In my life, I’ve always been biased toward build­ing a finan­cial on which other stuff can be built. After all, you have to have shel­ter before you can keep your fam­ily safe and warm. But for a long time I’ve been mov­ing toward a bet­ter under­stand­ing of what a real foun­da­tion is. And today, I may have reached a milestone.

I was read­ing my Bible this morn­ing, and think­ing “how can read­ing about Jesus and His res­ur­rec­tion help me today?” In other words, part of me felt like I was wast­ing pro­duc­tive time in read­ing the Bible. But then I thought that maybe life is not so much about what I have to do today and more about what went on all those years ago when He was crucified.

Then I thought of my friends in adver­tis­ing who, although their world­views aren’t always the same as mine, prac­tice daily those things that I believe are core virtues that wouldn’t seem to lead directly to busi­ness success…and they’re suc­cess­ful. They’re not rush­ing to try to beat the other guy, not car­ing who they hurt along the way.

The word we nor­mally use to describe that is “gen­eros­ity.” But I think it’s more than gen­eros­ity. It’s the larger idea of doing the right thing.

I remem­ber one time a guy named Bill Hurd was talk­ing about lead­er­ship. He told us about a time he almost got in a fight with a bully, but when con­fronted, the bully backed down. It’s because the bully knew Bill was right. And there’s bold­ness in that.

My con­clu­sion is that it may not be about a laser-beam focus on busi­ness goals. Instead, it may be about per­sonal goals first. It might start with doing what we know is right. And that may be the real foun­da­tion of every other kind of last­ing suc­cess we could want, includ­ing career success.

Related posts:

1. Strategy’s long-run suc­cess and short-run peace
2. 3 signs of an inno­va­tion culture
3. Suc­cess as a cre­ative genius
4. My fail­ure as a strategist