If successful people are bad people, why should we be good people? This sentence is not a rhetorical question, but a sincere question. We all hope that good people will be rewarded, but there is no scientific basis for this. Not only that, now psychologists have carried out a series of latest studies that show that most people who get "good news" are not "good people". We sometimes face two directions in decision-making: the direction that is beneficial to us and the direction that is worthy of our conscience. If you are a rational person, how should you choose? A habit of highly effective people I recently read an article "one to think about problems" circulating on the Internet, which talks about a very interesting dilemma: suppose you find that your boss is corrupt, what should you do. The author Cao Lili said that if you are an ordinary employee who has no chance to contact corruption, the only thing you can do is to protect yourself and pretend not to know, because you have no evidence even if you want to report it. If you are a secretary or assistant, you must not be greedy, or you will be the first one to take the blame in the future; Secondly, don't report it immediately, or other leaders won't dare to use you again. You should "try every means to dissuade the leader in private and let him rein in from the precipice. If he insists, he will resign." This answer is not only worthy of their own work, but also preserves their own morality. It is perfect. However, if you want to continue to be an ordinary person, you should do so. But what if you are not satisfied with being an ordinary person and want to be a leader? Let's take a look at these high-ranking people. They will inevitably encounter corrupt bosses in the process of growing up. First, since they can get high positions, it is impossible that they will never have access to the core evidence. Second, their original boss could not have been so stupid that he would have wanted to embezzle and quit on the precipice after listening to their advice. Third, since they are still working today, it is obvious that they did not resign at the beginning! So the most reasonable inference is that these people think that when the water is clean, there is no fish. They choose not to report if they have evidence in their hands. They may even be greedy together. Of course, there are risks in collusion, but there are risks before there are opportunities. It's safe to stay out, but it also means that others don't take you to play. We have to worry about gains and losses in the calculation of various risks and interests, which is not smart at all. How many righteous people, seeing the social situation, simply don't bother to calculate and quit the Jianghu. When I was in college, I often rented Gu Long's novels. On one occasion, I saw a sentence in a book full moon machete. I don't know which young man's blood was aroused. It was heavily underlined: "he must stand out from the right path.". What should we do to stand out from the right path? It's no use reading Cologne for such a problem... You have to read a better selling book, Stephen Covey's seven habits of highly effective people. One of the key ideas in the book, and the second habit of "highly effective people", is to do things with principle as the focus. Covey said that you should have a sense of mission and find a vision and direction for your life. This kind of vision is not to find an island to retire after success, but rather higher-level things such as personal final expectations and values, such as changing the world - or, in other words, what evaluation do you want to get when you build a coffin in the future. You should set yourself a set of constitutional principles according to this sense of mission, always keep them in mind, and every move is for this vision. Focusing on money, pleasure, fame and wealth, or work and family is not as good as focusing on "principles". Covey gives an example. For example, when you make an appointment to go to a show with your wife in the evening, the boss suddenly calls you back to work overtime. People who focus on work will choose to work overtime, and people who focus on family will choose to continue to accompany their wife. However, people who focus on principles will make overall consideration without being affected by any impulse. No matter what choice they make, they will make an active decision based on their sense of mission or obligation. A person who focuses on work may decide to go back to work overtime for his own promotion or to compare with his colleagues' competitors, while a person who focuses on principle decides to go back to work overtime for the sake of the company. What should a person who focuses on principles do when he encounters corruption from his boss? His starting point must be completely different from our previous calculations: he may think of the company and even the country, rather than simply studying what to do to his own advantage. In this way, high-performance people do things completely different from ordinary small people. They are aboveboard and full of moral responsibility, which is really admirable. The only problem is that although the book "seven habits of highly effective people" published in 1989 is clear and correct, it lacks the support of academic research. It is absolutely unreasonable for people today to write any similar book without some scientific research evidence. Now that more than 20 years have passed, is there any scientific evidence that according to the habit of high-performance people, if they do things in the right way, they can become outstanding? No, Who is more selfish? Feng Lun, a "Confucian businessman", once went to Hong Kong to have a meal with Li Ka Shing. He was impressed by the approachable attitude of the other party. He wrote an article specially when he came back. Fenglun said that Li Ka Shing was waiting at the elevator entrance to greet the crowd. He used lots to order his meals and photos. In this way, he "respected everyone present". Even the topic of his speech in the middle was "building self and pursuing selflessness", which fully reflected his "soft power beyond money". The story is not shocking. It is widely believed that the real elites are so amiable and even immortal. Their success does not depend on speculation at all, but on fair and bright soft power. People even think that the thinking mode of the elite is fundamentally different from that of ordinary people. For example, we often see positive energy stories such as "the poor tolerate themselves and the rich tolerate others". But we can't just listen to stories. We have to look at research. In a paper published in 2012, psychologist Paul K. PIFF and his collaborators conducted a total of seven studies. These studies have shown that the moral standards of the rich and the so-called upper class society are not only not higher than ordinary people, but also lower than ordinary people. In the first two studies, researchers observed hundreds of cars passing by at a sidewalk and an intersection in the San Francisco Bay area. In these two places where there are no traffic lights but only traffic signs, California law stipulates that vehicles must let pedestrians pass, and the late arriving vehicles at the intersection must let the first arriving vehicles pass. So which cars will honestly stop and give way, and which cars will grab it? The researchers divided the cars into five grades according to the degree of luxury. The result was that the lowest car was the most rule-abiding in both studies, while the highest car was the least rule-abiding in both studies. Excluding the age and gender of drivers, the conclusion is still very obvious: people who drive a good car perform worse. The third study recruited more than 100 undergraduate students from the University of California, Berkeley as subjects. First, they investigated their socio-economic background, told them about eight kinds of immoral behaviors in daily life, and then asked them if it was possible for you to do the same thing. These eight things are not specifically designed for the rich. In my opinion, the poor are more likely to encounter them: for example, working in a restaurant to steal food, taking the school's printing paper home, and not paying back the extra money for coffee. As a result, people with high socio-economic status are more likely to do these immoral things. The remaining studies found that the more "upper class" subjects believed that greed and selfishness were good, that lying in job interviews was acceptable, and that they really cheated in the experiment in order to win prizes. Moreover, even if the subjects "feel they belong to the upper class" because of the psychological influence of the researchers, the subjects become more likely to steal. How to understand these studies? One interpretation is that the rich have low moral standards because they don't care what others think of them. Ordinary people have limited resources and must rely on each other to survive better, so they pay special attention to their own image and dare not do immoral things. The rich have sufficient resources to maintain their independence. They don't need others to care about them. For example, some studies have found that in the interaction experiment with strangers, the richer the rich, the less attention and interaction they show to each other. This is tantamount to saying that wealth leads to immorality. A recent study in 2015 found similar findings. The experiment showed that people with higher socio-economic status cheated mainly for themselves, while ordinary people cheated mostly for others. Furthermore, just by giving subjects some power in the experiment, they will immediately become selfish people and start cheating for themselves. Another possibility is that because they are immoral, they become rich. As mentioned earlier, the research of PIFF et al. Found that the rich have an essentially different attitude towards greed from ordinary people. They do things more driven by selfishness. In his paper, PIFF even thinks that the mechanism that the more immoral people are, the easier they are to obtain more wealth is self-sustaining, and may lead to a further widening of the gap between the rich and the poor. However interpreted, researchers acknowledge the fact that people with high socioeconomic status are more selfish than ordinary people. Panshiyi donated money to Harvard and Zhang Lei donated money to Yale, which has aroused fierce criticism among Chinese people. Why don't you donate money to Chinese universities? Why not donate it to project hope? Because only the poor will donate to the hope project. Atlantic Monthly reported that in 2011, the 20% of people with the lowest income in the United States donated a total of 3.2% of their property; The top 20% of the people donated only 1.3%. Among the top 50 largest donations in 2012, none was for social services and poverty. Where are all the rich people's donations? The biggest winners are elite universities and museums. The rich are more selfish. A deeper interpretation is that ordinary people donate because they have compassion, while rich people donate with a strong self-interest purpose. Ordinary people are more likely to act from the perspective of empathy, while the upper class is more accustomed to the naked calculation of interests.

Fair world hypothesis I have looked through these studies and found no paper that the implementation of the high-performance habit of "focusing on principles" is beneficial to people's promotion, salary increase or success in any secular sense. And I haven't found any research to prove that "being an ethical person" is good for these successes. Of course, a person who is not reliable enough to cheat and abduct all day can not succeed. But a person who only knows selfless dedication may not be able to get along well. The people who are more likely to succeed in the end may be those who can cooperate with others on the surface, but are actually very selfish and even cheat occasionally. This is very contrary to common sense. Is it true that good people are not rewarded? I am in favor of being a good person, but a good person needs a correct world view. As good people, even if we don't believe in karma in the religious sense, we usually think that good deeds in this world are likely to be rewarded, and others are likely to be punished for bad deeds - in other words, we think the world is fair. But this is precisely a wrong world view. In fact, psychologists even have a proper name for this mistake, which is called "just world hypothesis" (also known as just world fallacy). In fact, the world is not fair. Fairness is just an illusion given to us by novels and movies, because we like fairness. In Jeffrey Pfeffer's book power: why some people have it - and others don't, the author puts forward that believing in the fair world hypothesis has three disadvantages for you:

1. You can't learn from the success of others. If someone succeeds by unscrupulous means, you don't like it, so you don't want to learn from him, and you won't learn more experience. In fact, whether this person is worth learning or not has nothing to do with whether you like him or not.

2. You think you can do your own thing well. You will underestimate the bad things that happen in the world. You will find that it is very difficult for you to accomplish something. You will feel that others are against you all day.

3. What's more, you will think that those who have achieved will have strengths, and those who have failed will have hatreds. And this is totally wrong! People mistakenly see what is good in a successful person and what is bad in a loser. So how can we succeed in this world? Pfeffer's book is not like the seven habits of highly effective people, which cites a lot of empirical research. Pfeffer tells us two things in the first chapter of his book by enumerating the research results. First, whether a person can get power and promotion depends on his work performance. Good or bad performance has little impact on whether the CEO, public affairs leaders, school principals, government officials, etc. can keep their positions, and has little impact on whether ordinary employees can be promoted. Second, the most important factor that determines your promotion is your relationship with your superiors. In order to improve the relationship with the superiors, Pfeffer talked about three ways: flattering himself in front of the superiors, fully understanding the intentions of the superiors, and flattering the superiors. Moreover, he said about the research done in the United States, and did not mention China at all. It can be seen that people all over the world are the same on this issue. It feels good to be a good person, but being a good person is the thinking of ordinary people. In fact, from the perspective of economics, you should be a "rational person" - which means that you should do things from the perspective of self-interest, not "good people". So why should a good man be on his own? If I have to be a good man, should I be eliminated from the world? That's not true! Because there is no evidence that there is any harm in being a good person. Kantian willfulness Now, with a correct world view, let's analyze the benefits of being a good person and a moral person. Focusing on principles is the second habit of covey, and the first habit of highly effective people is called "initiative". This habit is actually the key to morality. If you choose to work overtime in order to get this bonus because the leader announced that "anyone who works overtime tonight will be given a bonus", you will not be proactive, but passive - you will respond to external stimuli. This is a relatively low-level action, which seems to have no free will. It is no different from slaves or bacteria. If you are more advanced and "take the initiative" to work overtime without any bonus policy in order to win the favor of your boss, are you even proactive? Not really. Because your ultimate goal of working overtime is still to serve your own interests, you are still responding to material stimuli. The real initiative is that your behavior completely depends on yourself and is not influenced by external stimuli. Your free will is independent of external constraints. Between stimulation and response, you have the freedom and ability to choose what response to. Covey didn't say it clearly, but what he said about the initiative is actually the moral concept of Kant's philosophy. Kant said that if you do something because of any benefit, or to avoid punishment, or even to satisfy your own compassion, it is not true morality, and you are not really free. Only when you do it out of pure responsibility and obligation can you be truly free, which is the real morality. Kant's philosophy is broad and profound, which is difficult for us to fully understand, but this alone is enough to convince us why we should be good people. I can repeat this: I have investigated many studies, but have not found any papers that say that being a moral person is good for secular success. In fact, I have read more than one article directly saying that morality is not good for secular success. Why should we be a moral person? Because I don't want to be a slave to anyone, anything, or any emotion. I want to be a master. In addition to flattering the world, there is another way to succeed. This is what you do with your own wisdom and courage, taking risks that others dare not take, taking responsibilities and costs that others dare not take. You dare to do this not because you have carefully calculated the probability of success, but because you believe in a certain principle and sense of responsibility and think it should be done. In other words, you did it purely out of willfulness. Kant believes that only doing something out of willfulness - that is, free will - is the real free choice. So "willful" is actually a good word. The willfulness of a child is not really willful, because he is not free, he is just a slave of his own desires. As Kant and Covey said, such high-efficiency willfulness is the true willfulness. It's no good doing so. According to Kant's theory, if there is no good, it is right. If there is really good, it is not self willed. But in my opinion, there is actually a benefit of doing so: I will feel very proud. If you see a young man groveling to his superiors, you will have a strong sense of superiority in your heart. You feel that you are superior not only to this young man, but also to his superiors. Now back to the question at the beginning of this article: what should you do if the leaders are corrupt? In the real world, when we encounter similar situations, we can only make specific choices according to the details of the specific situation. We cannot give a standard answer to an abstract problem, but we can give an answer from the perspective of slave or master. Kant is a very rigid person. He thinks that he can't use anyone as a tool, so he can't deceive anyone. Therefore, he may have no more choices in this situation. But my moral cultivation is not so high. I think some people only deserve to be used as tools. So I suggest that no matter whether you choose to be a slave or a master, you may decide to join in the evil temporarily according to the situation, or you can't bear to fight back directly. The results you encounter may be successful or unsuccessful. But the degree of inner pride of these two perspectives is completely different.

If successful people are bad people, why should we be good people? This sentence is not a rhetorical question, but a sincere question. We all hope that good people will be rewarded, but there is no scientific basis for this. Not only that, now psychologists have carried out a series of latest studies that show that most people who get "good news" are not "good people". We sometimes face two directions in decision-making: the direction that is beneficial to us and the direction that is worthy of our conscience. If you are a rational person, how should you choose? A habit of highly effective people I recently read an article "one to think about problems" circulating on the Internet, which talks about a very interesting dilemma: suppose you find that your boss is corrupt, what should you do. The author Cao Lili said that if you are an ordinary employee who has no chance to contact corruption, the only thing you can do is to protect yourself and pretend not to know, because you have no evidence even if you want to report it. If you are a secretary or assistant, you must not be greedy, or you will be the first one to take the blame in the future; Secondly, don't report it immediately, or other leaders won't dare to use you again. You should "try every means to dissuade the leader in private and let him rein in from the precipice. If he insists, he will resign." This answer is not only worthy of their own work, but also preserves their own morality. It is perfect. However, if you want to continue to be an ordinary person, you should do so. But what if you are not satisfied with being an ordinary person and want to be a leader? Let's take a look at these high-ranking people. They will inevitably encounter corrupt bosses in the process of growing up. First, since they can get high positions, it is impossible that they will never have access to the core evidence. Second, their original boss could not have been so stupid that he would have wanted to embezzle and quit on the precipice after listening to their advice. Third, since they are still working today, it is obvious that they did not resign at the beginning! So the most reasonable inference is that these people think that when the water is clean, there is no fish. They choose not to report if they have evidence in their hands. They may even be greedy together. Of course, there are risks in collusion, but there are risks before there are opportunities. It's safe to stay out, but it also means that others don't take you to play. We have to worry about gains and losses in the calculation of various risks and interests, which is not smart at all. How many righteous people, seeing the social situation, simply don't bother to calculate and quit the Jianghu. When I was in college, I often rented Gu Long's novels. On one occasion, I saw a sentence in a book full moon machete. I don't know which young man's blood was aroused. It was heavily underlined: "he must stand out from the right path.". What should we do to stand out from the right path? It's no use reading Cologne for such a problem... You have to read a better selling book, Stephen Covey's seven habits of highly effective people. One of the key ideas in the book, and the second habit of "highly effective people", is to do things with principle as the focus. Covey said that you should have a sense of mission and find a vision and direction for your life. This kind of vision is not to find an island to retire after success, but rather higher-level things such as personal final expectations and values, such as changing the world - or, in other words, what evaluation do you want to get when you build a coffin in the future. You should set yourself a set of constitutional principles according to this sense of mission, always keep them in mind, and every move is for this vision. Focusing on money, pleasure, fame and wealth, or work and family is not as good as focusing on "principles". Covey gives an example. For example, when you make an appointment to go to a show with your wife in the evening, the boss suddenly calls you back to work overtime. People who focus on work will choose to work overtime, and people who focus on family will choose to continue to accompany their wife. However, people who focus on principles will make overall consideration without being affected by any impulse. No matter what choice they make, they will make an active decision based on their sense of mission or obligation. A person who focuses on work may decide to go back to work overtime for his own promotion or to compare with his colleagues' competitors, while a person who focuses on principle decides to go back to work overtime for the sake of the company. What should a person who focuses on principles do when he encounters corruption from his boss? His starting point must be completely different from our previous calculations: he may think of the company and even the country, rather than simply studying what to do to his own advantage. In this way, high-performance people do things completely different from ordinary small people. They are aboveboard and full of moral responsibility, which is really admirable. The only problem is that although the book "seven habits of highly effective people" published in 1989 is clear and correct, it lacks the support of academic research. It is absolutely unreasonable for people today to write any similar book without some scientific research evidence. Now that more than 20 years have passed, is there any scientific evidence that according to the habit of high-performance people, if they do things in the right way, they can become outstanding? No, Who is more selfish? Feng Lun, a "Confucian businessman", once went to Hong Kong to have a meal with Li Ka Shing. He was impressed by the approachable attitude of the other party. He wrote an article specially when he came back. Fenglun said that Li Ka Shing was waiting at the elevator entrance to greet the crowd. He used lots to order his meals and photos. In this way, he "respected everyone present". Even the topic of his speech in the middle was "building self and pursuing selflessness", which fully reflected his "soft power beyond money". The story is not shocking. It is widely believed that the real elites are so amiable and even immortal. Their success does not depend on speculation at all, but on fair and bright soft power. People even think that the thinking mode of the elite is fundamentally different from that of ordinary people. For example, we often see positive energy stories such as "the poor tolerate themselves and the rich tolerate others". But we can't just listen to stories. We have to look at research. In a paper published in 2012, psychologist Paul K. PIFF and his collaborators conducted a total of seven studies. These studies have shown that the moral standards of the rich and the so-called upper class society are not only not higher than ordinary people, but also lower than ordinary people. In the first two studies, researchers observed hundreds of cars passing by at a sidewalk and an intersection in the San Francisco Bay area. In these two places where there are no traffic lights but only traffic signs, California law stipulates that vehicles must let pedestrians pass, and the late arriving vehicles at the intersection must let the first arriving vehicles pass. So which cars will honestly stop and give way, and which cars will grab it? The researchers divided the cars into five grades according to the degree of luxury. The result was that the lowest car was the most rule-abiding in both studies, while the highest car was the least rule-abiding in both studies. Excluding the age and gender of drivers, the conclusion is still very obvious: people who drive a good car perform worse. The third study recruited more than 100 undergraduate students from the University of California, Berkeley as subjects. First, they investigated their socio-economic background, told them about eight kinds of immoral behaviors in daily life, and then asked them if it was possible for you to do the same thing. These eight things are not specifically designed for the rich. In my opinion, the poor are more likely to encounter them: for example, working in a restaurant to steal food, taking the school's printing paper home, and not paying back the extra money for coffee. As a result, people with high socio-economic status are more likely to do these immoral things. The remaining studies found that the more "upper class" subjects believed that greed and selfishness were good, that lying in job interviews was acceptable, and that they really cheated in the experiment in order to win prizes. Moreover, even if the subjects "feel they belong to the upper class" because of the psychological influence of the researchers, the subjects become more likely to steal. How to understand these studies? One interpretation is that the rich have low moral standards because they don't care what others think of them. Ordinary people have limited resources and must rely on each other to survive better, so they pay special attention to their own image and dare not do immoral things. The rich have sufficient resources to maintain their independence. They don't need others to care about them. For example, some studies have found that in the interaction experiment with strangers, the richer the rich, the less attention and interaction they show to each other. This is tantamount to saying that wealth leads to immorality. A recent study in 2015 found similar findings. The experiment showed that people with higher socio-economic status cheated mainly for themselves, while ordinary people cheated mostly for others. Furthermore, just by giving subjects some power in the experiment, they will immediately become selfish people and start cheating for themselves. Another possibility is that because they are immoral, they become rich. As mentioned earlier, the research of PIFF et al. Found that the rich have an essentially different attitude towards greed from ordinary people. They do things more driven by selfishness. In his paper, PIFF even thinks that the mechanism that the more immoral people are, the easier they are to obtain more wealth is self-sustaining, and may lead to a further widening of the gap between the rich and the poor. However interpreted, researchers acknowledge the fact that people with high socioeconomic status are more selfish than ordinary people. Panshiyi donated money to Harvard and Zhang Lei donated money to Yale, which has aroused fierce criticism among Chinese people. Why don't you donate money to Chinese universities? Why not donate it to project hope? Because only the poor will donate to the hope project. Atlantic Monthly reported that in 2011, the 20% of people with the lowest income in the United States donated a total of 3.2% of their property; The top 20% of the people donated only 1.3%. Among the top 50 largest donations in 2012, none was for social services and poverty. Where are all the rich people's donations? The biggest winners are elite universities and museums. The rich are more selfish. A deeper interpretation is that ordinary people donate because they have compassion, while rich people donate with a strong self-interest purpose. Ordinary people are more likely to act from the perspective of empathy, while the upper class is more accustomed to the naked calculation of interests.

Fair world hypothesis I have looked through these studies and found no paper that the implementation of the high-performance habit of "focusing on principles" is beneficial to people's promotion, salary increase or success in any secular sense. And I haven't found any research to prove that "being an ethical person" is good for these successes. Of course, a person who is not reliable enough to cheat and abduct all day can not succeed. But a person who only knows selfless dedication may not be able to get along well. The people who are more likely to succeed in the end may be those who can cooperate with others on the surface, but are actually very selfish and even cheat occasionally. This is very contrary to common sense. Is it true that good people are not rewarded? I am in favor of being a good person, but a good person needs a correct world view. As good people, even if we don't believe in karma in the religious sense, we usually think that good deeds in this world are likely to be rewarded, and others are likely to be punished for bad deeds - in other words, we think the world is fair. But this is precisely a wrong world view. In fact, psychologists even have a proper name for this mistake, which is called "just world hypothesis" (also known as just world fallacy). In fact, the world is not fair. Fairness is just an illusion given to us by novels and movies, because we like fairness. In Jeffrey Pfeffer's book power: why some people have it - and others don't, the author puts forward that believing in the fair world hypothesis has three disadvantages for you:

1. You can't learn from the success of others. If someone succeeds by unscrupulous means, you don't like it, so you don't want to learn from him, and you won't learn more experience. In fact, whether this person is worth learning or not has nothing to do with whether you like him or not.

2. You think you can do your own thing well. You will underestimate the bad things that happen in the world. You will find that it is very difficult for you to accomplish something. You will feel that others are against you all day.

3. What's more, you will think that those who have achieved will have strengths, and those who have failed will have hatreds. And this is totally wrong! People mistakenly see what is good in a successful person and what is bad in a loser. So how can we succeed in this world? Pfeffer's book is not like the seven habits of highly effective people, which cites a lot of empirical research. Pfeffer tells us two things in the first chapter of his book by enumerating the research results. First, whether a person can get power and promotion depends on his work performance. Good or bad performance has little impact on whether the CEO, public affairs leaders, school principals, government officials, etc. can keep their positions, and has little impact on whether ordinary employees can be promoted. Second, the most important factor that determines your promotion is your relationship with your superiors. In order to improve the relationship with the superiors, Pfeffer talked about three ways: flattering himself in front of the superiors, fully understanding the intentions of the superiors, and flattering the superiors. Moreover, he said about the research done in the United States, and did not mention China at all. It can be seen that people all over the world are the same on this issue. It feels good to be a good person, but being a good person is the thinking of ordinary people. In fact, from the perspective of economics, you should be a "rational person" - which means that you should do things from the perspective of self-interest, not "good people". So why should a good man be on his own? If I have to be a good man, should I be eliminated from the world? That's not true! Because there is no evidence that there is any harm in being a good person. Kantian willfulness Now, with a correct world view, let's analyze the benefits of being a good person and a moral person. Focusing on principles is the second habit of covey, and the first habit of highly effective people is called "initiative". This habit is actually the key to morality. If you choose to work overtime in order to get this bonus because the leader announced that "anyone who works overtime tonight will be given a bonus", you will not be proactive, but passive - you will respond to external stimuli. This is a relatively low-level action, which seems to have no free will. It is no different from slaves or bacteria. If you are more advanced and "take the initiative" to work overtime without any bonus policy in order to win the favor of your boss, are you even proactive? Not really. Because your ultimate goal of working overtime is still to serve your own interests, you are still responding to material stimuli. The real initiative is that your behavior completely depends on yourself and is not influenced by external stimuli. Your free will is independent of external constraints. Between stimulation and response, you have the freedom and ability to choose what response to. Covey didn't say it clearly, but what he said about the initiative is actually the moral concept of Kant's philosophy. Kant said that if you do something because of any benefit, or to avoid punishment, or even to satisfy your own compassion, it is not true morality, and you are not really free. Only when you do it out of pure responsibility and obligation can you be truly free, which is the real morality. Kant's philosophy is broad and profound, which is difficult for us to fully understand, but this alone is enough to convince us why we should be good people. I can repeat this: I have investigated many studies, but have not found any papers that say that being a moral person is good for secular success. In fact, I have read more than one article directly saying that morality is not good for secular success. Why should we be a moral person? Because I don't want to be a slave to anyone, anything, or any emotion. I want to be a master. In addition to flattering the world, there is another way to succeed. This is what you do with your own wisdom and courage, taking risks that others dare not take, taking responsibilities and costs that others dare not take. You dare to do this not because you have carefully calculated the probability of success, but because you believe in a certain principle and sense of responsibility and think it should be done. In other words, you did it purely out of willfulness. Kant believes that only doing something out of willfulness - that is, free will - is the real free choice. So "willful" is actually a good word. The willfulness of a child is not really willful, because he is not free, he is just a slave of his own desires. As Kant and Covey said, such high-efficiency willfulness is the true willfulness. It's no good doing so. According to Kant's theory, if there is no good, it is right. If there is really good, it is not self willed. But in my opinion, there is actually a benefit of doing so: I will feel very proud. If you see a young man groveling to his superiors, you will have a strong sense of superiority in your heart. You feel that you are superior not only to this young man, but also to his superiors. Now back to the question at the beginning of this article: what should you do if the leaders are corrupt? In the real world, when we encounter similar situations, we can only make specific choices according to the details of the specific situation. We cannot give a standard answer to an abstract problem, but we can give an answer from the perspective of slave or master. Kant is a very rigid person. He thinks that he can't use anyone as a tool, so he can't deceive anyone. Therefore, he may have no more choices in this situation. But my moral cultivation is not so high. I think some people only deserve to be used as tools. So I suggest that no matter whether you choose to be a slave or a master, you may decide to join in the evil temporarily according to the situation, or you can't bear to fight back directly. The results you encounter may be successful or unsuccessful. But the degree of inner pride of these two perspectives is completely different.