There are only three virtues!

Attempting to better yourself as a person, means to cultivate and act in accordance with certain principles based on virtue. It can be very confusing to do that because there are so many different virtues where do you even start.

After a couple of years of introspection I have reach the conclusion that there are three most important one, everything else is either a different nuance of these three or you need them as a precursor before you can cultivate something else.

Those three virtues are in the order of importance: honesty, patience and humbleness.

• Perhaps the most important virtue is honesty, it is impossible to have healthy relationships without honesty, an important step in abusing someone is to confuse the other person with a lye.

Honesty is it also important if you want to break out of a vicious cycle, it is pretty much the first step out of recovery. If you are going to change your behaviour you need to be honest with yourself about the consequences that your present behaviour is having over your life.

• The second most important virtue is patience, any significant change takes time, unfortunately nature works slow. In order to reap the benefits of your actions you have to stay long enough in the game to accumulate the necessary skills. If you have no patience there is no pay chance.

Patience is also the precursor of others virtues, like empathy for example which is the capacity to understand the motivation behind someones action. In order to do that you need the patience to try to understand that person rather than jump to any preform conclusion.

In today's world we put so much emphasis on instant gratification which is great where there is no long term negative consequences, lack of patience is probably on of the most common reason of self-sabotage.

Patience is like an endurance race it is more sustainable, the same way if you run a marathon you run much slower than if you would run a 5k, courage is like a sprint race take big risks for high rewards. The problem with courage is that it is exhausting to do, not very sustainable and it can be also dangerous.

• I don't know if you ever heard about the Dunning-Kruger effect that states that the people that underestimate their performance tend to be the best performers while the people that have a very high expectation about themselves tend to be the worst performers.

I think there is a very justify reason why we don't like people who are arrogant, it is not just an arbitrary social taboo.

Not only you can predict how other people perform in the world based on their own opinion about themselves but you can actually self diagnose yourself based on your own opinion about yourself. So you can give yourself more accurate feedback.