This episode of the Voice of Hope Podcast is a bit different from our normal Bible Study material. We had the opportunity to present a number of businessperson’s breakfasts in April 2022.
In this presentation Mr. Byler takes an in-depth look at what integrity means in life and business. Enjoy!
Enduring integrity—what’s integrity? In order to talk about it, I had to know exactly what it was, and it is: adherence to moral or ethical principles; or the second meaning was: the state of being whole, entire, undiminished; to preserve the integrity of an empire, for example.
So I looked at that, and I was stumped because integrity, by definition, means enduring. Like, stated in the negative: if it does not endure, it does not have integrity. So I wasn’t sure how to talk about enduring integrity, because if it has integrity, it’s enduring, and so it seemed to be the end, but the second part, the pitfalls of success, that’s something I can bite into.
But in order to understand that, we have to see what success is, and a key difference between success and integrity is that your success and my success might look really different, but integrity looks the same to everyone. And the reason is, success is when I reach my goal.
So, let’s say I want to hike 10 miles before 9 am. So, if I go out and I hiked 9 miles, 10 miles, for 9 am, I reached my goal; I’ve had success. But, if my goal was to shoot a turkey before 9 am, and I just hike around for 10 miles, I have I’ve accomplished the same thing, but have not reached my goals, and so, therefore, I’ve not had success. So, success really has a lot to do with the person that is is experiencing the success or lack of it.
You know, if I say that I like a song, that tells you something about me, tells you what I like, tells you what’s inside me. But if I say, “This is a good song,” then that means that it is quality, it is good according to some standard, has nothing to do with me.
So that’s a difference between “I like it” and “it is good,” and success and integrity are the same way. So goals have to do with me, what I want out of life, while integrity has to do with a set standard. So success is defined by me. Integrity is defined by absolutes or God. So, I think it could have been called enduring success.
So, if success is reaching my goals, I’m assuming that this group has healthy goals, because success in reaching the wrong goals might be worse than not actually having goals, because you wind up where you don’t want to be. But did you know that winners and losers both want the same thing, and yet only winners reach their goals?
Now I’m part of a business peer group. And, there we learned that there’s five parts to a healthy life, it’s: faith, family, finance, fitness, and friendship. So, in order to have a healthy life, all five of those need to be in place. Because if I have a goal that doesn’t encompass all of those, I’ll probably wind up not being happy.
Because if we look at failure in success—let’s say that I have a goal of having 10 million dollars. And so, what if I reach my goal? I have success, but I lost my family, and I lost my health in the meantime. How happy am I going to be? And if I lose, you know, my faith, that’s another one of the F’s. But lose my family my faith—how likely is it that I’ll plunge into despair and lose my fitness? I’ll overeat and self-indulge, and if I die of a heart attack alone and godless, but I reached my goal of a net worth, I’ve had success, right? But it wasn’t a good goal, so that’s a pitfall of success.
So if any of the five F’s are missing, we have not won on a personal level.
Now, business failure—there’s so many ways to fail. If you ever went deer hunt...
