Intro to The Tao of Josh - Why having a code of Ethics and Conduct makes life easer.

My dad once told me, “Josh, for every decision and action you make there are consequences: some will be good and some will be bad. So every time you make a decision or take action, you need to ask yourself, ‘what will the consequences be and can I live with them?’ If the answer is no then don’t do it. If you decide to do it anyway and the consequences comes to pass don’t whine about it, don’t make excuses and accept it like a man. You will have no one to blame but yourself.”

Now this wasn’t the first time my dad had told me this, but this time for some reason it stuck with me. Maybe, this was do to me realizing that my dad wasn’t always going to be around to bail me out and make things better. You see, we had just moved to Wyoming and by “we,” I mean it was just my dad, my brother and me; my dad and mom got divorced when I was four. My dad worked in the Oil Field and put in about 100+ hours a week and would be gone for days at a time. We had been staying with my grandparents, but now it was just going to be the three of us. So, you see if I got in trouble it was up to me to deal with it. Oh, and by the way, I was twelve, and my brother was ten.

Now you might be asking yourself, “Why are you telling me this,” because, even if I didn’t know it my dad was helping me build my own personal code of ethics and conduct, a code or “Tao of Josh” if you will. Now fast forward 20 some years, I’ve tried to live my life by this code. Some of it I got from my dad and some I got from books. I never wrote it down, until now. It was just these ideas floating around in the back of my head. “Again why are you telling me this?” It's simple, I see so many people making the same mistakes over and over. These same people complain that “life is hard,” and now I can say, “No its not. It’s just you making it appear that way. Here is my code of conduct and lets help you make one of your own, because the hardest part about life, in my opinion, is making decisions; if you have a code of conduct making decisions becomes easy. You see with out a structured way of looking at the world we tend to make decisions haphazardly and in the moment. We might do something one way one time, and then in a similar situation do it another way; this leads to inconsistency of results, and we scratch are heads and wonder why.”

There are four guiding principles I try to live by. Three of them are Personal Responsibility, Respect and Honesty/Integrity. I will go over them in following posts.

Now you say, “But you said there were four guiding principles and you only mentioned three?” This leads me to the first and overarching principle of my code, “The Tao of Asking “Why?” In a nutshell the Tao of Asking “Why” is if you ask the question ‘why something is the way it is’ or ‘why did something do what it did’ you engage your mind and you are telling your self this is a problem to be solved. By asking “Why” you will never stop learning, because as soon as you stop asking “Why” you start believing that you know everything. If you come up with an answer to why something is the way it is you will better understand it and know how to use it. We as children know this intuitively. How many of us drove our parents crazy asking “Why?” As we grow up, we stop asking “Why,” we just start excepting everything that we are told as fact. (I will go into why I think we stop asking “Why?” later.)

So, keep this in mind as you read this blog. Don’t just take my word for it; just ask “Why.”