How to Act with Honor

Courage is the most important virtue for without it, the rest fall apart. To build the foundation of who you are on courage is to build a solid foundation, one on rock and not the sand that the masses rest on.

1. Take risks

• Hold an unpopular opinion that’s true, that deviates from what everyone else is thinking
• Stand by that opinion in public regardless of what it does to your reputation
• Stand by someone else you know to be good and honest, think Rosanne, who’s being dragged through the mud by soulless idiots
• Build a business that employs people, this is the best form of charity, and if you get rich you decide where the money goes.
• Put your money where your mouth is, never speak on things that you don’t have a vested interest in (think intellectual economists who don’t have their money in the market and don’t have a real world job where they practice their theories, who also ignore the history of what their theories have led to) – don’t be them. If you say something, do it.

You lack courage if…

Your private life conflicts with your intellectual opinion, it cancels your intellectual ideas, not your private life.

• Think Canadian environmentalist David Suzuki who hates the free market and growth in business, yet employs dozens or hundreds in his foundation that only exists because of the market.
• Who hates consumption and yet consumes regularly, but wants others not to
• Who hates energy, namely oil, but also claims to despise inequality, ignoring that fossil fuels are the cheapest form of energy, and that carbon taxes do the most harm to those who cannot afford to pay more in tax.

2. Always do more than you talk.

We live in an age of talkers who do very little. We proclaim and that proclamation leads us to feel as though we’ve accomplished something.

There’s research that goes back a century showing that we should not proclaim our goals, instead, we should set them and work on them in silence.

When we voice our desires and aspirations it sends a signal to our brain that we’ve accomplished what we want to achieve, making us feel the satisfaction of achievement without having achieved anything.

Don’t announce your goals. Set them in silence. And work your ass off.

Also, do not tell people what you’re going to do. Do it.

3. Do good works in silence.

Don’t do good works for show, it removes the virtue in the works. A good thing only remains good if it’s done in silence.

Follow this Bible verse:

Matthew 6:1-4

“Be careful not to practice your righteousness in front of others to be seen by them. If you do, you will have no reward from your Father in heaven. 2 “So when you give to the needy, do not announce it with trumpets, as the hypocrites do in the synagogues and on the streets, to be honored by others. Truly I tell you, they have received their reward in full. 3 But when you give to the needy, do not let your left hand know what your right hand is doing, 4 so that your giving may be in secret. Then your Father, who sees what is done in secret, will reward you.

4. Accept responsibility for your past, present, and future.

Don’t blame other people for anything. Accept responsibility and do the best you can with where you are and with what you have. That’s all anyone has ever done. No great man has ever waited and prayed for a miracle, the miracle is their potential and the amount of effort they can put in for how long.

The miracle has been given, now shut up and work.

5. Be a fighter.

Stand up for what you believe. Don’t give an inch. Honor isn’t honor unless it’s acted upon. You cannot merely think honorably, you have to back it up.

Note: MUCH of this podcast was inspired by Nassim Taleb’s book, Skin in the Game. It’s an AWESOME read, I highly recommend getting a copy.