My Reality Check Bounced! - Jason Ryan Dorsey [80]
Maybe you or your friends have been caught making these unethical choices:
• Secretly hooking up with your best friend’s boyfriend
• Not paying taxes on the cash tips you make waiting tables
• Lying to your parents about what you’re studying in college
• Making a false insurance claim
• Listing fake jobs and accomplishments on your résumé
All of these unethical choices can be rationalized and justified if you try hard enough.
Amber, twenty-eight, knows this all too well. She received her first credit card soon after graduating college. She used it to buy clothes, food, and jewelry and quickly fell behind on the payments. When she finally maxed out that credit card she got another one. When that card maxed out she got another.
She ran up over $40,000 in credit-card bills before she turned twenty-seven! When I asked her how she was going to pay off such huge credit-card debt, she replied, “I’m not going to pay it off. If the credit-card companies are stupid enough to keep sending me credit cards then I will keep using them. Then I’ll just file bankruptcy and all the bills will go away.” True to her word, she maxed out every credit card she could until she could not charge another cent. Then she filed for personal bankruptcy and her credit-card debt was erased. (Warning: The bankruptcy rules have since changed.)
Deep down, Amber knew this was wrong, but she did it anyway. Why? Most of the unethical choices we make, especially when it comes to getting ahead in the real world, come down to one reason: It’s easier to bend the rules to get ahead than to take the high road, pay your dues, and possibly risk failure.
For this reason, it’s vital you establish strong ethical standards early. Live up to them even if they push you onto a more difficult path. If you make a mistake but have solid ethics behind you, people will give you the benefit of the doubt. They’ll encourage you to keep going, stay true to yourself and offer to help you move forward. When you make a mistake using poor ethics, people hope you forget their name and lose their number. Nobody wants a friend, spouse, or co-worker who can be trusted only half the time.
ETHICS 101
Regardless of your Future Picture, you’re bound to encounter some unethical shortcuts that will help you get there faster. At these ethics crossroads, you can choose to take the unethical shortcut or keep to the high ground. Either way, you show your true colors in all their glory. You show them to yourself and to everyone else who will eventually find out about your decision.
With so much of your future riding on your ethical beliefs, it’s important you are clear about what you stand for. Your ethics may be the only guiding light you have to navigate your darkest times. Take a moment and get your all-important definition of ethics in writing.
You define ethics as:
I define ethics as separating right from wrong and then acting on what’s right—even if it’s more difficult.
What concerns me is that when I bring up the topic of ethics in conversations with twentysomethings, they usually go right to Enron, Martha Stewart, or a steroid-abusing athlete. They overlook the smaller, seemingly less important ethical decisions that they are faced with every day that can affect the rest of their lives.
These everyday decisions include keeping your promises, telling the truth, and treating people as you would like to be treated. You may think your ethical beliefs are not something you need to work on, because you always do the right thing even when no one is looking. This is totally possible, but I am confident you have a friend, family member, neighbor or co-worker who could use a little help in this area. Leading by example is the best way to help them see that