In today’s episode, we discuss the importance of doing the right thing.
Full Transcript
Hi Everyone, welcome to the You’re Daily Cup of Joe Podcast, with your host Joe Bautista, where my goal is to give you quick lessons on how to grow yourself physically, mentally, emotionally, and spiritually so you can have better careers, better relationships, and better personal finances.
I’m also the author of the book “More You Know, More You Grow: How to Get Better Every Day”. In this book, I wrote down over 30 tips to help you grow in those four cornerstones.
In today’s episode we’re going to talk about the importance of doing the right things. One of my favorite stories is of Col John Boyd who was in the Air Force. He is a man of high integrity and was responsible for getting the lightweight fighter program in place that allowed the Air Force to have the fighter jets that we all now.
I came to know Col Boyd through the book the ego is the enemy by Ryan Holiday which is an excellent book on how to not let your ego sabotage you. One of the sections on a decision that most people will have to do decide on and that’s To Be or To Do and Col Boyd beautifully explains the concept with this speech of his.
Tiger, one day you will come to a fork in the road and you’re going to have to make a decision about which direction you want to go. If you go that way you can be somebody. You will have to make compromises and you will have to turn your back on your friends.
But you will be a member of the club and you will get promoted and you will get good assignments. Or you can go that way and you can do something — something for your country and for your Air Force and for yourself. If you decide you want to do something, you may not get promoted and you may not get the good assignments and you certainly will not be a favorite of your superiors.
But you won’t have to compromise yourself. You will be true to your friends and to yourself. And your work might make a difference. To be somebody or to do something. In life, there is often a roll call. That’s when you will have to make a decision. To be or to do? Which way will you go?
He was telling his students at flight school this and I think about this speech all the time. There comes a time where we have to do decide are we going to do things to be important people or are we going to do a thing to do important things. I’m trying to go down the path of doing important things and if you do important things, you might not get the recognition you crave.
I remember there was one incident when I was in the Marines, where I was in the budget department and our command wanted new furniture for the newly remodeled building that we were about to go in. The furniture was going to cost over $250,000 and the furniture we had was perfectly fine. But they wanted new stuff in the office and I was the only person who knew how to submit a contract.
I was a sergeant at the time but I was one of the lowest ranking people in my office at the time and when it came to giving a justification for why we needed new furniture, I was told to put down that the old furniture wouldn’t fit in the new building, which was a lie. I felt like I needed to do it prevent any trouble coming my way and I just felt my integrity go down the tube. After that, I knew I had to get out of the Marine Corps.
So I choose to be important instead of doing important things at the age of 24, and it’s a lesson that I still think about. So I guess this is why I want to work for myself so I’m not put into those types of situations where I have to sacrifice my integrity.
So I like to ask myself, am I doing this to become an important person or am I trying to do the important thing. If you choose to do important things and everyone else does that too, then the world will be a much better place.
To prevent a scenario where you have you don’t have to forced to choose to be an important person, this is why it’s important to have resources as I said. If you have no savings or other job opportunities to go into, then you’ll be less likely to go against the grain and do important things. This is what happened to me and the Marines. I wanted to go to school and I didn’t want to be put on extra duty. In the military you don’t have 9-5s, you can stay at work as long as you they want you to and be at work at any time. So I decided to go with it and be an important person.
Have a safety net so you don’t have to worry about the golden handcuff scenario where your enjoying your pay and benefits but are stuck doing something you don’t want to do because you enjoy the pay and benefits so much. I feel like my mom gave me this mindset because she always tells me that I should do the right thing. If you were about to do something that compromises your integrity, you should do it. I remember watching Gladiator in the theaters when I was in middle school. It’s a great movie but my mom after the film said that I should glorify the violence but he had to do what he does. So I guess I have a lot of my ethics from her and to do good things.
If you’re about to do something important but it might piss off people at work or with your family. I would just document everything with times and dates so if you do call out something, you have some protection. I remember talking to someone about gender discrimination at her work. I told her to go see a lawyer and document everything if she was going to tell her bosses. I also told her that things might not work out for you and you might face some type of lash back like Col Boyd.
See Col Boyd was working at the Pentagon when implementing the lightweight fighter program and he had to get the generals above him to be on board, but the military can be a very political place where they are trying the secure the next rank so the generals didn’t want to move forward with his program because some of them wanted to take the credit but couldn’t. So what Col Boyd did is that he went the Secretary of Defense and told him about the program and the Secretary of Defense gave him the green light.
Since the Secretary of Defense outranked all the generals, they pretty much had to implement the program but what happened next was that Col Boyd never made general. So when you do important things you might be treated unfairly but who says life is fair. So I told this story to the person with the gender discrimination case and this might happen. So you got to be strong mentally and emotionally when you choose to do important things and this is why you work on them every day. That person ended up leaving her company for something else but I don’t know what happened with the gender discrimination case.
These are tough choices that we have to make but we should strive to make the right choice.
To summarize today’s episode, in life we have to choose to be important people and sacrifice our morals and ethics or we can choose to do important things and sacrifice our social and financial status. It’s not guaranteed that those sacrifices will happen but it is a possibility. Make the right choice though.
Thanks for listening to today’s episode.
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