Character Needs a Compass

There is an old saying:

I have always liked that idea.

But lately I have been thinking there is something missing from it.

Before you can stand for something, you have to know what the hell you are standing on.

You have to know enough about yourself to know:

• what matters;
• what you believe;
• what you value;
• what you are trying to build;
• what kind of person you want to become;
• and where you are actually trying to go.

That sounds obvious.

I do not think it is.

Because I spent a lot of my younger life without that clarity.

And there is a particular danger in being lost when your life does not look terrible enough to force you to change.

Lost But Not Falling Apart

Before I moved to Los Angeles, I was living in Hawaii.

I had a job.

I had friends.

I went to the beach.

We went to clubs in Waikiki.

I drank.

Probably too much.

From the outside, somebody could look at that and ask, and have asked:

You live in Hawaii.

You have friends.

You work.

You go to the beach.

That sounds pretty damn good.

And in some ways, it was.

But I was not going anywhere.

I did not have a career.

I was not going to university.

I did not know what came next.

I was working, playing, drinking, hanging out, and repeating.

Thank God I did not smoke or get high.

But I sometimes describe that period as drinking my life away.

Not because I was falling apart.

Because I was letting time pass without deciding what the time was for.

There is a difference.

You can destroy your life through catastrophe.

You can also lose years through drift.

The second one is quieter.

Nobody stages an intervention.​

Nothing becomes painful enough to force a decision.

You just wake up one day and realize a lot of time has passed and you are still standing in roughly the same place.

I think that is what I was feeling.

I was lost in translation.​

I knew the life I was living.

I just could not translate it into a future.

I did not yet have a framework for turning that uncertainty into direction.

So I made a big move.

I left Hawaii and came to Los Angeles.

Geography Does Not Give You Direction

Moving felt like movement.

And it was.

But movement is not the same thing as direction.

That took me a while to learn.

I changed islands for a continent-sized city.

New place.

New people.

New possibilities.

But I brought myself with me.

And myself still did not completely know what he was doing.

It took another couple of years before I really set myself on the path toward becoming an electrician.

Even then, I did not have some magical revelation where the clouds opened and I knew:

This is my purpose.

That is not how it happened.

I chose a direction.

And then reality started testing the choice.

Construction Will Tell You Who You Are

Electrical construction was not an easy environment.

It was:

• fast;
• demanding;
• competitive.

People expected you to keep up.

The job did not slow down because you were confused.

You could not sit around for three months thinking about whether you felt aligned with your authentic self.

There was work to do.

There were expectations.

And there was very little sense, at least in my experience, that anybody owed you a permanent place there.

Even being union did not feel like job security in the way people outside construction sometimes imagine it.

A job could end.

Work could slow down.

You could get laid off through a "reduction in work force."

Sometimes that was exactly what it sounded like.

There was less work.

People had to go.

But sometimes, in my experience, “reduction in work force” could also feel like shorthand for something else.

Maybe personality.

Maybe ego.

Maybe politics.

Maybe you rubbed somebody the wrong way.

Maybe they thought you were not good enough.

Whatever the reason, somebody else could make a decision and suddenly you were looking for another job.

That environment did something important to me.

It forced me to ask a question I had been avoiding:

If other people can decide whether I work here tomorrow, what inside me cannot depend on their approval?

I did not know the answer immediately.

I had to find it.

The three questions were how I started looking.

Three Questions

I started asking myself three questions.

Not once.

Over and over again.

Week after week.

Year after year.

Those questions became a kind of compass.

I returned to them so often that they stopped being something I thought about and became something I saw through.

The first question forced me to deal with reality.

Where am I?

Not where do I wish I was.

Not where do I tell people I am.

Not where should somebody like me be by now.

Where am I actually?

• What am I doing?
• What am I good at?
• What am I bad at?
• What is working?
• What is not?
• What is my life producing?

That question requires honesty.

The second question is harder.

How did I get here?

Because now, like the Mervingian, you have to deal with causality.

Circumstances matter.

Luck matters.

Other people matter.

Your childhood matters.

Opportunity matters.

Prejudice matters.

Who helped you matters.

Who hurt you matters.

All of that can be true.

But eventually you also have to ask:

• What did I do?
• What choices did I make?
• What did I tolerate?
• What did I avoid?
• What habits kept bringing me back here?
• What did I fail to learn?

That question requires responsibility.

Not blame.

Responsibility.

Then comes:

Where do I want to go?

Now you are no longer describing your life.

You are choosing something.

That is where clarity begins turning into direction.

Character Needs Something to Organize Around

I have been thinking about this because I have been reading Gen. Stanley McChrystal’s On Character.​

He gives a simple equation:

Conviction is what you deeply believe after it has been examined and tested.

Discipline is your ability to consistently live according to those beliefs when doing so becomes inconvenient.

Put them together and you get character.

I love the equation.

But I think there is a prerequisite hiding underneath it.

Clarity.

Not because somebody without clarity has no character.

That would be ridiculous.

A confused nineteen-year-old can still be brave.

A person without a career can still be honest.

Somebody who does not know what they want from life can still be loyal, kind, responsible, and disciplined.

But if you want to develop your character deliberately, you need something to organize it around.

Otherwise:

• What are you disciplined about?
• What convictions are actually yours?
• What deserves sacrifice?
• What deserves a no?
• What deserves a yes?
• Which criticism should you listen to?
• Which criticism should you ignore?
• Who is a mentor and who is just loud?

Without clarity, other people answer those questions for you.

Your parents.

Your friends.

Your boss.

Your culture.

The loudest person in the room.

Whatever is in front of you that day.

And now we are back to the old saying.

If you do not stand for something, you will fall for anything.

But the step before standing is seeing clearly enough to choose.

Discipline Without Direction

There is another danger here.

People often think discipline automatically produces a good life.

I do not believe that.

You can be extremely disciplined and still be headed somewhere you do not actually want to go.

You can work eighty hours a week toward somebody else’s definition of success.

You can become incredibly efficient at building a life you hate.

You can keep every promise to everybody except yourself.

You can climb a ladder very effectively and eventually discover it is leaning against the wrong wall.

Discipline is powerful.

That is exactly why direction matters.

A compass does not make you walk.

Discipline does that.

But discipline without a compass can simply help you get lost faster.

That may be what I lacked as a young man in Hawaii.

I was not lazy.

I showed up to work.

I had friends.

I was functional.

But functional is not the same thing as directed.

I was moving every day and still not going anywhere.

What I lacked was not the ability to work or endure.

I eventually proved I had both.

What I lacked was a direction that made those abilities useful.

You Discover Yourself Against Reality

There is another phrase attached to this whole conversation:

​Know thyself.​

I believe in that.

But I think people sometimes misunderstand what self-knowledge looks like.

You can sit alone and think forever.

At some point, you have to collide with the world.

I learned things about myself through construction.

I learned things through martial arts.

Through:

• bosses;
• mentors;
• teachers;
• bullies;
• idiots;
• assholes;
• people I admired;
• people I never wanted to become.

Success taught me things.

Failure taught me things.

Being scared taught me things.

Standing my ground taught me things.

Getting something wrong taught me things.

You do not discover yourself only by looking inward. You discover yourself by watching what happens when you collide with reality.

Then you go back and reflect.

• Where am I?
• How did I get here?
• Where do I want to go?

Then you go back into the world and test the answers.

That is not a one-time exercise.

At least it was not for me.

I kept asking those questions for years because the answers kept getting better.

Clarity Is Not Certainty

This matters too.

Clarity does not mean knowing exactly how your entire life is going to unfold.

When I chose electrical construction, I did not know I would spend decades doing it.

I did not know every job I would work.

I did not know where the trade would take me.

I did not know whether I would even succeed.

I just knew enough to choose a direction.

That is different from certainty.

You do not need a complete map.

Sometimes you just need a compass.

North is enough to start walking.

Then the terrain teaches you the rest.

And that is what clarity started doing for me.

It gave my discipline somewhere to go.

It gave my convictions something to form around.

It gave me a way to distinguish between:

• somebody I should learn from and somebody I should stand up to;
• useful criticism and bullshit;
• discomfort that was helping me grow and behavior I should not tolerate;
• an opportunity and a distraction.

Clarity did not make construction easier.

It did not keep people from laying me off.

It did not eliminate assholes.

It did not eliminate doubt.

It simply kept me from confusing movement with direction.

Set Your Compass

I think that is where character begins becoming deliberate.

Not with pretending you already know who you are.

Not with announcing ten values you copied out of somebody’s book.

Not with writing a mission statement because somebody told you successful people have one.

Start simpler.

Where am I?

Tell the truth.

How did I get here?

Look at circumstances.

Look at other people.

And then look hard at yourself.

Where do I want to go?

Not forever.

Not necessarily for the rest of your life.

Just enough to choose a direction worth testing.

Then:

• walk;
• pay attention;
• learn;
• reflect;
• adjust the compass;
• keep going.

A compass does not make the terrain easier.

It does not flatten the hills.

It does not remove the assholes.

It does not guarantee you will not get laid off.

It just keeps you from confusing movement with direction.

Because conviction needs something worth believing.

Discipline needs somewhere worth going.

And character needs both.

But before any of that becomes deliberate, you need enough clarity to know which direction is yours.

You do not need to have your whole life figured out.

You just need to stop being lost to yourself.

⚔ The Dojo Drill

Today’s training:

The Opportunity Audit

Ask yourself:

Write three.

📚 Leader’s Library

​On Character by General Stanley McChrystal​

Why?

McChrystal examines character as something built through the choices we repeatedly make and the discipline to live according to the standards we claim to believe in.

That raises a harder question than simply asking whether we have good values:

Do our actions actually match them?

It is easy to meet the standard when the boss is watching, the instructor is standing there, or somebody is keeping score.

Character gets more interesting after they leave.

Eventually the external standard has to become your standard.

That is when you find out who you are becoming.

P.S. Know a martial arts gym owner who’s stressed about money or student numbers?

Do them a favor: send them to The Leader's Dōjō, my website where I help owners get more students and keep them longer with simple systems.

One forward from you could change their gym: The Leader's Dōjō​

Chuck