Critical Success Factor: Developing a Moral Character to Achieve Greatness

No matter what you do, your ultimate goal, beyond what you are trying to accomplish at the moment, is to achieve your own happiness and become a good person. An individual can exercise a key success factor for developing a moral character to achieve the kind of happiness everyone longs for.
People are successful in life to the degree to which they can organize their world in such a way that they are genuinely happy. The only difference between people in this area is that some people are better at achieving their own happiness and others are not particularly successful. Some people make choices and decisions that make them unhappy and worse off than they ever would have been if they had done nothing at all. But always, happiness is your goal.

Strive to Become a Good Person

In his time, Aristotle examined the human condition and came to a remarkable conclusion.  He said that, “Only the good can be happy, and only the virtuous can be good.” This is one of the major breakthroughs in philosophy. Imagine! You can only be happy if you are a good person, and you can only be a good person, and you can only be a good person if you practice the virtues that are associated with goodness.
What this means simply is that, if you want to have a wonderful life, you must continually strive to become a good person. Any deviation from this course will lead you to lower levels of happiness and dissatisfaction. Every single time you act consistently with the highest virtues that you know, you feel happy and strong inside, your self-confidence and self-esteem go up and you become more effective in your relationships and in your work.  Virtue is its own reward.  It pays for itself in the inner feeling of pleasure and contentment you have when you live consistent with the best you know.

Develop a Moral Character

In order to achieve happiness and become a good person, you must know that character is the greatest success factor of all. If you want to change your outer world, you must go to work, like a computer programmer at a keyboard, to reprogram your subconscious mind, your world of values, beliefs, and inner convictions so that the person you are inside is exactly the mental equivalent of the life you want to enjoy on the outside.
Your reputation is your greatest asset. Your reputation can be defined as how people think about you and talk about you when you’re not there.  As you know from your own experience, when people talk about you in either positive or negative terms, and you find out about it, it has a major impact on your thinking and your emotions, either positive or negative.
Because of the Law of Attraction, as you develop a moral character, and live more and more by the highest and best virtues that you know, you will become a happy and good person. You must always strive to exercise this success factor and develop a moral character.

Success Factor for Greatness

If character is the greatest success factor to your life, the fundamental component of one’s character is trust. In relationships, trust is the glue that holds it all together. It is impossible for us to proceed in any kind of a relationship unless we trust and feel confident with the other person.  All good friendships are based on trust. All strong families are based on trust. And in companies, which are larger business families, trust is the fundamental ingredient that determines the success and prosperity of the enterprise.
The very best companies to work for have high-trust environments. Everyone in the company, at every level, absolutely trusts and believes that what people say is true. In almost every company of value, telling a lie can be a sufficient reason for losing your job.
The ultimate expression of trust is truthfulness. Your very best friends and closest associates in life will always be those who tell you the truth. The willingness to be absolutely truthful with yourself and others is the critical mark of a person of outstanding moral character. If integrity is the core quality then truthfulness is the most obvious expression of integrity.
Shakespeare said, “And this above all, to thine own self be true. Then, it must follow as the night the day, thou canst not then be false to any man.”  You must always be absolutely be true to yourself. This means being true to the very best that is in you. This also means that you always do your very best in every situation, especially at work where people are counting on you.  If the inner expression of integrity is truth, then the outer expression of integrity is quality work and quality behavior under all circumstances.
In Abraham Maslow’s studies of self-actualizing people, he found that one of the characteristics of the most advanced people he found was that they were extremely objective and truthful about themselves, about their strengths and weaknesses, and about their situations in life. They never tried to convince themselves of things that weren’t true. They exercised the success factor of character and “lived in truth” with themselves. As a result, they were able to live in truth with others.
Refuse to compromise your moral character. Refuse to pretend or wish or hope that something is not true, when in your heart, you know it is.
This means that you live in truth with everyone around you. You state your truth simply and honestly. You do not stay in relationships that are wrong for you, or do things that you do not agree with or believe in. You do not say things to people that are not honest and sincere expressions of your true beliefs. You adamantly insist on living in truth in every aspect of your life and strive to become a good person.
What are your thoughts on the greatest success factor of all? Do you agree that an individual’s moral character is important for one to develop in order to achieve happiness in life? Please comment below and share with others if you enjoyed this post!

My Mentor
Brian Tracy