How tall are you? How athletic are you? How smart are you and how many friends do you have? How much money do you have and where do you live? What music do you like and what clothes do you wear? What language do you speak at home? The answers to these questions shape the story you tell yourself about who you are—they help you understand your identity.
These questions are also pretty easy to answer. You’re either five feet tall or you’re not. You either like classical music or you don’t. This layer of your identity is like the paint on a house—it’s either red or it’s not. But what goes on inside that house is a whole other story, and the questions that shape your inside story are much harder to answer:
If you see a friend doing something you know is wrong, do you speak up? If you mess up on the sports field or on a test, does it make you quit or does it push you to practice harder? When you see a problem in the world, do you wait for others to figure it out or do you search for your own solutions? If you were diagnosed with a life-changing disease, would you still show the world your smile? When you do a good deed, do you need people to know about it?
When you think about things like courage, kindness, creativity, persistence, resilience, and responsibility—some of the things that make up your character—it’s pretty easy to imagine you’re like the person you heard about who saved someone from the subway tracks and think you’d do the same! But would you? Would you really? Unless you’ve been put to the test, you might not know.
It’s hard to know your character. It’s also hard to change it. Doing one brave thing doesn’t necessarily make you courageous, just like doing one kind thing doesn’t necessarily make you a kind person. The opposite is true, too: Just because you came home from soccer practice one afternoon and said something mean to your little brother or sister doesn’t make you a spineless jellyfish toad who should start sleeping in the garage to protect humanity from your evil.
Character is not necessarily something you learn with your head—it’s something you feel with your heart. You can try studying it like you study for a math test, but that’s about as good as trying to eat peas with a knife. Being able to define character isn’t the same thing as having it.
If you really want to know and grow character, you have to experience it. You have to see it in action. You have to sit with character until it finds its way into your head and your heart. This book is a good start. But even at its best, it’s just a start. When the bell rings or you close this book for the night, that’s when character really starts. That’s when you have the chance to actually be one of the young people from these pages.
It doesn’t take a million dollars or a superpower to have character. It just takes a choice—the choice to be conscious of your choices. The choice to do the best you can do in your imperfect skin with your imperfect brain in an imperfect world. In some ways, it’s the choice to matter. And in some ways, it’s the choice to let other people matter more. These choices, over the course of your life, make up your character. These choices start today.
Garth Sundem