God Is Watching When No One Else Is

I’ve walked away from money. Real money. The kind that would have made a meaningful difference in my life at the time. Not because the deal was illegal. Not because anyone would have found out. Because I wouldn’t have been able to look at myself the same way after.

That’s the whole framework. That’s the post.

But let me unpack it, because I think most people in business have this backwards.

The Three Floors

Everyone has an ethical floor. The question is where it sits.

For most people, the floor is legal. If it’s not illegal, it’s fair game. This is the default setting for business. Optimize everything up to the line, and the line is whatever a lawyer says you can get away with. It works. It keeps you out of jail. It also produces the kind of behavior that makes people hate marketers, salespeople, and executives.

The second floor is reputational. Would I be embarrassed if this became public? This is better. It filters out the obviously shady stuff. But it’s still reactive. You’re not asking whether something is right. You’re asking whether you’d get caught. The ethics are downstream of the optics.

The third floor is the one I operate on. Would I be comfortable with God watching this? Not metaphorically. I mean it literally. I believe in God. I believe He sees what I do when nobody else is looking. That belief isn’t a constraint on my business. It’s the foundation of it.

Why Constraints Make You Better

People hear “ethical constraints” and think limitation. I’ve experienced the opposite. Having a hard floor forces you to be more creative, not less.

When you take manipulation off the table, you have to learn persuasion. When you can’t exploit urgency, you have to build genuine value. When you refuse to lie about results, you have to actually get results worth talking about. Every shortcut you remove forces you to develop a real skill in its place.

I’ve watched competitors run campaigns I wouldn’t run. Messaging I wouldn’t approve. Tactics I wouldn’t use. Some of them worked in the short term. But the ones built on deception have a half-life. The trust erodes. The reviews catch up. The reputation tax comes due eventually.

The thing about doing it right is that it takes longer to show results, but the results are real. They hold up under scrutiny. They don’t require you to remember which version of the story you told to which person.

The Deals I’ve Walked Away From

I won’t get specific. But I’ve been offered partnerships that required misrepresenting outcomes. Projects where the business model depended on people not reading the fine print. Opportunities where the upside was obvious and the ethical cost was “minor” by most people’s standards.

Every single time, the calculus was simple. Not whether it was legal. Not whether I’d get caught. Whether I could live with it.

And here’s what I’ve noticed: every time I’ve walked away from something that felt wrong, something better showed up. Not immediately. Not as a cosmic reward. But because the act of saying no clarified what I was actually looking for. It sharpened the filter. Made the next decision easier.

The people who never say no don’t develop that filter. They take everything that’s profitable and wonder why their portfolio of work feels hollow.

This Isn’t a Religious Argument

I want to be clear about something. I’m not saying you need to believe in God to have ethics. I’m saying that I do believe, and that belief gives me a framework that doesn’t bend. It’s not up for quarterly review. It doesn’t adjust based on market conditions. It doesn’t negotiate with incentives.

Most ethical frameworks in business are negotiable by design. “Do the right thing” sounds good until the right thing costs you a quarter’s revenue. “Act with integrity” works until integrity conflicts with growth targets. These frameworks fail under pressure because they were built for fair weather.

Mine doesn’t fail under pressure because it’s not mine to modify. The standard exists outside of me. I didn’t set it. I can’t lower it when it’s inconvenient. And honestly, that’s a relief. It means I never have to agonize over where the line is. The line is fixed. My only job is to stay on the right side of it.

The Competitive Advantage Nobody Talks About

Here’s the part that surprises people: having a hard ethical floor is a competitive advantage. Not just a moral one. A practical one.

People trust you faster when they sense you have principles you won’t bend. Employees stay longer when they know the company won’t ask them to do things they’re ashamed of. Partners refer you to their networks because your reputation is clean. Clients stay because they’ve never been misled.

Trust is the most expensive thing in business to build and the easiest to destroy. Every corner you cut, every half-truth you tell, every “minor” ethical compromise makes the trust more fragile. And fragile trust is expensive trust. You end up spending more on damage control, legal review, and reputation management than you would have spent just doing it right.

I don’t track the ROI of my ethics. That would defeat the purpose. But I know, from experience, that the businesses I’ve been part of that operated with a clear moral floor performed better over time than the ones that didn’t. Not because God rewards good behavior with revenue. Because trust creates the conditions for everything else to work.

Do the thing you can live with. The results follow.