Would You Like to be a Kinder Person?

Then you’ve got to be kind to people when they’re mean or rude to you.

This is how the virtues strengthen: not by doing them when they’re easy, but by doing them when they’re hard.

Consider:

• You cannot get braver unless you do what needs to be done when what needs to be done makes you scared.
• You cannot become more purpose-driven unless you call to mind the purpose of your work when it’s the last thing in the world you’d like to think about.
• You cannot become more curious until you start asking questions where naturally you wouldn’t.
• You cannot get more discerning until you start trying to get to the bottom of complex matters.
  

Your character — your “relatively constant will,” as the late philosophy professor Dallas Willard defined it — is honed not through ease but through struggle.