Why is integrity a key to your success in life? How is it defined? How does it apply to your life? All answered within this article.

To get you a little more focused in on this concept, let's take a look at a few synonyms: honesty, honor, reliability, uprightness. Integrity is consistently, not perfectly, adhering to a code of moral values. Integrity can help you overall, help you in your relationships, and how you feel about your self. This is a major factor in achieving growth in all areas of life. But let's get into what integrity is in a little more detail.

According to Abraham Maslow, the father of humanistic psychology, integrity is a characteristic that belongs to people who are self-actualized, or the motive to realize all of one's potential. Note: not some potential but a desire to achieve or reach all of one's potential.

I gave a general lecture one time on the principles behind my work, specifically that which is expressed in my novel Black Body Radiation and the Ultraviolet Catastrophe, and I was attempting to show this innate or natural desire of human beings to reach toward perfection. One student doubted that most people desired this. I asked him if he played sports. He said yes. I asked him if he ever desired to lose. Of course he said no. I then asked him if he was going to school to get F's. He began to see my point. Integrity is simply a desire to achieve moral growth. Unfortunately, we see little of this today. When the word achievement is invoked we often think of those achieving in academics, sports, business, the arts, science, and politics. Very rarely do we admire, look to, or think of great moral achievers, especially in a day and age when self-service and winning is a priority over and above valor and honesty.

Nevertheless, we admire, at times even come close to worshiping these great achievers: Donald Trump, Bill Gates, Warren Buffett, Tiger Woods, Michael Jordon, David Ortiz, Oprah Winfrey, Steven Spielberg, Tom Hanks, Madonna. A point to keep in mind is that even high achievers, or those who have self-actualized in their careers to a greater degree than others, often times suffer a majority of failure. Tiger Woods, of course, a great winner, still loses about seventy-five percent of the time. Michael Jordan, even with all his success, missed more shots than he made and won the championship only six out of the fifteen years he played. David Ortiz, one of the most prolific and clutch hitters in Major League Baseball, still fails seventy percent of the time. And even the most successful people in business and entertainment, like those listed above, still fail more than they achieve. But it is this human desire to achieve that is above all else an innate desire, and this innate desire to achieve, to work towards perfection requires one to use many of the attributes I've listed above to get there. They are essential to helping you work towards your potential.

Knowing oneself heightens a person's integrity. According to Abraham Maslow, having integrity can take a very long time to reach and is very hard to obtain. It's at the top of Maslow's pyramid.

You'll notice the word at the very top: morality. And there are a couple of other very important elements of self-actualization: lack of prejudice and acceptance of facts. For now, let's take a closer look at morality.

Morality. What does that mean? It is not, according to some, a shifting or changing principle, meaning that one can modify it according to one's needs and desires or as they see fit. For example, it is not right to say that stealing is immoral and then qualify it when you find some money on the street and say, "Well, attempting to track down this person is futile. Finders keepers." Now I'm not saying that we should all be a goody-two-shoes (what does that mean anyway?) but more that we should look at this issue of morality and focus on its absolute definition. However, when you look up the definition, it is not absolute, meaning it's a little vague. What gives? So how do we know what is, according to the dictionary definition, "right or just behavior" or what it means to have a "sense of what is right or wrong"?

Well, let's take a look at the definition of a word that often implies a lack of moral character: steal. Stealing is the "taking of the property of another or others without permission or right, esp. secretly or by force." Now, in an attempt to work to the best of one's ability, the person should reach for perfection, meaning that if you take something, anything that is not yours, it is stealing. Let me give you an example I gave me students.

You're in Blockbuster Video looking for a movie. You're roaming around the back shelves, and looking down for a movie you see a twenty dollar bill. What do you do? Put it in your pocket? Bring it up to the cashier and tell them that you found it? Or do you start asking people in the store who tell you it's theirs what is the serial number?

To answer this question, let's take a look at the definition of stealing again. Stealing is defined as taking something without permission or right. To be perfectly moral in this situation, doing that which is right, you would have to one, either leave it where you found it- disassociating you from any degree of stealing-or two, give it to the cashier.

I'm not saying what you or anyone should do here, but I do bring this up to make a point. Any move whatsoever toward taking property that you are not given permission to take is moving toward the stealing. Now, many may say that it's ridiculous to believe that if someone takes twenty bucks that was left behind by someone in Blockbuster that it's stealing and that it's going to lead to bank robbing. It may. Consider this, not everyone who takes a drink becomes an alcoholic, but some do. Nutritionists tell us that the more you eat food that is bad for you the easier it is to not only keep eating it but to eat more, and that if you begin eating food that's good for you, the greater propensity you have to continue to eat it. One of the reasons people go off their diet is because they say to themselves, for example, "Well, I know I told myself that I would only eat ice cream on the weekends but it's been a hard week and I'm going to eat today. Hell, the weekend is only a day away." Certainly, not a problem, but then it's being eaten on Thursday, then Wednesday, then Tuesday and so on.

There's a man I know who only eats ice cream when it's a full moon. Why? Well, he wants a treat, don't you? Consider this part of the story. During the celebration of his birthday one year, someone brought ice cream. They knew his rule but they figured that he would eat the ice cream. After all, it was his birthday. Let's live it up. However, the man said no. He would not eat it. That is discipline. That is sticking to one's rules. That is working toward perfection. Hell that is perfection. The closer we get to perfection with our thoughts, words, actions, and deeds the greater joy we will have. Let's have Brutus tell us again how it is.

"It is one of the strange ironies of this strange life [that] those who work the hardest, who subject themselves to the strictest discipline, who give up certain pleasurable things in order to achieve a goal, are the happiest people."-- Brutus Hamilton