The things you do when no one’s looking
Growing up, I got in my fair share of trouble. Stupid stuff mainly, but most of it felt like the end of the world at the time. Looking back, I probably could have avoided half of it if I wasn’t taught from a very young age that your integrity was everything, if you did something in my house, you owned up to it and faced the music. I remember on one occasion it was one of those times the world was ending, I called a friend’s Mum as I did every night and this one time she says to me “don’t call here again, I know what you’ve done, I’m going to be calling your Mum tonight to let her know about it!” What do I do? I spend about 2 hours in panic, running through every possible scenario in my head before I end up running to tell my mum what happened in full and complete detail. I ended up grounded for 3 weeks or something like that, and I only found out much later that the friend’s Mum never did make that call to my Mum. So I ended up ratting myself out when I didn’t even need to. Oh well, at least I had my integrity.
15 years later, I look back on those events and I’m still completely comfortable with the decisions I made. As you get older, wiser, (or simply less tolerant) those with low integrity are the first ones you cut off. I’d go as far as to say that personal integrity ends up being one of the defining characteristics of one’s life.
The Collins Dictionary defines integrity as
Noun
- adherence to moral principles; honesty
- the quality of being unimpaired; soundness
- unity; wholeness
A wise man once said to me “there’s got to be a time in your life Malcolm, where you just cut off the sacks of shit”. Having pondered this theory for a few years and probably not originally fully understanding what he meant, I think it ended up being a bit of a metaphor for quite a simple mantra. Don’t have lasting dealings with those with low integrity. We live in a world now where “the end justifies the means” has become an accepted school of thought, especially in a business environment. Sales people over promise and under deliver in order to get the deal across the line and meet their ever increasing quotas, employees call in ‘sick’ because they don’t have any more paid time off, applicants over inflate their abilities in job interviews because getting a job is not easy and they feel as though they have to be an expert in everything. In each of these scenarios, the person committing the dishonesty has justified to themselves that they have a valid reason for their lack of integrity.
This topic can (and has) taken me on many different tangents which I’ll save for future writings, but ultimately it boils down to this: Integrity is developed over years; it is learned through nurture and developed through nature. When you’re down and out and when you’re up and about, in the end all you really have is your integrity. It’s critical that one comes to realise that individually, our character and integrity is judged (fairly or unfairly) by the character of the friends you keep. If you surround yourself with those that love to drink and smoke, you’ll inevitably end up drinking and smoking with them. Unfortunately, the same applies with integrity. If you surround yourself with dishonest cats whom are willing to cut corners to get ahead, inevitably, although maybe not initially, you will find yourself accepting and then adopting the same kinds of traits that have made them so.
Building your integrity could have taken you years, and can be lost in minutes through making the wrong choices or associating with the wrong people. I think it’s so important to surround yourself yourself with high integrity people, through friendship circles, and through work life.
That leads me into another topic actually one that my boss has been banging on at me about, but that’s for another day.
