Throughout history, we’ve been encouraged to have a great career, or, to phrase it better, develop an attractive outward appearance, filled with success and accomplishments.
That makes sense. And I think it’s a good encouragement.
But for many, the inner life gets ignored in the pursuit of a great career.
We neglect the values and beliefs that would allow us to get through the highs and lows of life.
And sadly, some don’t even have values they live by. So when something awful occurs unexpectedly (and things will occur unexpectedly), they don’t know how to recover from it.
Now the question remains: how do you build character?
To answer that question, it would help to answer this question: What experiences can you draw upon to shape your character?
Only by living life consciously can we understand what touches our inner life.
We can have a great career without ever considering our inner life.
But it won’t last long.
Because I genuinely believe that to sustain a great career, we must build our inner life as a means to continue living.
If only it were all so simple! If only there were evil people somewhere insidiously committing evil deeds, and it were necessary only to separate them from the rest of us and destroy them. But the line dividing good and evil cuts through the heart of every human being. And who is willing to destroy a piece of his own heart?
Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn in his book, The Gulag Archipelago