Our integrity is our ability to make and keep commitments.
The fascinating thing about integrity is the way it accelerates the good and the bad. If we keep one commitment, we feel the momentum to keep the next. And the next. Until it becomes unthinkable to break a commitment.
And vice versa.
The implication is that the simplest way to build our integrity is to keep a small commitment – e.g., I will sleep 7 hours today. The momentum from that will build onto bigger commitments – e.g., I will do a strength workout every weekday – before we know it.
The related opposite implication is that we ought to be very careful about making exceptions on our values/principles. As the late Clay Christensen put it beautifully, we’ll all discover before long that life is an unending stream of extenuating circumstances.
