“The man of virtue makes the difficulty to be overcome his first business, and success only a subsequent consideration: this may be called perfect virtue.”
Confucius is defining ren — humaneness or virtue — through a single behavioral marker: the virtuous man does what is hard first. He does not calculate the outcome before deciding whether to do the right thing.
There is more to this one. The full context — the events behind the words, what the author was living through, and how it applies to the specific situations of fatherhood — is in the app under Deeper Understanding.
Read the full context in DadViceDadVice matches wisdom like this to the real situations of fatherhood — the hard conversation, the long night, the moment you do not know what to say. Every quote is sourced. No motivational filler.