From the Working Draft

Your standard belongs to you.

If you work hard only when your boss is watching, your boss owns the standard. If you are honest only when dishonesty might be discovered, consequences own the standard. If you keep your word only when keeping it remains convenient, convenience owns the standard.

Character is what remains when nobody else is enforcing it.

Convenience is wonderful. It is also a terrible principle around which to organize a life.

Relationships become inconvenient. Children are inconvenient. Aging parents become inconvenient. Commitments become inconvenient. Doing excellent work is frequently less convenient than doing adequate work. Serving another person eventually costs something.

If our highest objective is minimizing inconvenience, responsibility itself eventually begins to look like the problem.

I see that temptation in myself too.

It is remarkably easy to identify the standard somebody else should be meeting while constructing a sophisticated explanation for why my own miss was different. I was busy. I had competing priorities. Circumstances changed. I meant to get to it.

Sometimes all of those things are true.

I still missed.

Adulthood, in my view, requires becoming less interested in explaining away everything that has our name on it.

That does not mean circumstances are irrelevant. They matter. Our childhood affects us. Economic conditions affect us. Discrimination exists. Institutions fail people. Bad luck happens. Other people's decisions can materially damage our lives.

Understanding causes matters because you cannot fix what you refuse to understand.

But explanation cannot be the final destination.