As you do more real work, with more real responsibility, you’ll be faced with decisions that increasingly test your moral boundaries.
How many chances do you give the coworker who constantly messes up before you stop even trying?
How do you reconcile making recommendations that the company change its pricing structure so that it makes more money, while the customers of your bottom-barrel product spend more money they don’t have on it?
Do you recommend or even just simply go along with (or close your eyes to) pricing structures that make people pay much more than they thought they would because of hidden clauses in their terms and conditions?
Who is really funding the company? Are you sure? And who is funding the funder? And who is funding the funder’s funder’s funder?
Is the company paying all of its taxes? Are you sure? Have you inspected the tax returns yourself?
Here’s the problem, if you turn a blind eye to (what you consider to be) immoral behavior, then three things happen to you:
- You become complicit in it. Sorry, no exceptions.
- You become inoculated to it, so it becomes normalized in your mind, and over time, without realizing it, you will accept it as normal. Sorry, no exceptions.
- It will eventually turn a blind eye to you. The person who steals from everyone except for you, will eventually steal from you. Sorry, exceptions only if you’re fantastically lucky (which you may be).
What to do? Three things.
First, think long and hard about what is good and bad, moral and immoral, by your own definitions. Think in particular about the gray area in-between the obvious extremes. This is something healthy and even important for all adults to do, anyway. Probably all kids, too. Note that merely thinking about it helps greatly in recognizing it and knowing how to handle it when it happens.
Second, before you start any project, write down a document, just for yourself, of what you won’t do, the level below which you will not stoop. Don’t show this document to anyone, but don’t lose it. And if that level is ever crossed, then just quit. You won’t change them, and you may not want to change yourself. Writing it down is important because, if you don’t, then your values and expectations will change over time—so you’ll descend slowly into immorality, just like the frog boiling without realizing it.
Third, keep in mind the “what you consider to be” qualification about the morality. You may consider something to be bad, but it may not be to someone else. Your value system is yours and just yours. Is your value system universal? Maybe, maybe not, but that’s a question you can spend a lifetime trying to sort out. So, just because your manager, boss, or client has a different value system doesn’t necessarily mean he’s any worse of a person, although of course he may be.
And remember, value systems change over time—individual and society-wise. Your values today, I would bet, are very different than your values when you were 7 years old. For example; at 7, I valued eating Oreo cookies non-stop as the highest possible calling in the universe and today, I just don’t. Your own personal values are likely to be different 15 years from now, just like how your client’s values are likely to have been different when he was younger or will be older. So, when you document your value system and what lines you won’t cross, an easy starting point is to think about it in the limited way of your values of today. Tomorrow is a different day and there’s always another rainbow to cross over!
