The small lies that slide at a part-time job become headlines when you’re running the company.

Habits scale with position, and the ones formed when nothing was at stake do not announce themselves as habits. Shaving a few minutes, covering a mistake, telling a customer something not quite true: each is small and each is practice. What changes later is not your character but the size of the audience.

Pick the minor dishonesty you currently treat as harmless and stop it while stopping is easy. Notice the situations that produce it, since it is usually a specific kind of pressure rather than a general weakness. Small integrity is cheaper to build now than to install later.