Form follows function. Act like the kind of person you want to grow up to be. Even if you are physically adult, you still have lots of growing up to do. Be always open and honest with yourself about who you are, what choices you are making, and why you are making them. Make sure to know at least one person whom you trust to be similarly open and honest with you, who will serve to check or corroborate your own self-regard. I choose to be good.

To be truly good requires rightness of both action and intent. A truly good person will intend only good results, and will use only good means to achieve them. There is no question of temptation; offered choices between good and bad, the truly good person will find the bad choice simply impossible. This makes good people easy to predict and hence rare.

To live in the real world requires compromises. People of less than pure intent abound, and must be dealt with. Specifically, they must be prevented from achieving evil ends or employing evil means. In a practical sense, this means employing punishment and rehabilitation together, both deterring and correcting the improper behavior. This is more difficult than simply executing them, but the good person must naturally seek to give the wrong-doer every possible chance to reform.

Most people are not born good; children have a tendency to be very self-centered and need to learn to respect others. Even then, it takes more than that to be truly good. Not only must the action be good, but the reasoning behind it must be as well. Thus, refusing to do evil because it would lead to punishment is not goodness; it is self-preservation. Likewise, trying to do good because only good people get to go to Heaven is not truly good; that is attempting to gain a reward for encouraged behavior. For an action to be truly good, it has to be chosen because any alternative is unthinkable.

It may be possible to become a good person, or a better person. Choose what kind of person you want to be and what kind of person you would admire. Whenever the chance comes up, think not what will be best for you, but which choice you would find admirable in another. Over time, you will find that some of those early choices are no longer choices at all, but automatic and inherent. To make the choice to pursue evil has become unthinkable; in those actions you are being truly good.

Whenever a time comes up when there is a chance to do good or not do good, willingly and knowingly choose to do the good deed. Sometimes this will be spontaneously chosing to actively do something nice rather than do nothing; sometimes it will be choosing to do nothing rather than do evil. Both means and ends must be chosen for their rightness.

This works only for attributes under your own control. If you would be a happy person, then when you are sad you can choose to behave happily, and in time you will come to automatically shun dismay. You cannot choose to act famous and expect fame to follow; fame is a social attribute assigned by others.