later. My wife didn’t turn in that cash because she thought I’d someday put it in a newsletter. There was no public recognition waiting on any side of those choices, just what felt right, done at the moment the situation could have called for doing the opposite.
We tend to think of character as something that shows up in life’s biggest, most dramatic moments. In real life, however, it’s built in decisions so small nobody’s keeping score … or maybe even noticing. It could be giving credit that you could have kept, helping the person who has nothing to offer you back, or maybe even walking away from something valuable because taking it would mean becoming somebody you don’t want to be.
There’s an old adage that character is what you do when nobody’s watching. The rarest type of character, and perhaps most noble, is what you do when nobody’s watching and doing right actually costs you something. Ron Davis had a $250,000 reason and he passed on it anyway. Dolly had nothing to gain from a kid in the cheap seats with a camera he wasn’t supposed to have. She gave him a shot anyway.
We spend so much energy measuring what people accumulate—titles, followers, wins, dollars. Maybe it’s worth keeping a more important, quiet ledger? The credit you shared, the money you turned down, the kindness nobody saw. That picture you didn’t take.
What’s the shortcut, the credit, the easy win that you’d be better off not taking?
“Character is like a tree and reputation like a shadow. The shadow is what we think of it; the tree is the real thing.”
—Abraham Lincoln
Connecting this quote to the story. Reputation is what others see, but character is revealed by the choices we make when there is no audience, no reward, and sometimes a real cost for doing what’s right.
This week’s Chasing Influence tip: The choices that define your leadership are often the ones nobody else will ever see.