This is one of the stories I go back to, and it’s about integrity. It’s about how our mind works and how every little decision we make in our head defines the outcome.

I was doing a workout in a gym many, many years ago. I was running on a treadmill when, at one point, there were these two guys talking to each other about why someone would cheat on someone else.

One of the two guys was saying, “Yeah, it depends on the scenario. Maybe you have some scenarios where you’re more intrigued and blah blah blah.”

And the other guy replied: “No, you only have 42 seconds to make a decision. After that, you’re about to cheat.”

I keep going back to this phrase every now and then. I don’t think it’s fully true, but I do think there’s a lot of wisdom in it.

When you are confronted with a moral or ethical decision, or anything along these lines, you often have the choice to protect your integrity or to give up some of it. There may be benefits that lure you into giving up a little bit. This applies to cheating, but it applies to everything that revolves around integrity.

What I think is true about this story is that if you take more than 42 seconds to decide to protect your integrity, then your integrity is at risk. Because otherwise your answer would be clear: I’m not going to break my integrity for this.

But if you think about it for too long, and “too long” in this case is 42 seconds, then it starts becoming about the benefits. And it’s highly likely that, with bigger benefits, you will accept breaking your rules and giving up your integrity.

Protecting Integrity

What I took from this are two lessons.

First, if there’s something you truly, truly care about in your life, no matter what the benefits are, say no early on to protect it. Don’t wait. Don’t think about it. If it’s about protecting it, you must do it as quickly as possible.

The second thing is that whenever you give up some integrity, you are bending. You’re bending your morals. You’re bending your integrity. That kind of bending will stay, and it will be easier to bend next time.

This is also true for the things you’re trying to change or build. If you’re trying to stop smoking and you think, “Oh, maybe I’ll smoke a little bit,” there are things that feel innocent. They’re not. They’re usually not.

Integrity is all about keeping this whole thing intact as much as possible. Whenever you give up some of that integrity, you allow yourself to get out of that zone. And if you allow yourself to get out of that zone, then your integrity around whatever thing you care about is at risk.

Bending in the Other Direction

The other face of the coin here is when you want to grow into something else that you’re scared of then bending is actually the right tool.

If you want to do something you’re scared about, one approach is to do it in small steps that you’re less scared of. You bend a little bit, and that kind of bending becomes your new normal. After a while, you can bend a little bit more, and that becomes your new normal, until you’re okay with doing the thing that you were scared about.