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The measure of a man’s real character is what he would do if he knew he would never be found out.
- T.B. Macaulay

AN INVENTORY OF CHARACTER TRAITS

Knowledge (virtue)
- Creativity (strength)
- Curi-sity
- Love of learning
- Perspective (wisdom)
- Open-mindedness

Courage (virtue)
- Bravery (strength)
- Persistence
- Integrity
- Vitality

Humanity
- Capacity to love and receive love
- Kindness
- Social intelligence

Justice
- Citizenship
- Fairness
- Leadership

Temperance
- Forgiveness/mercy
- Modesty/humility
- Prudence
- Self-regulation

Transcendence
- Appreciation of excellence and beauty
- Gratitude
- Hope
- Humor
- Spirituality

Source http://www.viasurvey.org/

It is foolish and wrong to mourn the men who died. Rather we should thank God that such men lived.
- General George S. Patton

Thinking leads to feeling, leads to doing, leads to habits, leads to character, leads to destination. Change your character? Start to change what you think about.
- Unknown

You often learn the most from what doesn't go well. From this perspective, temporary failure can be of great value, and all failures are temporary.
- Josh Kaufman

It takes 20 years to build a reputation and five minutes to ruin it. If you think about that, you'll do things differently.
- Warren Buffett

Of the billionaires I have known, money just brings out the basic traits in them. If they were jerks before they had money, they are simply jerks with a billion dollars.
- Warren Buffett

Sweep your own floors. It reminds your employees that there is nothing you won't do for your business and that no task is below you as a leader. - Something my dad told me when I asked why he didn't hire a cleaning crew.

A small daily task, if it be really daily, will beat the labors of a spasmodic Hercules.
--Anthony Trollope.

To have a right estimate of a man's character, we must see him in misfortune.
- Napoleon Bonaparte

WHY WE DO WHAT WE DO

1. Cheating is a lot easier when it's a step removed from money.

An experiment on MIT's communal refrigerators.

* When (the researcher) slipped in a 6-pack of Coke, all the Cokes had vanished within 72 hours
* When he left a plate containing 6 $1 bills, no one *ever* took any of the money
* Would you feel bad about taking a pen for you child? How about taking $0.10 from petty cash to pay for a pen for your child? The two are economically identical, but get very different reactions.

2. We have no idea how dishonest we are. Overall, cheating is not limited by risk; it is limited by our ability to rationalize the cheating to ourselves.

3. Given the opportunity, many honest people will cheat

4. "We care about honesty and want to be honest. The problem is that our internal honesty monitor is active only when we contemplate big transgressions, like grabbing an entire box of pens. For little transgressions like taking a single pen, we don't even consider how these actions would reflect on our honesty."

5. Those who signed the honor code didn't cheat. Those who didn't see the statement showed 84% cheating.

6. There are three fundamental quirks of human nature:

A. We fall in love with what we already have.
B. We focus on what we might lose, rather than what we might gain.
o When thinking about selling something, you think about all the things you'll miss, rather than the hassles of ownership.
* We assume that other people will see the transaction from the same perspective as we do.

7. Peculiarities of ownership:

* The more work you put into something, the more ownership you begin to feel for it (The "IKEA effect")
* We can begin to feel ownership even before we own something (The "eBay effect").
o This is why trials and money-back guarantees work so well! People hate to downgrade.
* These ownership quirks apply to ideas as well as things...which is why we end up with ideologies that no longer seem rational.

- Predictably Irrational: The Hidden Forces That Shape Our Decisions by Dan Ariely

Never sleep with someone who reports to you.
- Robert Tillman

In "The Day America Told the Truth," 25% responded that they would be willing to abandon their entire family for $10 million, 7% would be willing to kill a stranger, and 3% would be willing to up their children up for adoption.
- Why We Do What We Do, By Edward Deci

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