Reputation in Dollars

How much is a reputation worth? I’m not sure a price exists. That’s why people bankrupt themselves quite literally to maintain it. How people think of us is translatable to wealth, relationships, playing time on a sports team, credit of course, etc.  According to Dictionary.com,  character is:

the aggregate of features and traits that form the individual nature of some person or thing”

The problem with developing these features, however,  is that we take days off from the them. Some days we struggle with traits like honesty, dependability, patience and such. We tend to take “plays” off the way an athlete might when fatigue sets in during a game. But development ceases when routine is broken and that’s why character is a buzz word with multiple meanings in 2009. But I think I’m on to something. Everybody cares about their Rep. We’re socialized to do so and yet programmed to act as if we don’t care about the opinions of others.  For superficial and genuine objectives, people spend a lifetime flirting with character in as much as it is connected to reputation because your Rep is currency that spends worldwide.

A teenage boy says to his girlfriend, “Why can’t I have friends who are female? Don’t you trust me?” Even the boy values reputability though he may not intend to master the traits that provide its substance. He knows that with reputation, he has access to the girl’s heart and without the “roaming charges”, if you can dig what I’m sayin’. A free agent in the National Basketball Association knows that reputation is synonymous with gainful employment in a profession where the minimum salary for veterans is around $1.2 million. Reputation has universal appeal and as long as it can be used to push the importance of the aggregate traits, I’m all in. So what have I learned? I know that when mentoring, where all my horror stories about growing up in the ‘hood fail, it’s about time to rely on something palatable to all walks – Reputability and its fundamental ingredients.