Chapter 3: Discover and Acknowledge Your Faults

Much modern misery comes from unaddressed problems

In spite of easier and more abundant material prosperity than ever before, modern people seem to be more miserable than at any other time in history. Much modern misery comes from unacknowledged truth. When it comes to your emotional experience, the way the world is matters, but not as much as how you choose to respond to it. While so much of what happens within and outside of you is not your choice, you always get to decide how to act on and react to everything in and around you.

Modern people increasingly respond to what they do not like by ignoring it or lying about it. So many problems that individuals face today are the cascading and compounded consequences of failure to acknowledge painful pieces of truth now long forgotten.

You can’t be ashamed of the truth without removing yourself from the path to greater blessings.¹ You can’t be as successful in contending with reality while living lies as you would be were you to acknowledge the truth. You can’t solve a problem beyond your comprehension of its cause. You can’t learn from mistakes until you correctly identify and effectually address the shortcoming that caused them.

Unexpected negative outcomes can be a powerfully noticeable sign that you have overestimated your capabilities. Those who willingly attribute to themselves value beyond their merit suddenly experience surprising and extreme negative consequences. Unexpected consequences are an indication that you do not correctly understand cause and effect in the domain in which you encounter them. The most common approach is to treat the problems that arise through unexpected consequences like once-offs, where if you can just get through it, you’ll be back to normal. The appearance of an unexpected outcome always indicates a shortfall in your understanding of yourself, others, and the world. Always adjust your beliefs, desires, and actions when given sufficient reason to.

The proliferation of preventable problems

When you refuse to think, feel, and do your best, you open yourself to manifold problems that you have the ability to prevent. An unfortunate number of problems faced by people today both individually and societally are completely preventable, but persist only because those suffering from them refuse to acknowledge and solve them.

Many problems are easy to identify and solve if you are honest, but very few people are honest. Persistent problems tend to be those that require acknowledging truths we would rather not face.

It’s difficult to accurately identify problems and potential solutions in a world lacking radical truthfulness and transparency. In our modern world, you don’t have to look far to find examples of blatant lies about the causes of common problems:

• Homelessness. The homeless reliably prefer their situation to alternatives, and will only prefer something other than homelessness when the cost of being homeless increases relative to it.
• Under- and unemployment. Nearly all people are employable, just not at the wages they feel entitled to.
• Suicide. Those who kill themselves are not “victims of suicide.” The victims are those they selfishly leave behind.
• Obesity. Obesity is not a disease, but simply the choice to overeat.
• Mental health. So-called mental health problems are not caused by chemical imbalances in the brain, but negative thought patterns and behaviors—things that can be changed by choice. The challenges of life are increased—not reduced—by drugs that reduce one’s perception of them.
• Poverty. Poverty is caused by poor life choices, not lack of resources or opportunity. The perpetually poor neglect opportunities to improve themselves and their surroundings, spending their money on things of low worth and low future value.² They do not invest in the future. They prioritize the present.
• Racism. Racism is a practice, not an outcome, and cannot be solved by practicing more of it. Any program that boosts or reduces the merit of a person based on their skin color is racist, no matter its intended outcomes.
• Youth degradation. Children need full-time parents, the ability to play outside, education without Marxist indoctrination, and freedom from pornography, social media, and junk food. Almost all modern problems present in the youth are absent from children raised in environments approaching normal home life prior to 2008.

Similar blatant lies exist in the specific context of the lives of families and individuals, where problems like religious beliefs, finding a spouse, having children, maintaining a marriage, raising children, obtaining and succeeding in a career, and so on all follow the same pattern of obvious solutions requiring the acknowledgment of difficult truth.

Few people possess the honesty to identify and solve today’s problems, no matter how simple they may be. Instead, they either blame other causes or people, or insist that the solution is something other than whatever it is they would rather not change. An added benefit of inflating the problem is that the larger the solution, the less guilty anyone feels in failing to solve it.

In modern society, consequences of poor choices are artificially subdued

Prior generations placed more value on telling the truth, being authentic, and aligning with reality. Modern people are far less grounded in reality than their ancestors. Most people in history were farmers whose survival required them to discover and abide by the laws of reality.

The cheap energy, unbounded money printing, and complex technology of the modern world has made the connection between cause and effect much more difficult to see than it was in prior generations, providing a fertile ground for greater delusion than ever before.

In prior times, poor choices carried more immediate obvious consequences. Historically, suffering tended to increase with increasingly bad behavior. In modern times, the flow of wealth and complexity of cause and effect insulate people from most of the bad decisions they make, even when those decisions are repetitive or consequential. Bad ideas, bad feelings, and bad behavior are thereby allowed to propagate through the life of the individual and through society as a whole.

In our society, almost all people are insulated from almost all consequences, living in wealth paid for by the virtue and productivity of other people, while some of the worst people are promoted to the greatest wealth, power, and fame.

The effect of insulated consequences in the modern world is that modern problems continue growing larger and larger, both at the individual and societal levels, guaranteeing an eventual explosive confrontation with suddenly unavoidable problems that have increasingly grown beyond the capability of normal people or society as a whole to solve.

As you transcend the degenerate and ascend into experiences that fewer people have, you will begin to see an abundance of negative consequences to poor choices presently hidden from your perception, both in your life and in the lives of others.

Take responsibility for your present choices

Honest people assume responsibility over every aspect of their lives. An honest person takes responsibility for both their successes and their failures.³ They do not blame others for what is within their ability to change. They also honestly take credit for their contributions.

A common way people avoid admitting fault is by blaming someone else for who they are, how they are, and what they do. Consider how often people dishonestly discuss obesity, suicide, sexual sin, mental misery, drugs, and every other harmful choice as anything but a choice.

Be responsible for your life and what you use it for. Don’t blame other people for things that are your fault:

30 And now remember, remember, my brethren, that whosoever perisheth, perisheth unto himself; and whosoever doeth iniquity, doeth it unto himself; for behold, ye are free; ye are permitted to act for yourselves; for behold, God hath given unto you a knowledge and he hath made you free.
31 He hath given unto you that ye might know good from evil, and he hath given unto you that ye might choose life or death; and ye can do good and be restored unto that which is good, or have that which is good restored unto you; or ye can do evil, and have that which is evil restored unto you. (Helaman 14)

As long as you make others the scapegoat for your own unhappiness, you will never be happy. While you incorrectly ascribe your undesirable situation to factors outside of your control, you will never address what you can do to improve your situation, overcome the problems that presently overcome you, or remove the avoidable suffering they cause in your life. Blame shifting can’t provide any longterm improvement to your inner or outer circumstances. Like every other lie, it can only temporarily delay consequences whose eventual price is magnified by lying about it. It is the truth that makes you free,⁴ not deflection.

Before blaming others for your situation, first ask whether there is anything that you could do to change it.⁵ It is almost always the case that the critical portions of the situations you do not like are wholly within your control. Even in the extremely rare case where your situation is completely out of your hands, your reaction to it is still 100% your choice. What are you going to do about it?

The path to happiness lies in first doing what lies in your own power to fix those things about yourself you know are contributing to your lack of happiness.⁶

The key to greater meaning in life lies in assuming greater responsibility. Anything that reduces your personal responsibility for what you do and why you do it will negatively affect your life more than anything else. The key to meaning lies in the choices you make and the reasons you make them. Your choices can only improve as you pay more attention to and improve how and why you make them. These improvements come in proportion to the responsibility you assume, as any lack of responsibility translates into reduced recognition and implementation of potential improvement. The more responsibility you assume, the more improvement you will achieve. The more responsibility you assume, the better your decisions will be. The less personal responsibility you assume, the less likely you are to make good choices.

What you do and why you do it are always fully your choice. The experiences you’ve had and the choices of others absolutely influence the ease or difficulty of that choice, but they don’t make the choice for you. No matter the role played by others or the challenges of your situation, you always have the power to choose.⁷ God created “both things to act and things to be acted upon,” (2 Nephi 2:14) and you were created to act. You are an independent agent, endowed by God with the freedom to choose:

Therefore, cheer up your hearts, and remember that ye are free to act for yourselves—to choose the way of everlasting death or the way of eternal life. (2 Nephi 10:23)

`And the Messiah cometh in the fulness of time, that he may redeem the children of men from the fall. And because that they are redeemed from the fall they have become free forever, knowing good from evil; to act for themselves and not to be acted upon, save it be by the punishment of the law at the great and last day, according to the commandments which God hath given. (2 Nephi 2:26)`

If you ever do less than your best, you alone bear full responsibility.⁸ At any time you have the full power to choose what to do and why to do it.

Improvement requires the recognition of fault

Some of the most important facts are those you least want to acknowledge. You have to detect and acknowledge what isn’t real in order to find what is.

Many of your ideas about your self-worth are based on illusion. Your faults are the difference between your overinflated self-worth and your actual self-worth.

Overestimation of self-worth is a problem of eternal significance, as it prevents you from improving toward who you could be.⁹ You will never become what you think you already are. While you overestimate your value, you will prevent yourself from becoming more valuable than you are. Without knowing your weaknesses, you can’t grow out of them. Those who are not aware of their faults can never address them. You will have to adopt a lower image of how you are in order to adopt a higher image of what you could be. To attain what could be , you must first accept what is. Accepting what is requires letting go of what is not . You have to recognize who you are to effectively plan how to become more and better than you presently are. You need to know where you are in order to effectively find and follow the path to where you want to go.

Improvement requires you to first admit who and how you really are. Human adults, by nature, have massive barriers put into place to hide who we really are: what we do, why we do it, and how we feel about it. We avoid identifying faults because we suppose that recognizing faults reduces our perceived value. The problem is that your actual worth is never reduced by recognizing flaws—only your artificially inflated perceived value.

Don’t hide from who you really are. Strip yourself of the pretense or delusions that cause you to see yourself as more than you really are. Without accurately recognizing your weaknesses, you won’t take advantage of opportunities to improve¹⁰ or recognize the need for help from others,¹¹ and you will unwittingly enter situations that are guaranteed to overcome you. If you ignore contending with your flaws, the day will come when the consequences of doing so eclipse the benefits of not doing so.

Whether the idea for the change comes from your mind, your interaction with the world, or your interaction with others, and no matter if the change concerns your thoughts, feelings, or actions, no improvement will ever occur while you believe there is insufficient reason to make it.

Self-improvement is progressive both in your ability to detect your flaws as well as in your ability to implement improvements. There is a set of faults which you already have the ability to see, but actively ignore, and these must be acknowledged and addressed before you can see additional faults that lie beyond your present ability to perceive.

The first step to overcoming any fault is to notice it. It is possible to become the kind of person who rejoices at the discovery of a fault. Recognize that every fault discovered is the key to something better. You have to detect and acknowledge what isn’t ideal in order to do something about it. Everything better than what you presently have requires recognition of the flaws in what you already have. As you admit and confront the faults you presently see, you will gain the ability to see more.

Before every improvement comes the realization that a better option exists. Seeing the possibility of something better requires admitting the reality of something worse. Improvement can’t occur before the difference between what is and what could be is identified.

Elevate the priority of finding and fixing faults by understanding them as barriers to what you want

Most people simply will not find the motivation to improve if they merely see their faults as an abstract moral issue. Character flaws are less arbitrary and more consequential than commonly assumed.

Character flaws are often seen as separate from most other things in life. The truth is that character flaws have long tentacles that wind around nearly everything in your life. While these connections are not frequently acknowledged, they are easy enough to see, and until you do, you will lack the interest and intensity required to fix your flaws. The problems you face in life reveal the problems in your character. Your character flaws are more obvious than you pretend they are. Fix them.

The apparent consequences of our flaws are more than enough reason to fix them. While the costs of fixing flaws are readily acknowledged, the costs of leaving them unaddressed are not. Like the lion who needed to pull the splinter from its paw, it is going to hurt momentarily, but it is also the path to the least long-term pain.¹²

Most avoid fixing faults because they suppose that the work required to do so will take away from something more important to them. The truth is that addressing faults is actually the most direct action you can take toward getting more of whatever it is you want.

Everyone has unmet desires. Some desire many things, some only a few. Some have a strong desire, and some only a little. Whatever it is you want, and however much it is you want it, you need to realize that the reason you do not have it is that you are not yet the kind of person who gets it.

It is essential to understand that your faults are among the barriers preventing what you want. In order to become the kind of person who gets whatever it is you desire, you must address every part of your character that is different than that kind of person. You should impart to fixing your faults the same intensity with which you desire what you do not yet have. If you want to change, you have to change what you want. In this case, you have to learn to desire everything needed to attain what you want, and detest everything preventing what you want.

Addressing obvious flaws is non-negotiable¹³ for building an abundant life free from unnecessary suffering. To get better, you have to identify and discharge what is worse.

Don’t celebrate faults

We live in a society that pretends that you can be one way and feel another way. This is a lie. If you want to feel better, you actually have to become better. You can’t hold to what makes you feel bad and still feel better.¹⁴

In recent years, the idea of celebrating your flaws has become vogue. For example, consider how many guilty people post celebratory confessions on social media. In this ritual designed to alleviate the guilt of all involved for willingly doing less than their best, the poster will describe how poorly they are performing, knowing they will be propped up by affirming replies from legions of similarly-flawed people seeking alleviation of the same guilt.

You can be yourself without celebrating your flaws. Don’t flaunt your faults.¹⁵ Not only do you encourage the continued suffering of those who know they need to be better than they are, you also prevent those who would have improved from even trying,¹⁶ all while ensuring everyone is less likely to ever figure out the root cause of their selfinflicted malaise.

Virtue exists in purging the vices that you have, not in admitting that you have them. Until you actually improve, you won’t feel any better, and bragging about your faults will just encourage others to remain in their own. It is not possible to enduringly experience better feelings without first making consistently better decisions. To encourage anyone otherwise is to prolong and worsen their suffering while increasing your own.

Those encouraged to celebrate their disease aren’t likely to find or even bother looking for its cause and cure. In general, it’s unwise to look for relief from those whose job depends on the perpetuation of the problem that ails you. People like Brene Brown sell a way to feel better about the less-than-best choices you make instead of feeling better by making better choices than you used to. While persuading people to celebrate their flaws is an easy way to gin up book sales and speaking engagements, it is extraordinarily harmful. Too many professions exist today that claim to solve problems when they actually only provide temporary treatment for surface symptoms.¹⁷ Such occupations have untouchable job security, as desperate people will willingly part with any amount of money for the promise of better outcomes without the need for better choices, and their perpetually unsolved problem will keep them coming back.

It is impossible to avoid suffering that comes from the choices of others, but you can minimize avoidable suffering by making better choices. It is possible to avoid suffering that comes from your own choices. Regret, guilt, and shame all stem from choices that were less than the best we knew at the time.

Take responsibility for your past mistakes

An honest person acknowledges fault as soon as it is realized. They admit what they did and why they did it to God and anyone affected by it.¹⁸ They don’t deflect, move goalposts, or revise history or warp reality to make themselves feel better or avoid change.¹⁹

Honest people don’t just say they are sorry. They immediately make the changes necessary to prevent committing the offense again in the future. They fully recognize any harm to themselves or others,²⁰ and do all they can to to make restitution for the loss they’ve caused.²¹

People are overly compassionate to their past selves, not realizing that compassion for your past can only come at the expense of your future. Anyone unwilling to condemn their past self for willingly choosing what was less than the best they knew would do it again if they had the chance. So many entrap themselves in fairy tales about the past, making it seem better than it really was by either deliberately maintaining what they know is an illusion or by artificially inflating what they know wasn’t as good as they wish.²² Honesty about your past is the key to securing freedom from guilt. If you refuse to denounce your past foibles, you won’t find the present peace that comes from separating yourself from them.

You can choose to feel good about your past or be better in your future, but you can’t do both at the same time. Any lies about your past blind you to the reality of the present and possibility of the future. While you are chained to your past self, you cannot grow into a better person. Lies about your past mistakes trap you in a cycle of repeating them.

You will only find peace in the present through condemning the mistakes of your past. Analyzing what you got wrong in the past is essential to making yourself better in the future. The breadth, depth, and accuracy of your understanding of the present is limited by the breadth, depth, and accuracy of your admissions of the past.

While you still agree with or excuse the mistakes you made in the past, you retain the guilt that comes with them. Admit your fault, change your principles so it will never happen again, and trust in the forgiveness of Jesus.

Do everything you can to help others avoid your mistakes

Repentance frees you from the guilt caused by past mistakes. Repentance requires three actions:

1. Confessing what you did or didn’t do.²³
2. Change so that it never happens again.²⁴
3. Doing everything you reasonably can to prevent others from making the same mistake.²⁵

Part of repentance is boldly and unceasingly warning others not to repeat the mistakes we have made by teaching them the consequences of doing so. For example, the Lord told Ezekiel:

When I say unto the wicked, Thou shalt surely die; and thou givest him not warning, nor speakest to warn the wicked from his wicked way, to save his life; the same wicked man shall die in his iniquity; but his blood will I require at thine hand. (Ezekiel 3:18)

He reiterated this to all his disciples in modern times:

60 Verily, verily, I say unto you who now hear my words, which are my voice, blessed are ye inasmuch as you receive these things;
61 For I will forgive you of your sins with this commandment—that you remain steadfast in your minds in solemnity and the spirit of prayer, in bearing testimony to all the world of those things which are communicated unto you.
62 Therefore, go ye into all the world; and unto whatsoever place ye cannot go ye shall send, that the testimony may go from you into all the world unto every creature. (D&C 84)

Many people avoid doing what they can to help others avoid the same mistakes they’ve made because they are afraid of losing a reputation that they do not deserve. This is dishonest, and in addition to the penalties of dishonesty, it precludes the freedom from guilt enjoyed by those who have met the requirements to have their past sins forgiven by God.

Don’t fight to preserve your false self-worth

Those who appraise their worth beyond what reality justifies are emotionally-oriented and will act irrationally to preserve their unmerited self-esteem. Those with overestimated self-worth do not find value in themselves, but in a fake, imagined person. This avatar must be viciously defended, as life provides no supporting evidence for its worth:

3 For if a man think himself to be something, when he is nothing, he deceiveth himself.
4 But let every man prove his own work, and then shall he have rejoicing in himself alone, and not in another. (Galatians 6)

Don’t allow fear of the loss of your present self-image to keep you from being yourself. Any self-esteem based on hiding or ignoring who you really are will always fail when the challenges of reality reveal your true self.

Conceited people avoid anything that suggests that they are less than they purport to be. Don’t do this. When you value your self-image more than the truth, you’ll interpret any correction as loss. If you define yourself based on falsehood, you place how you feel at a higher priority than how you actually are; you will act out of a desire to avoid negative feelings, you will do so without thinking, and you will do so contrary to reason. You will flee from, ignore, and attack anyone and anything that reveals you for who you really are. You will even do so when it results in harm to yourself and others.

The deep distortions in which dishonest people engage is the reason that they so deeply despise those who live the truth. Truthful people are living contradictions of their continuous lies, and the only way that the dishonest can avoid the cognitive dissonance caused by their very being is to silence, discredit, or destroy them.

While the haughty interpret correction as an attack on who they are, the humble recognize it as the path to becoming who they could be. The humble view correction as an empowering gift.²⁶ Those who love truth above all have an intrinsically fluid self-worth; they freely adopt new truth, because they assess their value in terms of how truthful their present beliefs, feelings, and actions are, not in appraisals detached from reality or based on some past estimate of it.

An honest person has no reason to hide from greater selfawareness. They have the means to test new information against their own thoughts, feelings, and actions, and they have the means to improve by integrating any potential improvements they can perceive. They have the ability to question their identity and change it in response to sufficient evidence.

A dishonest person, on the other hand, has every reason to hide from self-awareness. First, dishonest people prefer to smooth over the undesirable portions of their lives through willful delusion rather than reconcile themselves through deep and painful change.²⁷ Dishonest people can warp their perception of reality by actually editing their memory—often in real-time—in order to avoid cognitive dissonance. For themselves and those who make them feel good, they will impute positive qualities and deny negative ones, no matter how much evidence contradicts the former and how much substantiates the latter. For those who make them feel bad, they will impute negative qualities and deny positive ones, no matter how much evidence contradicts the former and how much substantiates the latter. They will even twist the properties of the world around them that deviate from what they wish they were. Those who stand for the truth are hated by the dishonest because the things they say and do contradict the dishonest distortions of reality in ways that are harder to ignore.²⁸

Estimating the virtue of others relative to your own

Humility is required to correctly compare yourself to others. Without accurate comparison to others, you will miss out on examples of those who demonstrate the possibility of and path to something better, as well as important warnings to protect you from harm from them.

Amazing people rarely know they are amazing. While this is sometimes because they do not accurately identify or appreciate their virtues, it can also be because they falsely assume that others share their virtues. Good people often assume everyone is at least as good as they are in the same way bad people often assume everyone is at least as bad as they are. The best way to discover this potential disparity is to treat others as you would like them to treat you.²⁹ Those with exceptional virtues will find it easy to treat others well, but will quickly notice that they are under-appreciated or taken advantage of. Everyone else will see the experiment as having too high a cost to even begin.

Many miss out on opportunities for improvement by incorrectly assuming they know or are better than others when they are not. Do you presume that there is always something more you could know or be better at? Do you demonstrate this presumption through searching for improvement and recognizing it when you find it? How often do you assume that you are more knowledgable than someone else at something?³⁰ How often do you begin conversations with the assumption that you know less than the other person?³¹ When conversing with someone who obviously knows more than you, do you listen more than you speak, and ask questions more often than making statements? Do you ever pretend that you’ve always known something even when you only just learned it from the person you are speaking to? Do you exude more confidence than you should given the evidence that you have? Are you quick to criticize an alternative point of view, or do you provide ample opportunity to better understand its merits?³²

Much of your self-assessed goodness is actually the worth of others

Inflated self-valuations are almost always the result of the unrecognized and unremitted blessings from other people. What share of how much you enjoy came from other people? Do you accurately recognize just how little you deserve the good things that you enjoy?³³

You likely live in a place where your security, relative peace, prosperity, technology, and every other resource you enjoy is heavily subsidized if not fully paid by someone else. Do you really have the right to claim that any good that you do is anything more than what any halfway decent person would do in your place under the same circumstances, having been undeservingly gifted so much by others?³⁴

Overexaggerated self-valuations are nothing new. For generations, the Israelites reveled in being designated a chosen people, but reflected far less often on who had secured this blessing for them or the conditions required for its continuation.³⁵ Modern people would benefit by learning from their mistake.

Until you accurately perceive just how much of the good in your life is from other people, you’ll never have as much joy as you otherwise could. Joy comes from value. You will naturally appreciate the things you have earned. Unfortunately, much of what is presumed to be earned is actually due to the contributions of others, and you can’t appreciate a gift that you perceive is owed to you.³⁶ Until you correctly assess the contributions of others to the good you have, you will underestimate the worth of every good thing that you enjoy in which they had a part.

Humans have no inherent or implicit value

The Lord taught that we should assume that we are worse than we think until proven otherwise:

8 When thou art bidden of any man to a wedding, sit not down in the highest room; lest a more honourable man than thou be bidden of him;
9 And he that bade thee and him come and say to thee, Give this man place; and thou begin with shame to take the lowest room.
10 But when thou art bidden, go and sit down in the lowest room; that when he that bade thee cometh, he may say unto thee, Friend, go up higher: then shalt thou have worship in the presence of them that sit at meat with thee.
11 For whosoever exalteth himself shall be abased; and he that humbleth himself shall be exalted. (Luke 14)

The world preaches a very different message.

Modern society has been steeped in the belief that all people are equally valuable in spite of any differences between them. For example, Oprah-famous author Brene Brown wrote:

To be authentic, we must cultivate the courage to be imperfect—and vulnerable. We have to believe that we are fundamentally worthy of love and acceptance, just as we are.[^100]

A human has unlimited potential value, but no inherent or implicit value. Our worth is limited to how much like God we have become, and that change only happens by defying our human nature.³⁷ No one is “fundamentally worthy of love and acceptance.” A person is not automatically valuable. On the contrary, the value of fallen humans lies only in their potential to become something better. The worth of a soul is its potential to become more like God. Without intentional improvement, a human will assuredly do more harm than good.

Worthy describes one who has paid the price of something. Worthiness can’t be determined by the edict of non-participants, but only by the parties who actually pay for the thing they appraise. Imagine how foolish it would be for a third party to proclaim the price of some possession in the absence of anyone willing to buy it for that price—and yet our society does this across many applications every single day: from enforcing a minimum wage to declaring that everyone is beautiful.

At the root of the lie of intrinsic value is a desire for all things to be equal—something that can only be achieved by bringing down the value of all things to the lowest common denominator. Value is an inescapable question of hierarchical preference: a thing’s value is always measured by the other things people will sacrifice in exchange for it. If all things are equally valuable, nothing is valuable. When it comes to people, a person who has a positive quality must be more valuable than one without it, or else the positive quality has no value. You can’t believe that people have intrinsic value without diminishing their potential virtue.

Your character is comprised of a long chain of decisions

What we refer to as our character is the sum of the qualities describing how we are. Your character has been around much longer than you probably realize. Your character qualities are part of your spirit, and your spirit existed before you were born.³⁸ In this life, your character continues wherever it left off before you were born.

Character qualities develop long before an individual encounters a situation where they are externally demonstrated. Your character can change, but it is heavily influenced by what it was before. What a person thinks, feels, and does issues from deep within them,³⁹ according to a character that has been established through every previous thing they did, said, thought, and felt. Your life to this point provides a long list of demonstrations of who you really are. Each day of a person’s life is a demonstration of the running effects of their character, with the long-term effects of their long-term character prominently featuring in things big and small. Just as an apple with a rotten core will disintegrate from the inside out, a person with a rotten heart will give and experience corruption in all that they do. Meanwhile, a noble person will exude nobility in all they do and incline all around them toward greater nobility. An organized person will have an organized life, a hectic person will have a hectic life, an ambitious person will have a life full of accomplishment, a virtuous person will have a virtuous life, and so on. The constant expression of character traits coalesce into ever more noticeable arcs in life. While God’s provision for faith dampens the immediate consequences of choices, the cumulative outcomes of a person’s life overcome this obfuscation, more clearly demonstrating their character traits.

You can learn to see the clues that you create daily that indicate the content of your character. Your interactions with the world are a much clearer indication of how you actually are than what you think or how you feel about yourself.⁴⁰

Your experiences in life demonstrate who you are

Character is not as hidden as people think or wish. Life is designed to reveal truth, whether we like it or not. Though this world is complex enough to provide frequent opportunities to hide who we really are from ourselves and others, we cannot forever withhold our true selves.

All things constantly emit clues about their true nature through how they are through time and across circumstances. Truth, by its very nature, is self-revealing. Alethia, the word for truth in Greek, literally means “what can’t remain hidden.” A thing cannot help but demonstrate how it is throughout its very existence.

The gift God provides us of choosing to improve ourselves also allows us to choose to ignore the signals that suggest we need to. Most people have no idea who they really are because they strongly resist the many signs their interactions with life give to that end. They cleverly ignore many of the products of their hearts and minds that indicate a need for improvement. They don’t want to know what they are really like, because they already know they aren’t how they wish they were. These are long standing human tendencies. Jesus pointed them out to the people during his earthly ministry. They were clearly capable of critically examining the clues around them, yet conveniently ignored the signs that contradicted what they wanted to believe:

54 And he said also to the people, When ye see a cloud rise out of the west, straightway ye say, There cometh a shower; and so it is.
55 And when ye see the south wind blow, ye say, There will be heat; and it cometh to pass.
56 Ye hypocrites, ye can discern the face of the sky and of the earth; but how is it that ye do not discern this time? (Luke 12)

We have an ingrained resistance to all information that suggests we are less than how we wish we were,⁴¹ and we need to learn to overcome this in order to attain our potential. Every restriction we place on our willingness to see or make potential improvements will limit the extent to which we can achieve our potential.

Life has a way of showing us a lot more about ourselves than we presently see if we will just be more honest about it. Many people today waste untold amounts of time, money, and other resources on retreats, therapy, and many other approaches to discovering what life is already abundantly showing them, and then are surprised when they still can’t find what they claim to be looking for. No amount of external help will overcome an unwillingness to see yourself as you really are.

Each character trait has certain situations where it is most evident, just as a gemstone has a certain cut that best reveals its features. It is in these demonstrative situations that we come to know people for who they really are. For example, David’s kingly courage was present long before his kingly position. As a shepherd, he bravely defended his father’s flock from a bear and a lion, even though no one was there to witness the feat. David’s kingly qualities were only widely noticed once he became an actual king.

Short of the ideal situation, a character trait will still find a way to be expressed, albeit to a lesser or more hidden degree. While a person’s true character is hidden, people constantly emit clues about their qualities:

24 Some men’s sins are open beforehand, going before to judgment; and some men they follow after.
25 Likewise also the good works of some are manifest beforehand; and they that are otherwise cannot be hid. (1 Timothy 5)

Because a thing must be what it is, the true nature of a person can remain masked only so long. By definition, the truth will be revealed. Like dammed water, a person’s true character will find or create a way out through any tiny hole or crack, finding its way into expression in whatever way available.

Often, the public demonstration of our private choices and attitudes is anything but subtle. Expressions of character are like tracer rounds in a machine gun, which draw a glowing line that connects the barrel to the target. The events and outcomes of life will manifest who you really are, no matter what you may think of yourself.

Because your inward qualities and secret desires will shine openly in your life across time and circumstance, it is worth whatever sacrifice required to discover and improve them.

You are who you really are, not who you wish you were

Who you really are, deep down inside, is defined by what you think, feel, and act. Your character is what you actually think, feel, and do, not what you wish you thought, felt, or did.⁴²

Instead of defining who they are by how they have actually thought, felt, and acted until now, people like thinking of themselves in terms of how they wish they were, ignoring any evidence to the contrary.

Do you confuse your potential with your actuality? Do you claim motives that are contradicted by your actions? Do you give yourself credit for attributes that you are on your way to developing, or worse, that you only hope to one day develop?

How you wish you were isn’t a good way to measure your present value, but it is a wonderful way to increase your future value. Instead of using how you wish you were to determine your present value , use it to determine your present behavior .

When you surprise yourself by believing, thinking, or feeling less noble than you wish you were, recognize these moments as opportunities to self-correct. When your behavior deviates from how you wish you were, enumerate changes you need to make to align yourself to your ideal and commit to making them.

You are who you really are, not who you are at your best moments

When people base their self-image on actual evidence, they tend to pay attention only to the good qualities or the highlight reel of their best moments. Tremendous efforts are expended to hide certain unflattering internal and external qualities from others, and far too often from oneself. When your self-image is skewed towards your best behavior, your self-appraisal is as inaccurate as calculating the cost of a car based only on the days you spend no money on it.

Your true character is the integration of all your attributes: everything from the best to the worst. This is not to say that your selfappraisal ought to be an average. The disastrous character failures that generate almost all of the worst parts of everyone’s life come from exceptionally bad departures from their standard behavior. For example, murders and rapists do neither on the average day. In like manner, even the staunchest liar doesn’t lie all or even most of the time. A person who is good most of the time is not good all of the time.

While it is too strong to say that all that matters in measuring a person’s character is what they do at their worst, it probably matters more than anything else. The truth is that your worst behavior tells more about who you really are than anyone would like. Who you really are, deep down inside, is defined by what you think, what you feel, and what you do, including (and perhaps especially) in your worst moments. We can—and do—erect all sorts of flattering facades, but in our worst moments we fail to maintain them. When our facades drop, we show who we really are, for better or for worse.

We absolutely have to pay attention to how we feel and act at all times and in all places, especially when we don’t like it. People and situations that bring out your worst do the best job of showing how you really are. Don’t hide from your worst performances; use them like training camps—places where you face unusual challenges to develop exceptional strength that you will carry back into normal situations.

Measure yourself by fidelity to your conscience

Your conscience shows you who you really are by manifesting how well your choices align with your beliefs. It is easy to say that you are doing your best. Do you feel the slightest bit of guilt about anything? If you do, rest assured that you do not actually believe you are doing your best about that thing.⁴³ You will never feel guilty about something about which you believe you’ve done all you can.⁴⁴ To maintain a clear conscience, you must measure up to the best you can be.

Measure yourself by the same standards you impose upon others

We each have a powerful capability for analyzing faults in people. The problem is, we all have an ingrained tendency to avoid using it on ourselves.⁴⁵ Learn to introspect as if you were someone else looking at your life as an impartial observer.

Judge yourself as you would judge another.⁴⁶ Treat yourself as you would treat others.⁴⁷ Don’t have one standard for yourself and another for others.⁴⁸ Never criticize another person for a fault that you have.⁴⁹ Hold yourself to at least the same standard you apply to all others.

Judge yourself by whether you are like Christ, not whether you are better than others

Too many—particularly the gifted—ease their conscience while

doing far less than their best by correctly identifying that they are doing better than others. Most supposed Christians are content with who they are because they compare themselves to other equally fake Christians, not to Christ.⁵⁰

Instead of comparing yourself to those who are worse than you, compare yourself to those who are better than you. Compare yourself to Christ,⁵¹ and you will find plenty of ways in which you can still grow.⁵² God did not send you here to be better than average. He sent you here to be better than you were, and more like he is. If you know of deviations between you and him, you still have important work to do.

Actively look for more

The only way to gain significantly greater awareness of your inward self is through looking. Life will offer you many opportunities to learn more about yourself, but it is rare when they rise above the din of the ever-available abundance of distractions that fill modern life. To discover more of what life has to teach you, you’ll have to become more perceptive to the clues life constantly provides.

More numerous valuable lessons are available above and beyond the few that present themselves to you. These can’t be learned through passive practice, but require active introspection. Introspection requires you to take action to prioritize it in spite of the daily demands of life. Prioritization of self-discovery will look different for each person, and will probably take different shapes depending on your phase of life, but will commonly feature some way of asking how you could be better, actively and honestly interrogating your life across daily, monthly, and longer time scales. You’ll have to find the time to pay more attention to your life, whether this is through taking advantage of incidental quiet moments to reflect, engaging in a specific routine by waking up earlier, going to bed later, or displacing some present activity. You’ll have to think more about what is going on within you and outside of you, reflecting regularly on recent events and looking forward to those to come.

Many people will claim that they don’t have the time or emotional energy to engage in introspection. These same people will spend orders of magnitude more time wallowing through the negative effects of their character deficiencies or ineffectively talking through them with others without ever getting to real change.⁵³ Introspection is unavoidable for anyone who wants to become better, and it will take a lot less time and cause a lot less pain than the alternatives. It might even cost a lot less money. In fact, by sharpening your inner self, you will actually find yourself with more time and resources than you have now, because your efforts throughout the day will yield much greater progress and meaning.⁵⁴