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The elements of character, they're very diverse. There's not a single element; there's many
of them. Probably the one that young people probably need to work on the most is perseverance.
Perseverance is required in everything that is significant in life. To build perseverance
it really takes conscious effort to buckle down and do the things that have to be done
and quit doing the things that don't need to be done.
I learned early on, I started noticing a real difference between military culture and civilian
culture, was this thing called honor. And I realized in the military, there's this elevated
valuing of honor, and I realized that my civilian students and young civilians aren't introduced
to the whole idea of what honor is. I mean, they know, they hear the word honor repeated
over and over and over, but honor in terms of leadership is something so deep inside
of us that I say it's the heart of our character. All the other elements of character are built
upon honor, and as long as we maintain our honor, it helps us maintain everything else
across the board.
I think it's been so downplayed in society and in culture that we don't talk about it.
Honor. The way MacArthur talked about it when he said "duty, honor, country" at West Point
in 1962. So I harp on that especially with college students. Learning how to live honorably.
Honor is how deeply and reverently we live every day by our personal morals, values,
integrity, honesty, and all of these moral character traits that are talked about all
the time. It's how we truly live each and every day, according to those principles and
those ideas.
The third thing that I harp on a lot is trustworthiness. I say trust is our greatest asset on our balance
sheet because it's so tenuous and it's so hard to build, and if you lose it, you never
get it back to its original luster. The example I use is a mirror. If you break a mirror,
I don't care what you do, how long you work on it, you can never get that mirror back
to its original position and shape. The cracks are always going to show.
Where that's valuable, especially for a young person, is relationships. Because leadership
is a relationship between a leader and a follower. So leadership happens in this microscopic
interaction between a leader and a follower, the influence -- the definition of leadership
is influence -- it's the leader influencing his followers. When you zoom in on leadership,
it's happening in a moment in a space between two people, in a relationship between two
people.
And the only way relationships survive, or even are effective, is as long as there's
trust between those two people. Same thing with relationship between boyfriend/girlfriend,
husband/wife, spouse, children, fathers, mothers. Once that trust is sacrificed, it's never
fully regained. I learned this teaching business and from sales reps: trust can take years
to build, and it can be destroyed with one word. If character was destiny 2500 years
ago, well, it's still destiny today.
I've been around for over 50 years now, and so I've got the wisdom of being able to look
back on people that I've known for 50 years, and I realized as I was thinking about this
that that's an absolute truth. Undeniable truth. The people that are where they're at
today, they got where they're at because of who they are. And that's how character is.
Character's made up of a lot of different things, like honesty, integrity, and all that,
but character, the most basic definition of character is it's who you really are, inside.
And it's something that I can't see. I liken it to a light in a box. You can't see the
light, but you can see the beams coming out of the box, and those beams tell you the quality
and the strength and the value of that character that's inside that box. But you can't see
the true character.
So their character, a young person's character, ultimately is going to write their life story.
Every chapter in their life story will be written by the kind of person they are, because
the kind of person they are puts them into every position that they ever get in in their
lives: success, failure, or whatever. So fact of the matter is, what we're talking about
here is character development.
Ultimately the problem that young people have is that schools aren't teaching character
development. We've kind of left that up to however you're raised and whatever happens,
and the beauty of it is, if you grew up in a culture maybe that didn't value things like
honor and honesty, so your character may not appreciate that, but the beauty of what I'm
talking about, about character development, is character always changes. Because what
I consider to be honesty today or moral today is a lot different than what I considered
it when I was young.
It changes, and if it means it changes, then it tells us that we can cause it to change,
and we can manipulate it, ultimately, to become the kind of person that we need to be to become
the kind of person we want to be.
A segment of the young population, high school to college, who know that there's something
missing in this world that's bigger than them, and it's this thing called character that
will have a huge impact on the outcome of their life.
Leadership is something that you almost have to learn in practice. You can learn leadership
traits and best practices and all that that will help you in your journey, but you really
do have to get into leadership, I think, to truly learn leadership. So the best thing
you can do as a young person who wants to be a leader is learn how to be the kind of
person that it takes to be a good leader, and those are skills and traits that can absolutely
be developed.
Truth is, it takes conscious effort, intention. You've got to sit down and start figuring
out how to say "yes" to things that need to be said "yes" to and "no" to things that need
to be said "no" to.