It’s easier to hold to your principles 100 percent of the time than it is to hold to them 98 percent of the time. The boundary — your personal moral line — is powerful, because you don’t cross it; if you have justified doing it once, there’s nothing to stop you doing it again.
— Clayton M. Christensen
There is a story of a wise business man in the old west who had to regularly travel by stage coach down a treacherous road. This road wound down a steep hill. On one side it had the wall of the mountain and on the other was a steep cliff.
The business man was interviewing stage coach drivers to drive him along the treacherous road. The first boasted that he was so good he could drive right along the edge of the cliff and never fall off. The second proudly claimed that he was such a good driver that he could have half of the wheels over the edge of the cliff and not fall off. The last driver claimed that he had no idea how close he could drive to the cliff because he stayed as far away from it as he could.
The wise business man hired the last driver.
Often in our lives we can behave like the first two stagecoach drivers. We treat our principles like the cliff edge of the road. We see how close we can get to the line without crossing it. Or, worse yet, we decide whether or not to cross it each time we get close.
When we choose to live in this way we have to rely on willpower to keep us living our principles. The problem with willpower is that it is not a reliable tool. Too often our willpower can fail us, and when it does we can find ourselves crossing over the lines of our principles.
When willpower fails us, we fall over the cliff.
To keep from falling over the cliff we need to decide what our principles are and then choose to always follow them. We need to know where our cliff is and then stay as far away as possible.
By deciding on your principles and then following them 100% of the time, you can avoid the pitfalls that come from relying on willpower. You can keep yourself from falling off the cliff.
Which of your principles do you struggle to follow? What decision can you make today to allow you to keep your principle 100% of the time?