[dwrodri]

When I was in my 20s, I hit a point where I started looking back on my high school years and realized there were a small handful of teachers who had a very large influence on what I use as my "compass" for guiding me towards being the person I wanted to become as an adult.

One commonality among all of those teachers is that decade(s) later, it seems that they are mostly the same person, beliefs-wise and character-wise. It appeared that they had hit a point in their life where they "figured it out", and anchored themselves on that point. I put the phrase in quotes, because as an adult, I know the statement is superficial now, but that it certainly how it seemed when I was younger.

Circling back to the post: in my own lived experience, "Men who mean what they say" became that way not necessarily through the sole virtue of honesty, but by guiding themselves using the same set of virtues (honesty included) for large portions of their life. It was very easy to understand what mattered to them and what they believed in, and as an adult at the end of my 20s, it is clear to me that should I want to become the person my younger self aspired to be, following in my teachers' example means making an increasing percent of my actions reflect the virtues that matter the most to me.

But it is a learned process, not one necessarily passed down through merely being a person who has learned that lying is bad. By learning to practice actions which reflect your virtues, you also learn how to avoid shallower "means-justify-the-ends" behavior (e.g. is it more important to NEVER tell a lie, even if speaking only in facts you know to be true creates more harm?)