I speak on lessons I learned this week on integrity from my economics class, Ender’s Game from my personal reading, and Japanese modernization from my Modern East Asia history class. Integrity as My Highest Incentive Oct 11, 2026 · @Jesse Everett I’ve been thinking a lot about incentives lately, and about integrity in my incentives. So many things drive us: money, power, success. But could I make integrity, pure integrity, my highest incentive? Welcome to Perfect Tense, where I share weekly reflections on what I’ve been learning. To start off, I want to talk about one of my favorite books. Integrity as my highest incentive As a Man Thinketh by James Allen was written in 1902. In it, Allen gives an in-depth look at Proverbs 23:7: “For as he thinketh in his heart, so is he.” It’s a short book with so much depth, and it really changed how I view myself, my thoughts, and how they’re shaping me. One of my favorite quotes is this: “The soul attracts that which it secretly harbours; that which it loves, and also that which it fears; it reaches the height of its cherished aspirations; it falls to the level of its unchastened desires.” It has me thinking again about what I am secretly harboring. My routine, unseen laziness is visible only to me. Why isn’t my own integrity strong enough to resist it? I think all of us want to say we have pure integrity and that we work hard all the time. I really want to. But in reality, there’s a routine, unseen laziness that hurts me. Sharecropping and shirking In my economics class, we’ve been learning about incentives. The discussion actually started with sharecropping. For those who don’t know, sharecropping is a contractual agreement between a landowner and a laborer: the laborer works and lives on the land in exchange for a share of the crop. We typically associate sharecropping with the Deep South, but it has existed, and still exists, in many parts of the world. It isn’t inherently bad, discriminatory, or racist in its own right. Done fairly, sharecropping can actually be a good way to incentivize both the laborer and the landowner. Other classic land-labor contracts include land renting, where the laborer pays the full rent and keeps the whole crop, and the wage contract, where the landowner pays the laborer a wage and keeps the whole crop. It’s not unlike commission pay versus salary. The renter wants to work harder to ensure a bigger crop. The wage laborer may not work as hard, because the owner takes the full crop anyway and the laborer gets paid regardless. My professor asked whether any of us had ever shirked at work. I thought it was a funny word. To shirk is to avoid or neglect a duty, responsibility, or piece of work, usually out of laziness or reluctance. It’s basically not working as hard as you could because you think you can get away with it, and most of the time you can. He argued that every one of us was guilty of shirking, whether or not we consciously decided to. It made me really think about how I operate and where I’m falling short. Imposter syndrome My personal integrity has been on my mind a lot. I’m balancing more and more responsibility. I’m working more, I’m in school, and in about 30 days I’m likely to be a father; our baby is due in about a month. As I’ve been working more, I haven’t been trying as hard in school, and in turn I’m less focused at work. It’s hard to navigate all of those responsibilities, and I want to keep my integrity strong as I go into this next phase of life. As I’ve caught myself slipping, I’ve also started to feel more like a fake. I think more about how others are going to find me out, that I’m not doing a good job. Even in simple things, like listening to a podcast while doing routine work. I’ve felt strong surges of imposter syndrome: the unnerving feeling that others will discover you’re not competent or qualified for what you’re doing. I feel this especially with my goals. Right now I’m planning on law school. Others can argue that law doesn’t require the brightest minds of all time, but for me it’s a high bar. Even the LSAT I’m planning to take next summer feels like a lot. I consistently have negative thoughts that I’m not smart enough and that I’ll never be at the level I need to be. From the law students and young attorneys I’ve talked to, this feeling is persistent for them too. I can’t imagine doing all that work, doing well on the LSAT, getting through law school, working as an attorney, and still feeling like people are going to find me out. Even Albert Einstein had these feelings. Speaking of his own status, he said, “I feel compelled to think of myself as an involuntary swindler.” He felt the esteem others held for his work was undeserved. We know Einstein as one of the greatest scientists of all time, and he still felt he didn’t deserve the praise. I think a large part of our imposter syndrome comes from our real, imperfect work. We will never fulfill our tasks perfectly. We’ll take breaks we didn’t need, procrastinate when bored, and let our minds wander. That’s natural, and it may always be part of us. It may even be good for us to always have something to strive for. The cure: becoming whole For me, at least, the true cure for imposter syndrome could be found in developing an even higher level of integrity. This last weekend I listened to a message from Elder Quentin L. Cook about integrity. He said, “In the Father’s plan, integrity, virtue, and happiness are intrinsically linked. Living a virtuous life with integrity aligns us with God’s will. True happiness, often translated as blessedness, is the actual outcome of integrity and being virtuous.” Imagine what it would be like, the next time an imposter thought comes to mind, to answer it by saying, “I did every ounce of work required to be here.” Not as a way to convince yourself, but because it’s actually true. You never had AI do a school project for you. You never cut the corner. Just thinking about being in that place sounds powerful to me. The word integrity comes from the Latin integer: whole, untouched, intact. It’s built from in-, meaning “not,” and the root tag-, the same root as the verb tangere, “to touch.” Something integer is something untouched. It’s the same word we use for a whole number. I don’t want my life’s accomplishments to have decimals. The soul “reaches the height of its cherished aspirations; it falls to the level of its unchastened desires.” So what do I love? What am I secretly harboring? What are my fears, and what are my cherished aspirations? If I’m going to fall to the level of my unchastened desires, then I need to lessen those desires. If I really make integrity my greatest incentive, I’m not sure yet what that looks like. Maybe it’s greater accountability at work and in school. But if I can end every day saying I put everything out there with full integrity, that I was whole and untouched, that sounds beautiful to me. What if that became the thing I love, the height of my cherished aspirations, instead of the respect or status I imagine I’ll have later in life? How would that change how I work? I think there’s real potential for greatness there. Writing a whole novel to build one character Moving on to some other things I learned this week. I spent some time with Ender’s Game by Orson Scott Card. I first read it in junior high, I think, and it’s a great book. If you haven’t read it, you definitely should. I wouldn’t call it a kids’ novel; it has some pretty deep themes about death, and the governments in it are pretty evil. (Spoilers ahead, so feel free to skip this section if you haven’t read it.) This week I started looking into the sequel, Speaker for the Dead, and read Card’s introduction, where he talks about writing it. He says Speaker for the Dead was the book he tried to write first, and that Ender’s Game came out of wanting to write Speaker for the Dead. The timeline is fascinating. Card first wrote Ender’s Game as a short story published in a magazine. Years later, he was trying to … This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit jgeverett.substack.com
