Morning Briefings

Those who live in close proximity to their basic values are apt to agonize over choices that other people, drifting over the surface of their lives, might never even see as problems. Sound values raise tough choices; and tough choices are never easy.

– Rushworth M. Kidder
How Good People Make Tough Choices: Resolving the Dilemmas of Ethical Living

It’s easy to be a decent person and to do good as long as it doesn’t cost you anything. It’s when it costs you everything that you have a story that’s inspirational.

– Screenwriter Steve Zaillian (Schindler’s List, Searching for Bobby Fischer)
AFI’s 100 Years…100 Cheers

If you’re waiting to have a good idea before you have any ideas, you won’t have many ideas.

– David Allen
Getting Things Done: The Art of Stress-Free Productivity

The river makes a difference to the landscape through which it flows.

– Margaret Silf
Inner Compass

I don’t want to do things to sell myself on myself. I don’t want to do nice things for people so that I will be ‘nice.’ I don’t want to work to make money, I want to work to work. Today I don’t want to live for, I want to live.

– Hugh Prather
Notes to Myself: My Struggle to Become a Person

In the famous final scene from the movie Casablanca, Humphrey Bogart sends the beautiful Ingrid Bergman away with another man so he can stay behind and fight the Nazis. He ends up sacrificing everything–the woman he loves, a prosperous nightclub, respect and status–all because he knows there something more important in life: the need to fight evil. Ultimately, that’s why we need to pray for courage. All the things in life we want to hold on to –our possessions, pleasures and feelings of security–as well as the fears about losing them, are secondary to our struggle with evil.

– Anthony DeStefano
Ten Prayers God Always Says Yes To

Looking back, it’s difficult for me to understand how I could have maintained such a fragmented existence for so long without caving in to its incoherence and lack of central commitment. Life was a blur — I was popping from one activity to another without a moment’s hesitation to reflect and consider my overall life direction.

– Joseph Jaworski
Synchronicity: The Inner Path of Leadership

The really tough choices don’t center upon right versus wrong. They involve right versus right. They are genuine dilemmas precisely because each side is firmly rooted in one of our basic, core values: truth vs. loyalty, individual vs. community, short-term vs. long-term, justice vs. mercy.

– Rushworth M. Kidder
How Good People Make Tough Choices: Resolving the Dilemmas of Ethical Living

To me, people are elevators. Either you get in with them and they take you up or they take you down. I needed to be with people who take me up.

– Director Alejandro Monteverde on his production partners
Bella

Most people know how to resolve conflicts between right and wrong, however, right versus right choices are best understood as defining moments. There are small ones that come up weekly, bigger ones every few months and some that really are classic defining moments that come up every couple of years–and you’ve got to get these right.

– Joseph Badaracco
Defining Moments: When Managers Must Choose Between Right and Right (podcast)

Rather than think of ethics as the benchmark against which behavior is measured, for many people ethics has come to be equated with something that inflicts pain on a company or some hefty sacrifice.

– Jeffrey L. Seglin
The Good, the Bad and Your Business: Choosing Right When Ethical Dilemmas Pull You Apart