Character…

Your character matters. Character, as Os Guinness so wonderfully defined it, is simply who you are when no one sees. You, most likely, know the characters around you more than you know yourself. With that in mind, you could benefit from reading Rabbi Joseph Soloveitchick’s masterpiece, Lonely Man of Faith. The Bible, of course, I believe you can never read enough. Anything Solzhenitsyn put to paper, yes please. Immanuel Kant, C.S. Lewis, Kierkegaard, Viktor Frankl, Dorothy Sayer, Tolstoy, Dostoyevsky, Tim Keller (gotta throw in a live one), and end with Augustine’s classic Confessions.

Your character matters, friend. You are not who you think you are. Nope you’re not. You are what you repeatedly do (thanks Aristotle) and most are too busy today to slow down and self observe, much less self improve. So, get busy working on the one person you can improve and hardly know. And, if you want an easy start to the hard road within, check out David Brooks latest rant titled, The Road to Character. In this baby you’ll get a taste of all the authors mentioned above. Once you’re on the road, you can always pull over to berm and grab some Guinness (Os, that is) and go deeper.

Your reputation is not who you are. STOP all the fuss about what others think about you and get busy becoming a character worth seeing and emulating. Good…