There have been a few men in my life who have been influential in helping me to identify what kind of man I would like to become. My dad who was hard working was a good provider and the most honest man I have ever known. My dad was a much more humble man than I am. I’m more like my mother’s father who was known to be a bull in a china closet at times. Grandpa was full of gumption and not afraid to call it like he saw it. But there were many others who affected my thinking as well. Some authors of great books, others were people who knew how to get things done.
In business you always hear people talk about integrity, but integrity in my mind is easy when things are going well. Richard Johnson, a millionaire real estate developer from Muskegon once told me a story about how he got started in business. He drove into town with just his pickup truck from Chicago where he had grown up and learned to be a carpenter. Richard had just his truck and power tools but was ready to go to work. He said that his first real job on his own was a small residential project; he contracted to build a retaining wall.
The work turned into more than he had anticipated. After he finished, the homeowner who knew that Richard had underbid the cement wall asked him how he had made out. Richard answered honestly that the job had cost him more than he had thought. He lost money before it was done. Still he finished it and as far as I know it still stands today. The lady was kind enough to offer Richard more money. But he didn’t accept it. He told her that he had better learn to estimate correctly if he had any chance of making it in business. He had included materials in his proposal and he stuck by his original bid, she hadn’t asked for any changes and he couldn’t justify charging her more per their agreement. If you ask me this is what integrity is all about. Doing what you say you will do and accepting the costs involved.
Richard went to build sixty custom upscale homes a year, and several hundred plus unit apartment complexes over several decades. That is what I call dependable and self-made.
Those same principles helped to carry me through my beginnings as a cleaning contractor, where my pay was merely twenty to sixty bucks an hour depending on the task, and it is that humility which made my pawnshop number one and provided steady income in the high six figures. It isn’t the space that we occupy but the way we occupy the space. There is much to learn about the building blocks of a company, but the foundation is what is most important.
There are other ways I suppose to raise up in this world, but if we are unable to keep the commitments that we make to others and if integrity is lacking, ultimately we find that no amount of money will buy the earnest respect and admiration of others. To quote Plato and later confirmed in the Bible: “What does it profit a man to gain the whole world if he loses his Soul.”
Integrity is the stuff of our legacy, and it is my personal belief that is what matters most when we finally meet our Maker. It is good to be liked, better to be loved and best to love. I don’t believe for a minute that love is possible minus trust and respect. Trust is rooted in one’s consistency in living out our principles. But it is never simple. We can folly with our expectations as well. People make mistakes, no one is perfect and we must make allowances as well.
Life is full of moral dilemmas which if not rightly considered can trip us up and leave us feeling like hypocrites, or worse yet our lives can become a stage of phony role playing of our own construction. It is easier than one might think, especially when we get a bit of the power bubble going on.
It is easy to see the ball and the court as yours and two that everyone else exists at our pleasure. We’re human; we are at the center of our own universe. There is a lot of envy and dissent in the ranks to contend with as a leader. Some want something for nothing. We learn to build up our defenses. We can also misinterpret intentions. We can get it wrong. We can become angry, bitter and even calloused. Our egos can grow a bit too large. We can forget that fundamentally other people matter just as much as we do.
This happens oftentimes when as owners we hear nothing but “yes sir”, omission of truth becomes in such cases, a more damaging deceit than an outright lie. The truth can sting, but illusion is an insidious disease not unlike the Aids virus, it attacks the cells of the mind as the virus does the body, taking over slowly, using the host to amplify itself. The resulting sickness can remain unsystematic for years if undetected. By then it is too late to win the fight.
This happens when we are depending on others for feedback but they really aren’t listening. Also it occurs when we shut others out and lose their respect; we allow resentments to take root. Or else we simply push away what is uncomfortable and retreat into the pride bubble, perhaps, even making some token gesture to reassure ourselves that “I’m okay, it isn’t me”. That is the nature of pride and perhaps the greatest obstacle between all humanity and the imperative of integrity. Integrity is the truest measure of our character, second only to our love.
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