Our oligarchs and politicians can learn a lot from Dolly Parton.

Dolly Parton is proof of something we forget in a cynical age. She had every excuse to keep what she’d built for herself. She came from real poverty, clawed her way up through an industry that didn’t take women seriously, and earned a fortune with her own two hands, working 9 to 5 and then some. Nobody would have said a word if she’d simply enjoyed it. But she understood something that the loudest and most powerful people in our country today seem to have forgotten. Success isn’t the finish line. It’s the opportunity to spend some of it on somebody else. The powerful people in politics and industry build monuments to themselves. They put their names on buildings and their faces on currency and they measure their worth by what they can take for themselves. Dolly measured hers by what she could give, and she gave until the last day of her life. When it was all over, the world didn’t eulogize her for the platinum records or the money or the fame. It eulogized her for the books, and the kids, and the kindness. That’s the choice she made, over and over, and it’s the reason a divided country stopped and grieved together this week. That’s the lesson, and it’s available to every single one of us, no matter how much or how little we have. You don’t need a fortune to give something away. You just need to decide, like she did, that the whole point of whatever you’ve been given is to make your corner of the world a better place.