Brave New Kitty

If you can keep your head when all about you
Are losing theirs and blaming it on you;
If you can trust yourself when all men doubt you,
But make allowance for their doubting too:
If you can wait and not be tired by waiting,
Or, being lied about, don’t deal in lies,
Or being hated don’t give way to hating,
And yet don’t look too good, nor talk too wise;

– If, by Rudyard Kipling

Respect is the most important thing human beings can give each other.

It is more important than love or kindness. It is more important than tolerance, patience, understanding, or education. It is even more important than any help or material goods you can offer someone (unless a person is in an emergency situation).

This is because respect contains all of these elements. Within respect can be found love and kindness, tolerance, patience, understanding, education, and help. If you give a person respect, then you are giving him all of these at once.

By respect, I mean allowing a person the dignity to make their own choices and behave as they see fit. You may not like the choices she makes. You may think she’s screwing up her life or hurting the people she cares about. But if she is an adult, and she is not causing harm to anyone except perhaps herself (your emotional anguish from watching notwithstanding), then it is your obligation, as a respectful person, to let her make her own choices.

This is the key concept: you don’t allow people the dignity to make their own choices because they are respectful; you allow people the dignity to make their own choices because you are respectful. Other people may or may not be respectful; if they are doing things that drive you crazy, chances are they haven’t learned a lot about respect yet. But if you hold respect as a value, then you will behave respectfully towards all people, whether they deserve it or not. Respect is what we choose for ourselves, regardless of how other people behave. We may not always achieve total respect all the time (doing so is hard), but we should understand why it is a worthwhile ideal to work toward.

If you conduct yourself respectfully, you will command respect from people. Such respect is powerful. People will perceive you as trustworthy. They will believe you to be honest, straightforward, and kind. They will feel “safe” talking to you, like they won’t be judged or told what you think they want to hear. Such an image of respect has what Stephen Covey would call a powerful “circle of influence;” that is, the areas of our lives over which we have some control. When you behave respectfully, everyone from your children to your bosses will want to know your thoughts and opinions. Respect is the basis for all satisfying relationships, personal or otherwise, absolutely essential for true connection and intimacy. And when that person who’s “throwing her life down the drain” is ready to change, she is going to go to the most respectful people in her life for the help to do so.

Respect, both getting and giving, is a big deal. All effective human interaction is based on it.

What does being respectful look like? Pretty simple, really. Good manners are a large part of it, which makes sense if you consider that manners are all about treating others in ways that make them feel comfortable in social situations. Being kind, honest, and tolerant. Being a good listener. Making an effort to understand what people are saying and what they want. Not imposing your views on someone who didn’t ask for them. Offering help, but not insisting on it. Forgiveness. Also, in heated situations, not reacting in kind to other people’s bad behavior (no matter how much they provoke you), or even excusing yourself. In short, being respectful is about behaving with dignity no matter what the situation may be.

Simple as the idea is, it is a difficult thing to carry out consistently. We all get anxious and scared and lose our composure at times. Being respectful doesn’t mean we can’t be human, it only means we maintain control over our reactions while in the presence of others. The respect we get from other people will grow according to our ability to do this, as will the respect we have for ourselves. We should always forgive ourselves when we fall short of respectful behavior, as we inevitably will, but we should also recognize respect for the important value that it is, and continuously strive for an ever greater ability to practice it in our everyday lives.

The only way to truly help another person is to become a Whole person yourself.–Lama Everest

Having said all that, I want to be clear that I don’t mean we should throw up our hands and give up on people or on making the world a better place. The fact that change is a choice which can only happen inside of an individual does not mean there is no point in trying to help people. Actually, if you understand this basic principle of personal change, then making an effort to help people becomes more important than ever.

Change happens internally, by a subjective process unique to each individual. But this doesn’t mean that external stimuli don’t have an influence. Indeed, external stimuli have a huge, vast, tremendous influence on our internal, subjective lives. Everything we see, hear, touch, taste, and feel will affect our worldview. Every idea that evokes a response in us will have an influence on the path we travel, the direction we take in life. Some of these influences are small and insignificant, while some of them are profound and life-changing. But the external world “gets in;” everything we experience has an effect on us.

These external ideas and opinions by themselves don’t have the power to transform our views. For that to happen, these ideas and opinions have to be fed through our internal processes, some of which we are aware of and some of which we aren’t. (It’s important to know we aren’t fully aware of our processes for a couple of reasons. First, it can push us toward a greater desire for self-awareness–something which can only benefit us–and second, knowing that we never have full control over our internal processes keeps us humble–we all have blind spots and nobody completely understands himself, much less the external influences that make waves in our psyches. So we should humble ourselves accordingly.)

Anyway. External influences matter. They have a big effect on our internal world. If we understand and believe this, then there are (at least) two significant implications to consider:

1. What we’re exposed to will have an effect on our thoughts, feelings, opinions, and choices. Thus, we should choose carefully the influences we expose ourselves to. In this day and age of “entertainment saturation,” where the choices are overwhelming and banality and titillation abound, it becomes more important than ever to be conscientious about how we spend our free time. We don’t have to spend every waking moment in the pursuit of happiness or personal betterment; in fact, we shouldn’t. But we should be aware that how we spend our time will, indeed, have an impact on how we think, what we believe and, indeed, who we are. If our pasttimes are primarily banal, we will inevitably be banal. If we never challenge ourselves, we’ll never get better at anything. If we don’t spend time learning how to love ourselves and other people properly, we’ll never get good at it. If we eat too much and don’t exercise, we’ll get fat. And so forth. As a friend of mine used to say, “If you hang around a barber shop, you’re gonna get a haircut.” She was talking about staying away from bars when you’re trying to stay sober, but the idea works for any situation: hang around a good barber, you’re gonna get a good haircut. Hang around a bad barber, you’ll get a bad haircut. But the choice is yours.

2. How we behave will have an effect on others. We should act as if we are examples to other people, because we are. We are their external influences. We should not take this responsibility lightly. We should act, to the best of our ability, as though we knew that everything we said and did was being observed and soaked up by other people, because it is. If certain principles are important to us–kindness, respect, tolerance, and personal development, for example–we should act with those principles always in mind. We should strive to be examples of how we believe people should live their lives. This is the greatest influence anybody can have on another human being–the influence of our example.

If we extend this second implication a bit further, it becomes easy to see why coercion doesn’t work to induce personal change. If we practice coercion, or believe that it’s morally correct for a political, religious, or other social body to practice coercion for purposes of individual change, then we are saying that we believe in the principle of coercion. We are setting an example of coercion. Which means we believe that not only is it okay to coerce others into doing what we believe is right, but also that it’s alright for others to coerce us to comply with standards that they believe are right. That is, if coercion is condoned for one person or group, then it is okay for all persons and groups. And where does that stop? Who decides which person or group is right?

Besides its terrifying implications, such coercion is generally responded to with resentment, which is never an incentive to personal change. But it can be hard to see until we become the ones being coerced–which is going to happen in a society that condones social control and the attempt to legislate morality. Considering all of this, is coercion–aside from prevention of force and fraud–really an effective way to evoke change?

Since none of us knows, for sure, what’s right or best for anybody but ourselves (and even for ourselves, what’s right and best is often sketchy), the wisest course of action can only be to allow people the freedom to make their own choices. Once such an environment exists, people may or may not choose personal betterment, but having the freedom to make such a choice (or not) places the principle of freedom above the principle of coercion. This is the most respectful thing one person can do for another, or a government for its people. As such, it creates an environment that allows for the greatest possibility for personal change.

Where would any of us be if there weren’t people who’ve helped us along the way? Helping others is crucial, not only to their well-being, but to our own. We don’t have a lot of control over the myriad external influences out there, but we do have a lot of control over the ones we expose ourselves to, and even more over the influences we present to other people. We should use our power of choice wisely in both arenas.

The more things change, the more they stay the same. — French proverb

Anytime we think the problem is out there, that thought is the problem. — Stephen Covey

Recently, I got into a discussion with a friend about technology in general and social networking in particular. His beliefs are that technology had made us less critical thinkers (which is what I mean by “stupider”), and that social networking, with its powerful allure to the banal and mundane, has elevated that problem by great proportions. Because of social networking, he and similar minded people believe, we have become less tolerant, more impatient, more opinionated, more narcissistic, less able to discern fact from fiction, less capable of having meaningful relationships in real life, and even that our physical well-being will suffer because of our “addiction” to the Internet and social networking; it’s such a simple, instantaneous source of pleasure, how could it not have detrimental effects?

I can understand how people would think this. All you have to do is look around you to see problems caused by technology. Pollution from factories and cars, for example. Overpopulation caused by better living conditions and longer life spans. Weapons that can destroy the entire planet. And video games, cell phones, smart phones, the Internet, and now, social networking to distract us from more serious pursuits and fill our heads with banal, pointless entertainment that can only be bad for us.

But this attitude is exactly backwards.

It is a mistake in reasoning to think these problems are caused by technology. Technology can’t cause problems. It is inanimate, it has no agency, and it is unable to perform any action, positive or negative, on its own. The problems of technology are, at their heart, the problems of humanity. The nature of our problems isn’t pollution and annihilation, it is greed, self-centeredness, shortsightedness, hatred, and fear. Technology can’t create these issues; it merely exacerbates the issues that are already there.

Yes, this creates some problems. To take an extreme example, if a power-hungry ruler wanted to wipe out an enemy country 150 years ago, it would have been very, very hard to do. Today, all he needs to do is get his hands on a nuclear weapon, and not only could he wipe out his enemy, he could wipe out the entire planet.

This is a serious concern. And having grown up in the shadow of thermonuclear annihilation, I know how much fear and anxiety the possibility can cause. But does this mean the ability to control atoms is bad? After all, radiation also kills cancer cells and creates cheap energy for millions of people. And more importantly, does it mean that nuclear energy is immoral? This is like asking if the sun is immoral. The answer, of course, is no. It is only the people who use the technology who can be appraised in terms of morality and value judgments. The power-hungry ruler may have immoral motives, but the nuclear bomb is no more moral or immoral than the garage it sits in before the ruler decides to use it.

Even so, you may say, the possibility of destroying the world is bad, so therefore, nuclear energy is bad. And in the same vein, you may say that the Internet has created a generation of mindless, instant-gratification zombies who are incapable of thinking for themselves, so it’s bad, too. But if you say these things, you are getting the causality backwards.

You are also getting the causality backwards if you think that 150 years ago, people had longer attention spans or a greater capacity to think critically. They did not. Then as now, the majority of people got by on the minimum amount of energy and effort that they could. It’s just that they had to work much harder back then to maintain their subsistence level of existence, and they had far fewer opportunities for entertainment of any kind. It’s true that if the Internet had existed then, people wouldn’t have used it the same way people do today–but that’s only because most people were illiterate. Thanks to technology, poor people today have much more comfortable lives than they once did, and much more free time to enjoy themselves. They also have access to education that was unheard of back then; today in an industrialized country, everyone gets the opportunity to learn how to read. If anything, more people have become critical thinkers than in the past, thanks to technology, and yes, the Internet.

And if you think that the Internet and social networking has created a desire for the banal and inane, you have got that causality backwards, as well. People have always gravitated toward the banal, the inane, and the sensationalistic. Think of lions killing Christians, or public hangings, or gambling, pornography, and prostitution. There is nothing new in entertainment that appeals to the lowest common denominator of human interest. Banality is fun, it’s entertaining. And everybody wants fun and entertainment in their lives.

Has the Internet taken this too far? I suppose if people cease being able to support themselves and make their way in the world because of their Internet and social networking usage, they would need to look seriously at how they’re spending their time and make some different choices. But until then, people should be left alone to spend their free time how they want to, even if it’s not what we would choose for them. This is what “personal freedom” means. Often, that freedom means the freedom to meet the minimum social and personal obligations, and otherwise to be left alone.

Some people do develop obsessions with the Internet that cause problems in their lives (although pornography is usually involved, not Facebook). But once again, this is a human problem, not a technology problem. Technology may have intensified the problem–because that’s what technology does, whether problem or solution–but it is still a human problem, and one that can only be solved on a personal, subjective, internal level. As they say in Alcoholics Anonymous, the first step to getting sober is admitting you have a problem.

You see, “external” solutions don’t work for personal issues. They may force people to conform, and in the case of laws to protect us from other people’s greed, self-centeredness, and violence, this is a good thing. But when it comes to protecting us from ourselves, external laws don’t work. They can’t squelch desire. Rather, they tend to create greater desires, and black markets to fulfill them. This is human nature. People have always done what they want, and they always will do what they want. In fact, technology exists largely because of people inventing better ways to do what they want!

So, the Internet is not making us stupider, i.e., less critical thinkers. It just appeals, in a big way, to tendencies that already exist. Technology makes the problem look new, and worse, but neither is the case. And it never has been. The older generation has always worried about the younger generation’s trends, fads, and crazes. Before social networking, it was video games. Before that, it was rock and roll and drugs; before that, it was jazz. And before that, it was something else, ad infinitum. It is almost the job of the older generation to criticize the younger one. But the truth is that every generation manages to reach adulthood pretty much intact and unscathed by their “dangerous” pasttimes, able to graduate from college and go on to have families and create new and better technology for future generations. There is no evidence whatsoever that this pattern of human life won’t continue for many generations into the future, or that there is any cause for alarm.

Oddly enough, I actually do think people have gotten stupider. Or at least ruder and more narcissistic. But I know that a lot of this is that I am now part of the old guard, looking down at the younger generation and seeing all their foolishness and short-sightedness (youth truly is wasted on the young!), and I try to keep in mind that, even though I didn’t have the Internet and even though I was a pretty serious kid, I had my own ways of rebelling and screwing off that horrified my parents. And I turned out alright, just like everyone else in my graduating class (which I now know for a fact thanks to Facebook).

And if people actually have gotten stupider, ruder, and more narcissistic, which is entirely possible, it is not because of technology. It is because of a gradual migration away from values, from an internally-derived sense of self that is so crucial to happiness, confidence, integrity, and everything else that makes life worth living. I’m not certain how this migration is occurring, if it is at all. One theory is that the vast success of technology since the Industrial Revolution has shifted the focus of modern cultures so far to the external end of the spectrum that people have ceased to look within for solutions to their problems. We’ve come to expect that technology will solve all of our problems, so we’ve moved away from reliance on our internal self–our values, emotions, and ability to develop ourselves.

I suppose on the surface this seems like an argument against technology. But this is not so. It’s more an argument that values are equally as important as technology, and it is more important than ever to develop them. To paraphrase the great physicist Richard Feynman, “science can create technology, and it can tell you what you can accomplish with it, but it can’t tell you the right or wrong of those accomplishments. Only values can do that.” In other words, technology is, in and of itself, completely neutral and absolutely benign. Only human thought bestows value on it. So if we do not have a good sense of our values, then technology is going to cause problems for us. Thus, because technology yields such tremendous power and offers such a vast array of choices, it is more important, not less so, to have a strong sense of who we are, what we want, and why.

The problem is not too much technology, it’s too little introspection. If there is one single message the world needs to hear, one single message that will change everything for the better, this is it. People are not getting stupider. But if they don’t figure out that everything that matters happens inside of them, and not “out there somewhere,” they are never going to get any smarter, either.

Happiness is a by-product. You cannot pursue it by itself.–Sam Levenson

That which is outside the possibility of choice is outside the province of morality.–Ayn Rand

Happiness is not a birthright, although the pursuit of it should be. There’s a lot of confusion about this idea, and about happiness in general. It’s a big topic, but I’m going to try to say something meaningful about it anyway.

With the presidential elections swinging into full, nauseating force, there is more than the usual political rhetoric inundating us about how much the government can, and is supposed to, do for its citizens. If we were to believe everything the politicians said, then we would believe that the government should provide for the safety, security, economic well-being, physical health, mental health, and, yes, happiness, of its citizens. In fact, this idea has become so deeply ingrained in our culture that few people question it anymore. Problems that arise in society are automatically expected to be solved by the government. There are so many laws, ordinances, prohibitions, and regulations now that it’s impossible for the average person to keep track of them; to know, for sure, whether or not he is adhering to the law or breaking it, or possibly doing both at the same time. Tax laws alone, now more than 20 volumes long and growing relentlessly, are so staggeringly complex that even trained IRS officials and accountants don’t always know if they’re violating rules by following others. And don’t even get me started on the laws meant to protect us from ourselves, the drug laws and gambling laws and tobacco laws, for example, that prohibit us from doing, buying, and ingesting what we want even when nobody else is hurt by our choices. And all in the name of our own good–because no law has ever been passed with the intention to harm citizens, at least not overtly.

In a very real way, the government has taken on the role of moral agent, the arbiter of right and wrong, in the lives of its individual citizens. At the very least, the federal government exercises social controls far beyond its province–gay marriage being the prime current example (and abortion being the classic one). You see? If people didn’t view the government as a moral agent, if this wasn’t the accepted norm, it wouldn’t occur to us to demand governmental action for the behavior we want restrained or reinforced; it wouldn’t occur to us that anyone had the right to such a brash approach to ideals they disagree with, but are unharmed by. Instead, it is so ingrained in our thinking that such action is rarely questioned; debated, yes, but questioned, at its roots, as the audacious violation of personal freedom that it is, no. The government now decides the right and wrong of many, if not most, of our societal, and even personal, dilemmas. With such far-reaching powers, it has become the default agent by which many citizens have come to believe that they can find happiness.

Not only is this morally wrong, it is rationally wrong. It can never work. Nobody is responsible for anybody else’s happiness. Happiness is an inside job, something we can only achieve by our own grit, sweat, and determination. And it is a by-product, as the quote at the beginning says. Of what? Of good moral choices. And if moral “choice” is decided for us by outside entities like the government, then it ceases to be a moral choice, as the other quote establishes. If the right and wrong of things are dictated to us rather than voluntarily chosen, and if we adhere to that right and wrong out of obligation or fear of retribution, then right and wrong have become moot points, and we have become like children waiting for our elders to tell us what to do.

Such a moral code will never produce happiness. It is the very antithesis of the kind of moral code most conducive to happiness.

If we are to find happiness, then, we must do so in spite of this paternal system, not because of it. We must transcend this urge, happily indulged by those who seek power over others (and politicians are only one segment of that population), to relinquish our moral agency. We must instead embrace our own moral agency for all it’s worth. And it is worth everything.

This is a hard thing to do. There is so much pressure to go the other way, to give in to external “assurances” of security and well-being. If we are to be free moral agents, and thus, if we are to have a shot at real happiness, we must go against convention on many, many levels. We must reject not only our government (at least its paternal aspects), but our education, our religion, our families, and our comfort zones. We must question all authority, all beliefs, all established ideas of morality and happiness and what matters in life. We must dissect them, examine them, digest them. And only after we’ve gone through this process, and decided for ourselves what’s important to us, what feeds our spirit and what detracts from it, what holds meaning for us and why, and where our passions lie, can we truly own ourselves: our histories, our spirituality, our families, our lives. And only then, after arriving at our own moral conclusions–for if they are not our own, they are not morality, but simply rules–do we have the opportunity for happiness. Real happiness, that is, the kind that is a default view of life, that stays with us, day in and day out, despite our changing circumstances. The kind we earn, the kind not to be confused with temporary elation or excitement. I might even say that undertaking this process is happiness itself, or at least the basis for it. Yes, it’s hard, but living any other way is far harder, regardless of how it might appear–and also far, far emptier.

Why empty? Because the larger, underlying truth is that our safety, security and well-being are always up for grabs, no matter who holds the reins. It is an illusion that the government (or any other external entity) can, or will, protect us from anything beyond its own moral province, that is to say, from force, fraud, and foreign invasion. And even in these cases, outcomes are uncertain. Ultimately, there is no real safety and no real security in life, and our sense of well-being is best had by coming to terms with those simple truths and learning to take care of ourselves as best we can in the face of them. Nobody can do that for us, no matter how much we want to believe they can.

Happiness is not a birthright in the same way that physical fitness is not a birthright. It is something we must be willing to work for. Once upon a time, Americans understood this, and their pursuit of happiness created the freest, wealthiest, most abundant nation ever imagined, with the highest standard of living and the greatest opportunity for all (flawed even as it was). This is all a government owes its people: an environment in which we are free to be our own moral agents and thus free to pursue our own passions and create our own happiness. This is the only happiness that really matters, the only kind that truly resonates with our human nature. In our deepest selves, we all know this to be true.

We’ve gotten so far away from that. We’ve gone so far down the road of government paternalism that, as I said, few people even recognize it as such anymore; it’s simply the way things are.

I did not mean for this to be a political essay. But politics are a huge part of the choices we make (or don’t make), in a way I’ve only recently realized. People need to be aware of this and to think seriously about it, even in areas of their personal lives that, on the surface, have little to do with politics. I strongly believe that if we continue progressing down this paternalistic path, we are going to end up in a totalitarian world that will squelch all possibility of moral choice, and thus, of true happiness.

It won’t be an iron-fist fascist regime, no. But it will be a totalitarian regime nevertheless, slipped into by fear, indifference, and intellectual laziness. As such, it will be a voluntary one, and thus, I believe, far worse.

And sadly, we will have deserved it.

Ultimately, man should not ask what the meaning of his life is, but rather must recognize that it is he who is asked. In a word, each man is questioned by life; and he can only answer to life by answering for his own life; to life he can only respond by being responsible.–Victor Frankl

If you’ve never read The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People, by Stephen Covey, you should consider doing so. (And if you read it fifteen or so years ago like I did, when it was at the height of its popularity, you should consider re-reading it.) You might think it’s a book about succeeding in business, but it is not that at all. It’s a detailed, step-by-step description of how to live a principle-centered life.

One of my favorite exercises in the book is creating a personal mission statement. You know what a mission statement is: it’s a statement used by some entity, usually a corporation, that boils down their business philosophy into a few short phrases or a bulleted list. A typical mission statement might read something like, “To provide optimum goods and services to our customers, to treat customers and employees fairly, and to act in an ethical and responsible manner in all our endeavors.” You might think a mission statement is meaningless business speak made up by company executives so that their employees and customers think they have morals. In some cases, I’m sure that’s true. But when done in a true effort to distill beliefs down to essential “first principles,” a mission statement can be an immensely worthwhile effort.

Covey explains the purpose of a personal mission statement, which falls under the Second Habit: Begin With the End in MInd. He says, “The most effective way I know to begin with the end in mind is to develop a personal mission statement or philosophy or creed. It focuses on what you want to be (character) and to do (contributions and achievements) and on the values or principles upon which being and doing are based.” He goes on to compare the personal mission statement with the Constitution of the United States, saying that “The Constitution of the United States is the standard by which every law in the country is evaluated. It is the document the president agrees to defend and support when he takes the Oath of Allegiance. It is the criterion by which people are admitted into citizenship. It is the foundation and the center that enables people to ride through such major traumas as the Civil War, Vietnam, or Watergate. It is the written standard, the key criterion by which everything else is evaluated and directed.”

This is how a person should look at creating a personal mission statement. It is your Constitution, a statement of deeply held personal beliefs and values that guide you through your life, help you live by your own chosen standards, and enable you to pursue and achieve the goals that are most important–because they are based on your values–to you.

How do you go about creating a personal mission statement? Without stealing all of Covey’s wonderful details, which you should read for yourself, I will say that you must begin with personal responsibility, with the idea that you, and only you, are responsible for the beliefs you hold and the actions you take. Whether or not your beliefs have been influenced by others is irrelevant at this point. You can deal only with what you have at hand, and it is your responsibility to do so. If you do not invest in this idea, you won’t really be able to soul-search in the way necessary to come up with your own most deeply held beliefs and principles.

Once you accept ownership for your life, then you must ask yourself, What do I want to do with it? What’s important to me? Why? What do I need to look at more closely? What do I want to change? What makes me truly happy and proud?

This process will not (and should not) be quick, and it should not be easy. As Covey says, “the process is important as the product.” Going through this process forces you to think through your priorities deeply. It heightens self-awareness and makes you think through your daily, routine actions with a new perspective. Ideally, it will help you align your behavior with your beliefs. It should take weeks or even months to write a personal mission statement, and in the end you should have a document of principles and values that will largely determine your desired path, will guide you down it, will steer you back to it if you stray, and will provide stability and even comfort in times of crisis. Your personal mission statement should be to you what the Constitution is to the United States.

As your personal Constitution, the mission statement should address your important concerns, but it should address them from a universal rather than a detailed perspective. It should be based on principles like honesty, perseverance, kindness, continued self-improvement, and the like. Goals and details about how to achieve them are important, too, but they must come after the mission statement, which provides the foundation for determining and achieving them.

I read The Seven Habits in 1994. I’d forgotten what a great book it was. Looking back now, I see that many of my beliefs about personal responsibility and the importance of leading a value-based life (or “principle-centered,” as Covey calls it) came from this book. In fact, I was so impressed with this book that I did something I almost never do: I took Covey’s advice and wrote my own personal mission statement. I took my time and put a lot of thought into it, just as he said, and when I was satisfied with it, I printed it and framed it and hung it over my desk, where I could read it every day. And I did, indeed, use it as a guide and a reminder about what really mattered to me.

My life has changed a lot since I wrote my personal mission statement in April of 1994, and I’d long since packed it away and forgotten about it until recently. There are a few things I’d change, but for the most part, it still stands as a “constitution” for my personal conduct and values. I’ll share it now, as an example of what a personal mission statement might look like:

I will:
Strive for personal growth.
Be here now.
Forgive myself.
Think positive.
Live in the solution.
Be a loyal friend.
Remember that people are the most important.
Use my pain to help others heal wherever possible.
Eat right, exercise, and take care of myself.
Be honest.
Be helpful without seeking reward.
Be willing to work toward goals.
Forgive.
Strive for ever deeper levels of love for others and myself.
Be tolerant, compassionate, and nonjudgmental.
Take risks and expand my horizons.
Be financially responsible.
Practice gratitude for all that I have, and all that I don’t have.
Believe that I’m doing the best I can.
Be a good worker.
Be true to my own ideals.
Build people up, not tear them down.

April 1994

I think, therefore I am. — Descartes

If you want to live a principled life, it is important to know about first principles: what they are in general, and what yours are in particular. A first principle is one that cannot be deduced from any other. In mathematics, these are known as axioms and postulates; in science, they are considered established laws of nature–gravity, for example. In philosophy, first principles are, according to Aristotle, “the first basis from which a thing is known.” Aristotle considered the discovering of first principles to be the primary task of philosophy.

The Descartes quote at the beginning is a good example of a philosophical first principle. Descartes used a systematic form of doubting to doubt everything he possibly could until he was left with what he believed were indubitable truths, or first principles. “I think, therefore I am” is one of the most well-known philosophical first principles ever conceived. It may seem so obvious, in fact, that we can overlook its significance. But this first principle was the first time anyone actually linked existence to cognition, to consciousness. And in doing this, Descartes established that everything we do, see, and experience is filtered through our individual minds. From this first principle came a whole spectrum of other ideas, theories, methods, and first principles, from the scientific method to the idea of self-ownership, which ushered in a new political system based on the autonomy of the individual. This simple, obvious first principle about rational thought brought much of our modern world into existence.

First principles are crucial to all fields of study. Without first principles, it would be hard to imagine any advances in any scientific, mathematical, or philosophical endeavors. First principles form the foundation of all formal, logical thinking. Without them, it would be nearly impossible to approach any subject systematically.

Most people don’t think about first principles all that much. I know I hadn’t until very recently, when the idea came up in a conversation with a friend of mine. But this isn’t because they aren’t important; in fact, quite the opposite. First principles are a major backdrop of life, underlying every thought we think and idea we hold, every product we use, every interaction we have with other people. They are common and important in much the same way as oxygen is: so much so that even though we don’t think about it, we can’t survive without it.

This is just as true in everyday life for everyday people as it is for scientists doing research and philosophers writing books. A person who is clear about first principles is going to have a clearer road through life in general. Decisive first principles will make it easier to make decisions, to know right from wrong, to establish and achieve goals, to be successful, and to be happy. Without established first principles, a person’s life will be full of inconsistencies, confusion, half-truths, irrational conclusions, poor comprehension, misunderstood failures, and likely, much misery.

To determine your own first principles, you have to do two things. First, you have to adopt standardized first principles that make sense to you (but only after you have given them some thought and determined why they make sense to you).  “I think, therefore I am” is a good first principle for someone who believes in self-ownership and personal autonomy, for example. “Do unto others as you would have others do unto you” is also a good first principle to live by if being respectful is important to you, as is Do the next right thing. And although I am not a religious person, most of the ten commandments also provide good, simple first principles of morality to live by (which, although attributed to god by religious folks, were written by man). These are just a few examples of many which a person can find and follow in living a principled life. The more research you do, and the more philosophies and spiritual teachings you expose yourself to, the more first principles you will find that make sense, feel good, and help you fine-tune your basic life philosophy (which, really, is a lifelong endeavor).

The second thing you have to do is determine your own first principles. In this sense, first principles are really your “bottom line” rules that you feel strongly about. In some sense, I suppose they could be considered your boundaries: what you will and will not tolerate in your life. You should establish these first principles for yourself in all areas of your life: career, relationship, friendships, and physical, intellectual, and spiritual pursuits. Figure out not only what’s important to you, but what is essential to you–and why. In relationships, for example, honesty is one of my first principles. But this can mean different things to different people. For me, it doesn’t mean my partner has to tell me everything going on with him all the time, merely that we be able to talk honestly with each other about the relationship and our feelings. In friendships, feeling heard is important to me, and I find that I feel awful after spending time with someone who is not a good listener (I think this is because it stirs up my family-of-origin issues, which is a good thing to know about myself). And in my intellectual and spiritual pursuits, truth-seeking is of utmost importance to me, far more than finding comfort and solace. Thus, honesty, respectfulness, and truth-seeking are three of my most important first principles that I try my best to live my life by. When I follow them, I feel good. When I deviate from them, I feel bad.

If I didn’t have these first principles clearly delineated, I would be hard pressed to connect feeling good or feeling bad to anything in particular. I might chalk bad feelings up to depression, and start taking medication, or chalk good feelings up to emotional highs, and chase after them, ever wondering why the exhilaration was so fleeting and followed by such terrible lows. Having first principles to live by provides emotional, intellectual, and spiritual guidance in a way that no external source can. For rules to live by to be meaningful, they have to personally chosen and internalized as your own. And they have to be rules that make you proud of yourself.

This may sound mechanical or dull, like it would take all the spontaneity out of life, but the opposite is true. In learning any skill, you must learn the basics before moving on to more complex techniques; if you can’t read, you’ll never be able to write, right? The same is true for life choices in general. If you have the basics down–your bottom lines, your boundaries, and your moral principles–you stand a much better chance of attaining more advanced skills. Advanced critical thinking skills, advanced spiritual states, advanced levels of relationships (that is, those that are the most satisfying and make you the most happy). And, because you know your limits, you will be less fearful and more confident, thus more willing to take risks and move beyond your comfort zone when required or desired. Simply put, you’ll be better equipped to get what you want out of life, in every way, shape and form. Rather than dull, living by first principles opens up doors to adventures and excitement not possible to people who are less aware of who they are, what they want, and why. To be adventurous and bold in life is to be confident, and confidence is a result of awareness and understanding.

If you want to get and be what you want, you have to know what you stand for. First principles are the foundation, the tools, and the path for this lifetime endeavor.

If you agree that everybody has a philosophy, and that the better thought out a person’s philosophy is, the better he will be at making decisions and basically getting the most out of his life, then the next logical question, I think, is “How do you arrive at a personal philosophy?”

It hadn’t occurred to me right away that this was the next question. Then I started thinking about how there are so many people looking for philosophy in all the wrong places, places that aren’t really going to help them develop their own set of values and criteria for advancing themselves through their lives. I say “advancing” because that’s what we, as human beings, do. We are driven to improve our lot in life and that’s just the way it is. We ate berries and wanted meat. We ate meat raw and wanted it cooked. We lived in caves and wanted dryer, warmer shelters. We discovered tools but wanted better ones. We discovered drawing and turned it into art. We created language and turned it into literature, philosophy and law. We discovered math and created physics, economics, music, and technology. In short, humans advance. We improve our lot in life, in general terms as a race, and in specific terms as individuals. It’s who we are. And even if for some odd reason a person argued that he isn’t interested in improving his own lot, he would be hard-pressed for a reason he didn’t want to leave a better legacy for his children.

But even though our will to survive is indelibly linked with our will to thrive, we have taken a number of wrong turns throughout history, and have thus left ourselves with some less-than-stellar options for figuring certain things out. These options are mostly the philosophical ones, since science, being objective, sorts itself out pretty well: if the math is wrong, the rocket won’t make it to the moon, and it’s back to the drawing board. Philosophy, however (and I use the term philosophy in the most general of ways, to mean all the studies that pertain to the subjective human experience, e.g., religion, psychology, literature, philosophy, politics, and to some extent, economics) is based on subjective ideas, which makes it much more susceptible to flawed thinking, errors in judgment, and personal biases. Philosophy is also much more difficult to prove “right” or “wrong” than a math-based science, as it is usually some of each.

Yet it is these flawed philosophies that man must turn to in his effort to determine his values and sets of criteria for advancing himself through his life. How, among all the philosophies available to the modern, literate human being, each one full of promise yet incomplete, does a person decide just what is the best path to follow in the development of a personal philosophy? The choices are truly overwhelming, with each one claiming to offer the most wisdom, the most happiness, the most solace. When you consider the amazing plethora of options, it is not surprising that most people tend to fall back on a few tried and true choices for their guiding principles, despite obvious shortcomings, or ignore the issue altogether as best they can.

Religion is probably the most common fall-back for the modern person who seeks guiding principles. It is the oldest and the most established option. It offers an instant community of like-minded people. And if you choose one within your cultural norms, it comes with a full set of values that you can comfortably adopt as your own and feel okay about.

But the drawbacks are many. Just because something is well-established does not necessarily mean it’s the best option. The three major Western religions–Islam, Judaism, and Christianity–are all thousands of years old, each with millions of believers. Which one is right? They are vastly different theologies, yet each claims to have the absolute truth, and each promises all sorts of horrifying consequences for not believing in it. Upon objective examination, these claims become more akin to Santa Claus and the tooth fairy than any divine wisdom. Yes, each religion contains kernels of truth, is based on universal truths of the human condition, but these kernels have become so buried under human agendas and political and economic motivations over the centuries that it is virtually impossible to know the true doctrines without a great deal of theological study and research. Thus, whatever the kernels of truth might be, they are best gotten at through intellectual understanding–theological study–than dogmatic belief.

But religion, by definition, requires dogmatic belief–that is, acceptance of its authority without question, merely because it is the authority. And dogmatic belief is the very antithesis of a guiding philosophy. Its appeal is also its downfall: an established set of principles for how a person should live his life. But if a set of principles has not been arrived at through a person’s own process of critical thinking and analysis, then they aren’t really his own principles. Rather, they are a list of rules with little more meaning than those a child would follow in school to avoid punishment. They might provide some guidance and comfort, but they will never be fully your own.

And not being your own, and being mostly a set of rules about how to avoid punishment and conform to externally imposed beliefs, they can’t really be considered values. Conforming out of fear is the lowest, basest, least meaningful “principle” a human being can have. Alleviation of anxiety is not a sound foundation for a personal philosophy.

Furthermore, dogmatic beliefs are meant to squelch critical thinking rather than encourage it. And without critical thinking, man is only a shadow of what he can and should be.

For all of these reasons, religion has lost its once powerful grip. As the “common” man has become increasingly more educated and able to think for himself, modern society has become increasingly secular. How could it not, when dogmatic beliefs are now so easy to challenge and refute?

This is mostly a good thing. People are freer and less guilt-ridden in their decision-making processes than ever before. And instead of obligatory conforming to the faith of one’s culture, people are now free to follow the spiritual pursuits of their choice. But there is a big drawback, too: religion provided a solid foundation upon which a person could live his life, and however limited it may have been, nothing has really replaced it. The opportunities to develop a personal philosophy are greater and more exciting than they have ever been, but they are also much more amorphous. Without religion to decree the right and wrong of things, we are each left to decide on our own. And while this is a very, very good thing, it has, as the dialectic of progress declares that it must, also ushered in a whole new set of problems. Where does one turn to find guiding principles and a personal philosophy?

In many cases, I’m sad to say, all the wrong places. The vacuum created by the downfall of dogmatic beliefs has been largely filled by secular equivalents, such as the law. While initially designed to allow people the dignity to pursue their own happiness in their own way (and the Founding Fathers took for granted that a person knew this involved having moral agency, or at least understood the futility of trying to legislate it), the law has deteriorated into a paternalistic entity people have become dependent on to provide rules for living and care in their hour of need. We now have laws for nearly every area of personal choice imaginable: matrimony, sex, education, income, smoking, gambling, and drug use, just to name a few. The legislation of morality is so ubiquitous that most people reading this accept such laws as moral and good, and believe that people need such laws to “help” them do the right thing. In fact, the government has become the new church, providing rules to live by for people who don’t want to do the work of figuring it out for themselves, as well as providing viable punishment for nonconformity–even if that nonconformity harms no one. The extent to which this situation has gotten out of hand is evidence of just how many people prefer to let an authority figure do their thinking for them rather than determining their own personal philosophy, which was probably the greatest gift a government has ever offered its citizens.

It would be nice to think that education was the answer. But formal education does little more than teach children how to conform. I’m not sure how critical thinking has been so successfully ignored by educational institutions; I just know that it has.

Our society is largely set up, I think, to bring people to a minimal level of conformity. If we want to progress beyond that, we are largely on our own. We have to seek out books and friends and teachers who are willing to discuss topics like freedom, critical thinking, and philosophy. We have to want to know more, understand more, see more. We have to undertake this journey on our own volition. In short, we have to use our minds.

This is the only answer, I think. We cannot find a personal philosophy in any pre-packaged morality or legislation. Guidance and principles, yes. But it is only through the awareness that our minds are our greatest tool for surviving and thus thriving, and that such thriving can only happen through a sustained effort to rely on and trust our own ability to think and understand the world, that we can develop a personal philosophy, a set of principles, a moral compass, to guide us on our journey. Anything less than this is borrowed, finite, fragile knowledge that leaves our confidence weak and our soul thirsty. Our minds: this is how we find our philosophy, and thus, our confidence, our self-esteem, and our dignity.

Mankind has struggled since his very beginnings between the desire for security and the need for growth: he wants to feel safe, but he also wants to thrive, and thriving requires risk. Today, this dichotomy plays out largely as the struggle to trust that we know what’s right for ourselves versus the seductive security of believing external authorities know better. They don’t. Ever. And believing that they do is a deal with the devil that destroys the very essence of our humanity: our ability to think.

When I was 15, I had a conversation with the school librarian about having kids. I was adamant, even at that tender age, that I did not want children. The librarian laughed at me, then she bet me that I would change my mind. She promised me that by the time I was 25, I’d have more kids than anyone else in my graduating class. She was so confident, she wrote and signed a note to this effect, handed it to me, and told me to bring it back in ten years to prove her right. A small wager, I think $25.00, was made. We shook hands.

Around that same time, there was a famous poll in the Ann Landers advice column about having children. 70% of respondents said that if they had the choice to do it over, they would not have children. Debate over this went on for months, maybe even a couple of years. People were shocked, outraged, incensed at this percentage, and put a great deal of effort into coming up with reasons why so many parents would answer this way. For some reason, a lot of people had a difficult time accepting that 70% of parents didn’t believe children were precious bundles of joy.

But the poll made perfect sense to me, validating what I already believed. People weren’t saying they didn’t love their kids. They were merely saying that they wished they’d given the issue more thought because having kids hadn’t turned out to be what they expected. What I didn’t understand was why people, like my school librarian and the millions who wrote in to Ann Landers to dispute these poll results, had such a hard time with those who did not want children (or who wished they’d given the idea more thought before they had them). To me, it was the most natural–and rational–choice in the world. To me, wanting children was what seemed unfathomable. And I have felt this way for as long as I can remember.

Many people see this as the result of some kind of trauma or neurosis, because women are supposed to want children; we are biologically wired to want children. I believed this myself for a long time, as I grew up with a mother who married at 15 and felt cheated out of a “real” life. She made no effort to hide this from us. She told all of us, over and over, Don’t get married. Don’t have kids. For a long time, I believed my aversion to having children stemmed from her example. It certainly made sense that it would–until you considered the fact that both of my sisters happily took on parenting, just as I happily did not. Maybe we dealt with our trauma and neuroses in different ways, or maybe it had nothing to do with that. Maybe we just made different choices. Also, I’d like to think that biological wiring can be transcended, or at least redirected as a person sees fit. Statistics corroborate this, indicating that as a woman’s education and economic status increase, the likelihood of both marriage and motherhood decrease. This would appear to be the very antithesis of trauma or neurosis.

So my lack of maternal desire may not have been pathological, but did it not belie a certain selfishness or self-indulgence in my makeup? I guess I thought this too, because for years when people asked me about having kids, I loved to answer that I was too self-centered. I thought this was clever, and it usually squelched any more rudeness along this line. Until one day a friend of mine, then in her forties and also voluntarily childless, pointed out to me that it is generally more self-centered (she used the word “narcissistic”) to want children than to not want them. That is to say (she explained), many people have children to satisfy their own needs rather than out of any real desire to bring new little lives into the world and nurture them to fruition. This made sense to me, too. I could name, just off the top of my head, half a dozen women who’d gotten pregnant to get a man to commit to them, and half a dozen more who did so to fill a void, avoid getting a job, or “have someone to care for them when they were old.” Now granted, most of these were very young women, but I could also think of several more mature women who’d had a child to try to save a marriage, or because they thought they should have a baby before they were too old, or simply because they thought it was expected of them. Most people, my friend said, have children for reasons that have little to do with actually wanting them, and I began to see that, sadly, she might be right.

She was definitely right, though, that we were no more selfish than women who chose to have children. All the women I knew, or knew of, who’d made a conscious decision not to have children were thoughtful people. They weren’t baby haters, or so screwed up from their childhoods (as I’d feared about myself) that raising children was beyond their capacity. Rather, they were women who had given the issue a lot of consideration and decided it wasn’t for them. Their reasons varied greatly, but they all shared one common characteristic: they had been arrived at through a careful, rational, introspective process. Some women had had a lifelong aversion to motherhood (as I did), which they explored thoroughly until they determined it wasn’t something they were going to change their minds about; others had started out wanting children, or assuming they wanted children, only to realize after serious analysis that other interests had taken a higher priority for a reason. Yes, we were the exceptions rather than the rule, but we were definitely not a bunch of neurotic, self-centered, maladjusted flakes. Of the people I knew who had children and the people I knew who did not, the did-nots were generally the more thoughtful, more mature, more conscientious group. Not unanimously, of course, but on the whole. The sad truth is that many of the parents I knew–and knew of–took on the job without a lot forethought, and many of them ended up saddled with a task they were not prepared for and which disappointed, disillusioned, and overwhelmed them.

I know this sounds cynical, but it’s true. And there is really no rational reason for it. In the U.S. and all other industrialized countries, information about child-rearing is abundant and people are literate enough to find it if they want to. Furthermore, contraception is cheap and easy to obtain, as is information on how to get and use it. You’d think unplanned pregnancies would be rare, or even non-existent where such access to personal choice exists. But according to a Wikipedia article on unintended pregnancy, almost half–half!–of the pregnancies in the U.S. are accidental, resulting in about 3 million unintended births and about 1.3 million abortions annually (this statistic was for the year 2002). Things don’t get much more cynical, or sad, than that.

I am stymied by women who give motherhood less consideration than they would give to, say, buying a car. No decision could change your life more, yet it’s taken on with shrugs, hopes, and grave delusions about what it means to be a parent, gravest most of all for the babies born into such an environment. Such lack of consideration seems far closer to pathological than choosing childlessness–and corroborates the statistics of the Ann Landers poll, which, if done today, I suspect would have similar results.

I feel good that I never brought a child into the world for selfish reasons, and just as good that I didn’t do so accidentally, out of lack of interest in my own future. But most of all, I feel good about choosing childlessness out of respect for the immense job that raising a child is. Because the contract we make with the Universe (or are supposed to make with the Universe) when we take on child-rearing is gargantuan. It dwarfs all other contracts on any scale you care to measure. When you become a parent, your life becomes a vehicle for the child’s. You are completely responsible for the child’s well-being, of which food and shelter are the barest of minimums. You must give the child your all, you must devote yourself to nurturing this young life to the very best of your ability, and you must instantly sacrifice self-interest when there is a choice to be made, which will be often. If you take on parenting, you take on exhaustion, frustration, worry, and heartache as an everyday way of life, a way of life that goes on for the rest of your life. Maybe most importantly, you must not expect anything in return. No gratitude, no obligation, no guilt, not even a guarantee of a decent relationship. Since the child did not ask to be born, that’s the only way it can be. And even if you do take the job on voluntarily, with a clear vision of what the future holds and no expectations about how your kids should or shouldn’t be, the amount of physical, mental and emotional effort involved would require tremendous fortitude, self-discipline, and will. Because I saw parenting for the huge and critical job that it was, I knew I did not want to take it on, would never want to take it on. As noble a cause as parenting is, and it is as noble as they come, I knew it was not for me.

I don’t know how I knew this, but I did. It began as a vague certainty that took decades to mature into the philosophy I have today. But it has always been a part of who I am. I’m sure watching my parents break nearly every stipulation of the parenting contract was a factor, but I think more importantly, I realized the sheer weight of the burden and felt exhausted by it. You could put a negative spin on that, and call it laziness or narcissism, as many people have over the years, or you could put a positive spin on it and call it a wise, responsible, loving decision. I freely admit that pursuing other interests has always been more important to me, but I also think it is wise and loving indeed indeed to do what you want with your life. We women who choose childlessness have taken responsibility for ourselves, not only reproductively, but also emotionally and intellectually. And that can only result in more positive energy, in general, in the world.

I don’t mean this as an indictment of parenting; quite the opposite. And I’m certainly not saying good parenting means you have to do everything perfectly (in fact, you have to be really good at apologizing because you will do so many things imperfectly). But I do believe that if more people put as much thought into what’s involved in being good, thoughtful, loving, responsible parents, fewer would choose to have children. I know there are parents out there who’ve made their choices circumspectly, who want and are in a position to provide for their children and who understand the immensity of what they’ve taken on. I just wish there were more of them.

I never went back to the librarian to collect my money. It seemed kindest not to. She would have had a hard time fitting me into her world view, even in the late 1980’s. I’m glad that’s changed, that I live in a time where a woman can choose not to be a parent without getting sideways glances and pursed lips, or at least fewer of them. I’m glad a person’s areas of obligation and self-sacrifice can be freely chosen and that I don’t have to feel the burden of motherhood, like my mother did, unless I truly want to. I applaud any woman who’s made the choice to be childless even if it has displeased people in her life, maybe especially if it has displeased people in her life. Mostly, I applaud anyone who makes a choice from her heart and has the courage to stick to it. The world needs more people like you, too.

from The Way of Chuang Tzu, by Thomas Merton:

If a man is crossing a river

And an empty boat collides with his own skiff

Even though he be a bad-tempered man

He will not become very angry.

But if he sees a man in the boat,

He will shout at him to steer clear.

If the shout is not heard, he will shout again,

And yet again, and begin cursing.

And all because there is somebody in the boat.

Yet if the boat were empty,

He would not be shouting, and not be angry.

If you can empty your own boat

Crossing the river of the world,

No one will oppose you,

No one will seek to harm you.

This is my favorite quote about respect: “I don’t respect you because you deserve respect. I respect you because I am a respectful person.” Let’s think about what this means, and its significance to a person who is trying to live a value-based life.

To see the importance of this statement, let’s look first at its opposite. If you think respect is something that other people must earn, you will have the opportunity to give it only when people behave in a certain manner. That is, if people are kind, then you are kind in return, but if people are not kind, then you are free to be as rude or thoughtless as they are being.

At first glance, it might make sense that you should treat people as they “deserve” to be treated. But what such behavior really says is that respect is about circumstances rather than about a person’s values. This makes respect a reaction rather than a choice. And reactivity never feels good because it means you are not in control of your emotions or actions. More importantly, behaving rudely on whim or impulse means that respect is not part of your value system.

True respectfulness is when you are able to maintain your composure in the face of a verbal attack. Doing so says you are in control of yourself, able to act on standards rather than on impulses. This is huge, because it is the difference between emotion-based behavior and value-based behavior. Emotion-based behavior is reactive, while value-based behavior comes from having a moral compass that guides your behavior from a higher place: a place that considers how you want to treat other people, how you want to be treated by other people, and how you want to be perceived. Value-based behavior says that you’ve put some thought into how you conduct yourself and that your dignity is important to you. It says that doing the right thing matters to you and it says that you respect yourself. It short, it says that you are a person of substance.

A person’s behavior says more about themselves than it can ever say about anybody else. In fact, it says everything about themselves and nothing about anybody else. So if you want to be seen as respectful, and if you want to be respected, then behave respectfully regardless of what people around you are doing.

This does not mean that you put up with disrespectful treatment. Quite the contrary. But it does mean that you don’t stoop to a baser level of behavior simply because somebody else has. You can set boundaries, state your feelings, state your intentions, then follow through on them,all without resorting to any disrespectfulness at all. You can be calm, speak in a controlled voice, and politely refuse to engage on any other level. Even if you are seething inside, you can maintain control on the outside. This may take practice, particularly if you grew up in a family with poor boundaries and low standards of respect, but if being respectful is important to you, you can learn to behave this way.

Really, respect is just one of many entry points into a conversation about values. Anything worth having is worth working for, and nowhere is this more true than in the realm of values. If a person wants to be honest, diligent, sincere, and respectful, for example, he has to make an effort to attain these traits. Nobody is born with them. First they have to be held as important (as values), then they have to be defined in each individual’s mind, then they have to be achieved. This is how excellence, in any field, happens. But values are the most important area of all, because without them, excellence in any other field is not likely to happen, or happen by accident, which amounts to the same thing.

If behavior is tied to values, we are far more likely to behave in ways that feel good, and far less likely to say or do things we will later regret. I can think of no better definition for respectfulness, and no better way to view values in general.