What's Stopping You?: Why Smart People Don't Always Reach Their Potential, and How You Can

The Character Ethic

Stephen Covey of Seven Habits … fame is probably the high priest of appropriate goal setting, although his true genius for those with a high fear of failure is that he doesn’t ask us to reinvent ourselves or deny our past pain in order to make progress: quite the opposite. He argues against what he calls the “Personality Ethic” prevalent in most modern self-help books and instead promotes the “Character Ethic”.

The Personality Ethic, states Covey, relies on developing skills and techniques that can result in quick success. However, these may be revealed as insincere (even manipulative) and will lose their lustre as soon as we hit a major difficulty that the techniques cannot deal with. The Personality Ethic forces us to wear ...