You bring up a crucial point Davide - the point is to strive for this and not beat yourself up for falling short. We all fall short on them every day. For me they are guideposts that allow me to recenter how I am approaching my life and also what my internal conversation is with myself.
I think your point about letting oneself off the hook is valid. I think if you're trying to practice honesty and intentionality, you have to be able to self-assess truthfully without placing judgment on yourself. From practice, this is hard to do because if your self-assessment is negative, then you have to step outside of yourself and know that it doesn't reflect on you as a 'bad' person. It's just that you fell short and you aim to do better. So many people including myself in the past conflate the 'I did a bad thing' to 'I am a bad person'. You have to decouple those thoughts and understand that failure is part of the journey and you're only doomed to repeat it if you don't learn from it and engage in personal growth. Doesn't mean that the failure may not happen again, but your response to it will be different. I believe this is probably the most important thing I have learned in my journey to improve my emotional fitness.
So yeh, there's tons of nuance to this and having honest self-reflection and balancing different viewpoints objectively as possible can point you in a forward direction.
