The Most Valuable Thing You Own
by Alexander Green

Many years ago I worked for a man who is perhaps the most charismatic individual I've ever known.

He was successful in business, gracious, funny, generous, and smart. He was thoughtful too, always inquiring about my family or how things were going.

He was wealthy, well educated and well traveled. Whenever you bumped into him, it seemed, he was returning from some exotic trip where he had rubbed elbows with Oprah Winfrey or Tom Cruise.

He impressed men. He charmed women. Everyone wanted to be like him. There was only one drawback.

You couldn't always trust him.

I'm not suggesting he was a thief or a crook. He wasn't. But he had personal credibility issues.

He would tell you he was going to do something and not follow through. His stories were often so exaggerated that they bore little relationship to reality.

And if the measure of the man is in small matters, he often came up short. For instance, he would sometimes invite a group of us to his private club for a round of golf. He would pick up the tab for everyone's greens fees, cart fees, lunch and drinks. And then cheat like the dickens to win the five-dollar Nassau we were playing.

It was ridiculous.

Over time these ethical lapses affected his business. He never broke contracts or the law. But he operated in grey areas, sometimes treating long-time employees shabbily or using hardball tactics to get his way with business partners.

Eventually, I had a falling out with him and left the company. Looking back I still shake my head. He was such a great guy in so many ways. Yet no matter what someone has going for him in the plus column, nothing compensates for a lack of personal integrity.

In the world of personal and business relationships, reputation is everything. In some ways, it is the most valuable thing you own.

"Who you are speaks so loudly I can't hear what you're saying," wrote Ralph Waldo Emerson two centuries ago.

Reputations, of course, aren't always entirely accurate. But they are a necessary shortcut. It takes time - sometimes years - to truly know someone's character. Decisions and judgments must often be made much sooner. So we depend on reputations.

Whether you're making a new friend or business contact, seeking a new love-interest or applying for a new job, nothing can help or hurt your prospects more than your reputation.

In a sense, your reputation is your ambassador. Every day it is out there circulating, knocking on doors, joining in conversations, arriving well before you do and paving the way - for good or ill.

Your reputation affects the way the world perceives and interprets much of what you do. A couple hundred years ago, a man would challenge another to a duel if he felt his integrity had been insulted. Reputation was beyond value. A serious slight could not be allowed to stand.

In reality, of course, your reputation is only what others imagine you are. Your character is what you truly are. In my experience, however, long-standing reputations are generally pretty accurate - and good ones are almost impossible to manufacture. People are too smart for that.

As Emerson said, "The louder he talked of his honor, the faster we counted our spoons."

Our deeds define us, not our words. If we wish to burnish our reputation, we have to work on our character. Not a bad idea, either. This is an area, if we are honest with ourselves, where we all could use a little home improvement.

Building character means taking responsibility, being accountable and treating others with fairness and respect, especially those who can do nothing for us in return.

Even then, reputations are built painstakingly, one step at a time. That's why we should never participate in malicious gossip. You don't want to inflict unwarranted damage on someone else's reputation.

And no one ever raised his own reputation by lowering someone else's. Quite the opposite, in fact. As the German writer Jean Paul Richter observed, "A man never discloses his character so clearly as when he describes another's."

Every day, without being consciously aware of it, each of us is enhancing or diminishing our reputation through our actions. Those actions, in turn, are determined by the quality of our thoughts.

As Charles Reader famously said, "Sow a thought, and you reap an act; sow an act, and you reap a habit; sow a habit, and you reap a character; sow a character, and you reap a destiny."

The Greek philosopher Heraclitus was pithier. He simply said that character is destiny. His words are as true today as when he wrote them 2,500 years ago.

Our destiny is fixed when we hold ourselves to a higher standard, follow the dictates of conscience, and do the right thing - especially when another path would be so much easier.

Or, as investor Warren Buffett once remarked, "It takes 20 years to build a reputation and five minutes to ruin it. If you think about that, you'll do things differently."

Carpe Diem,

Alex

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