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3.39 AVERAGE
3.39 AVERAGE
Building a character is far from a peaceful endeavor. It's war, and your intelligence report is wrong — the enemy is much closer. You see it in every mirror. It's you. Waging a battle against yourself is one of the most ludicrous and honorable things you can do.
To become a great character, picture yourself as Jackie Chan in your customized Armor of God. What would Jackie do next, if Jackie was you? Do that. Samuel Johnson and Michel de Montaigne did.
To become a great character, picture yourself as Jackie Chan in your customized Armor of God. What would Jackie do next, if Jackie was you? Do that. Samuel Johnson and Michel de Montaigne did.
I first became aware of David Brooks when I started regularly watching the PBS Newshour prior to the 2016 presidential election. Labeled as a conservative, I was nonetheless impressed by his common sense and humor. I saw this audio book at the library and with limited knowledge of Brooks, picked it up on a whim.
In The Road to Character, Brooks illustrates his views on the differences between the "resume" virtues and the "legacy" virtues through the lives of a variety of historical figures. The notables include Frances Perkins, Dwight Eisenhower, Dorothy Day (coincidentally I was also reading a biography of Day at the same time I was listening to TRTC.), George Marshall (who was from Uniontown, PA), A. Philip Randolph, Bayard Rustin, Mary Ann Evans (George Eliot), St. Augustine, Samuel Johnson, Johnny Unitas, Joe Namath, Katherine Graham and others. All of this diverse, and not perfect, group displayed outstanding character. Some I knew and learned more about, other I did not know of, but I now want to know more about all of these people.
I plan to purchase the print copy of the book, reread at least parts of it, and share it with my son.
In The Road to Character, Brooks illustrates his views on the differences between the "resume" virtues and the "legacy" virtues through the lives of a variety of historical figures. The notables include Frances Perkins, Dwight Eisenhower, Dorothy Day (coincidentally I was also reading a biography of Day at the same time I was listening to TRTC.), George Marshall (who was from Uniontown, PA), A. Philip Randolph, Bayard Rustin, Mary Ann Evans (George Eliot), St. Augustine, Samuel Johnson, Johnny Unitas, Joe Namath, Katherine Graham and others. All of this diverse, and not perfect, group displayed outstanding character. Some I knew and learned more about, other I did not know of, but I now want to know more about all of these people.
I plan to purchase the print copy of the book, reread at least parts of it, and share it with my son.
Interesting look at some historical figures representing different aspects of character which Brooks wanted to showcase. This is not so much a "how-to" book as it is a general case for valuing some traits that some may consider old-fashioned. I enjoyed reading it and also agree with Brooks that we might have swung a little too far into the Big Me camp away from the more humble Little Me.
The introduction and conclusion were hands down 5 stars.
I've really enjoyed some of David Brooks articles in the NY Times. So after a friend recommended this title, I knew I had to check it out.
Here are some of my favorite excerpts:
Thankfulness is the soil in which pride does not easily grow.
We have an almost unlimited ability to ignore our ignorance.
Humility is the awareness that there's a lot you don't know. And that a lot of what you think you know, is distorted, or wrong. This is the way humility leads to wisdom.
Wisdom is the moral quality of knowing what you don't know, and figuring out a way to handle your ignorance, uncertainty, and limitation.
There is a certain superficiality to modern culture, especially in the moral sphere.
Happiness is insufficient. The ultimate joys are moral joys.
You don't ask, "What do I want from life?" You ask a different set of questions, "What does life want from me?" "What are my circumstances calling me to do?"
To live in the presence of great truths and eternal laws, to be led by permanent ideals, that is what keeps a man patient when the world him, and calm and unspoiled when the world praises him.
What mattered more to long term stability and success was having steady habits, the ability to work, the ability to sense and ward off sloth, and self-indulgence. A disciplined work ethic was really more important than a brilliant mind.
Sin is not some demonic thing, it's just our perverse tendency to fuck things up. To favor the short-term over the long-term, the lower over the higher. Sin, when it is committed over and over again hardens into loyalty to a lower love. The danger of sin in other words, is that it feeds on itself. Small moral compromises on Monday make you more likely to commit other bigger moral compromises on Tuesday. People rarely commit the big sins out of the blue. They walk through a series of doors.
We build character by struggling against our internal sins.
Some sins such as anger and lust are like wild beasts, they have to be fought through habits of restraint. Other sins such as mockery and disrespect are are like stains that can be exsponged only by absolution, by apology, remorse, restitution, and cleansing. Still others, such as stealing, are like a debt, they can be rectified only by repaying what you owe to society.
Pride arises from a perverse desire for status and superiority. The only remedy is to humble oneself before others.
People also believed that manual labor was a school for character.
We can't always resist our desires, but we can change and reorder our desires by focusing on our higher loves.
Moderation is based on the idea that things do not fit neatly together.
The cognitive sciences have replaced literature as a way people attempt to understand their own minds.
The first big thing suffering does is it drags you deeper into yourself. People that endure routine suffering are taken beneath the routine busyness of life and find they are not who they believe themselves to be.
Emotion robs you of agency. Regard emotions as one might regard fire. Useful when tightly controlled, but a ravaging force when left unchecked.
Some people find incentive and reward deep within themselves. They don't require urging or applause. Such people are terribly alone, without the release most people find in the easy sharing of mind and heart with many people. For all their self-sufficiency, they are incomplete. And if they are fortunate, they find completion in one or two others. There are not more than two usually. The heart opened to a lover. The mind, to a friend.
Love humbles us.
Love depends on the willingness of each person to be vulnerable, and it deepens that vulnerability. It works because each person exposes their nakedness and the other rushes to meet it. You will be loved the day when you will be able to show your weakness without the person using it to assert his strength.
If you set out trying to achieve inner peace and a sense of holiness, you won't get it. That happens only obliquely, when your attention is focused on something external. That happens only as a byproduct of a state of self-forgetfulness, when your energies are focused on something large.
We don't become better because we acquire new information, we become better because we acquire better loves.
Education is a process of love formation.
Technology has had 3 major effects on how we see the world. 1) Communications have become faster and busier. It's hard to attend to the depths and stillness. We need quiet. 2) Social media allows us to always be in the privacy of our own screen. You'll be the sun in your own media solar system. 3) Social media encourages a broadcasting personality. We are engaged in a hyper-competitive struggle for attention. We all turn into little brand managers. Creating a falsely upbeat self.
We live in a culture where people are defined by their external abilities and achievements, in which a cult of busyness develops as everybody frantically tells each other how overcommitted they are. This encourages us to become approval seeking machines.
Humility code:
We don't live for happiness, we live for holiness. We crave purpose and virtue.
We are flawed creatures. We have an innate tendency towards selfishness and overcondfidence. We know what it deep and important, but we pursue things that are shallow and vain. We give into short term desires even when we know we shouldn't
We sin, but also have the capacity to recognize it and overcome it.
In the struggle against your own weakness, humility is the greatest virtue. Humility reminds you that you are not the center of the universe, but that you serve a larger order.
Pride is the central vice. Pride makes us more close-minded than we should be. Pride makes it hard for us to be vulnerable before those whose love we need. Because of pride we try to prove we are better than those around us.
It doesn't matter if you work at a hedge fund or a charity serving the poor, there are heroes and schmucks in both worlds.
If you make small, disciplined choices, you are slowing engraving certain tendencies into your mind. You are making it more likely that you will desire the right things and take the right actions. If you do behave with habitual self-discipline, you will become constant and dependable.
The things that lead us astray are short-term: lust, fear, vanity, gluttony. The things we call character endure over the long-term: courage, honesty, humility. People with character are anchored with permanent attachments to important things.
No person can achieve self-mastery on his/her own. Everybody needs redemptive assistance from the outside. You have to draw on the forces outside yourself to cope with the forces outside yourself. Gratitude fills the soul, and with it the desire to serve and give back.
Defeating weakness often means quieting the self. Only by quieting the self, by muting the sound of your own ego, can you see the world clearly. Only by quieting the self can you be open to the external sources of strengths you will need. The struggle against weakness thus requires the habits of self-effacement, reticence, modesty, obedience to some larger thing, and a capacity for reverence and admiration.
No good life is possible unless it is organized around a vocation. If you try to use your work to serve yourself, you'll find your ambitions and expectations will forever run ahead and you'll never be satisfied. If you try to serve the community, you'll always wonder if people appreciate you enough. But if you serve work that is intrinsically compelling and focused just on being excellent at that, you will wind up serving yourself and the community obliquely. A vocation is not found by looking withing and finding your passion, it is found by looking without, and asking what life is asking of us. What problem is addressed by an activity you intrinsically enjoy?
Maturity is not based on talent or any of the physical gifts that help you ace an IQ test, or run fast, or move gracefully. It is not comparative. It is earned not by being better than other people at something, but by being better than you used to be. It is earned by being dependable in times of testing. Straight in times of temptation. Maturity does not glitter. It is not built on the traits that make people celebrities. A mature person possesses a settled unity of purpose. A mature person has achieved a state in which the restlessness is over, the confusion about the meaning and purpose of life is calmed. A mature person can make decisions without relying on the negative and positive reactions from admirers or detractors, because the mature person has steady criteria to determine what is right. That person has said a multitude of no's for the sake of a few, overwhelming yes's.
I've really enjoyed some of David Brooks articles in the NY Times. So after a friend recommended this title, I knew I had to check it out.
Here are some of my favorite excerpts:
Thankfulness is the soil in which pride does not easily grow.
We have an almost unlimited ability to ignore our ignorance.
Humility is the awareness that there's a lot you don't know. And that a lot of what you think you know, is distorted, or wrong. This is the way humility leads to wisdom.
Wisdom is the moral quality of knowing what you don't know, and figuring out a way to handle your ignorance, uncertainty, and limitation.
There is a certain superficiality to modern culture, especially in the moral sphere.
Happiness is insufficient. The ultimate joys are moral joys.
You don't ask, "What do I want from life?" You ask a different set of questions, "What does life want from me?" "What are my circumstances calling me to do?"
To live in the presence of great truths and eternal laws, to be led by permanent ideals, that is what keeps a man patient when the world him, and calm and unspoiled when the world praises him.
What mattered more to long term stability and success was having steady habits, the ability to work, the ability to sense and ward off sloth, and self-indulgence. A disciplined work ethic was really more important than a brilliant mind.
Sin is not some demonic thing, it's just our perverse tendency to fuck things up. To favor the short-term over the long-term, the lower over the higher. Sin, when it is committed over and over again hardens into loyalty to a lower love. The danger of sin in other words, is that it feeds on itself. Small moral compromises on Monday make you more likely to commit other bigger moral compromises on Tuesday. People rarely commit the big sins out of the blue. They walk through a series of doors.
We build character by struggling against our internal sins.
Some sins such as anger and lust are like wild beasts, they have to be fought through habits of restraint. Other sins such as mockery and disrespect are are like stains that can be exsponged only by absolution, by apology, remorse, restitution, and cleansing. Still others, such as stealing, are like a debt, they can be rectified only by repaying what you owe to society.
Pride arises from a perverse desire for status and superiority. The only remedy is to humble oneself before others.
People also believed that manual labor was a school for character.
We can't always resist our desires, but we can change and reorder our desires by focusing on our higher loves.
Moderation is based on the idea that things do not fit neatly together.
The cognitive sciences have replaced literature as a way people attempt to understand their own minds.
The first big thing suffering does is it drags you deeper into yourself. People that endure routine suffering are taken beneath the routine busyness of life and find they are not who they believe themselves to be.
Emotion robs you of agency. Regard emotions as one might regard fire. Useful when tightly controlled, but a ravaging force when left unchecked.
Some people find incentive and reward deep within themselves. They don't require urging or applause. Such people are terribly alone, without the release most people find in the easy sharing of mind and heart with many people. For all their self-sufficiency, they are incomplete. And if they are fortunate, they find completion in one or two others. There are not more than two usually. The heart opened to a lover. The mind, to a friend.
Love humbles us.
Love depends on the willingness of each person to be vulnerable, and it deepens that vulnerability. It works because each person exposes their nakedness and the other rushes to meet it. You will be loved the day when you will be able to show your weakness without the person using it to assert his strength.
If you set out trying to achieve inner peace and a sense of holiness, you won't get it. That happens only obliquely, when your attention is focused on something external. That happens only as a byproduct of a state of self-forgetfulness, when your energies are focused on something large.
We don't become better because we acquire new information, we become better because we acquire better loves.
Education is a process of love formation.
Technology has had 3 major effects on how we see the world. 1) Communications have become faster and busier. It's hard to attend to the depths and stillness. We need quiet. 2) Social media allows us to always be in the privacy of our own screen. You'll be the sun in your own media solar system. 3) Social media encourages a broadcasting personality. We are engaged in a hyper-competitive struggle for attention. We all turn into little brand managers. Creating a falsely upbeat self.
We live in a culture where people are defined by their external abilities and achievements, in which a cult of busyness develops as everybody frantically tells each other how overcommitted they are. This encourages us to become approval seeking machines.
Humility code:
We don't live for happiness, we live for holiness. We crave purpose and virtue.
We are flawed creatures. We have an innate tendency towards selfishness and overcondfidence. We know what it deep and important, but we pursue things that are shallow and vain. We give into short term desires even when we know we shouldn't
We sin, but also have the capacity to recognize it and overcome it.
In the struggle against your own weakness, humility is the greatest virtue. Humility reminds you that you are not the center of the universe, but that you serve a larger order.
Pride is the central vice. Pride makes us more close-minded than we should be. Pride makes it hard for us to be vulnerable before those whose love we need. Because of pride we try to prove we are better than those around us.
It doesn't matter if you work at a hedge fund or a charity serving the poor, there are heroes and schmucks in both worlds.
If you make small, disciplined choices, you are slowing engraving certain tendencies into your mind. You are making it more likely that you will desire the right things and take the right actions. If you do behave with habitual self-discipline, you will become constant and dependable.
The things that lead us astray are short-term: lust, fear, vanity, gluttony. The things we call character endure over the long-term: courage, honesty, humility. People with character are anchored with permanent attachments to important things.
No person can achieve self-mastery on his/her own. Everybody needs redemptive assistance from the outside. You have to draw on the forces outside yourself to cope with the forces outside yourself. Gratitude fills the soul, and with it the desire to serve and give back.
Defeating weakness often means quieting the self. Only by quieting the self, by muting the sound of your own ego, can you see the world clearly. Only by quieting the self can you be open to the external sources of strengths you will need. The struggle against weakness thus requires the habits of self-effacement, reticence, modesty, obedience to some larger thing, and a capacity for reverence and admiration.
No good life is possible unless it is organized around a vocation. If you try to use your work to serve yourself, you'll find your ambitions and expectations will forever run ahead and you'll never be satisfied. If you try to serve the community, you'll always wonder if people appreciate you enough. But if you serve work that is intrinsically compelling and focused just on being excellent at that, you will wind up serving yourself and the community obliquely. A vocation is not found by looking withing and finding your passion, it is found by looking without, and asking what life is asking of us. What problem is addressed by an activity you intrinsically enjoy?
Maturity is not based on talent or any of the physical gifts that help you ace an IQ test, or run fast, or move gracefully. It is not comparative. It is earned not by being better than other people at something, but by being better than you used to be. It is earned by being dependable in times of testing. Straight in times of temptation. Maturity does not glitter. It is not built on the traits that make people celebrities. A mature person possesses a settled unity of purpose. A mature person has achieved a state in which the restlessness is over, the confusion about the meaning and purpose of life is calmed. A mature person can make decisions without relying on the negative and positive reactions from admirers or detractors, because the mature person has steady criteria to determine what is right. That person has said a multitude of no's for the sake of a few, overwhelming yes's.
A counterculture book in the sense that it reminds the reader that there once was a time when people didn't base self-worth on academic or career accomplishments; that achievement or "social capital" didn't = love, admiration, etc. People were encouraged to turn away from seeking external validation or spending time "finding themselves." People were shamed for exaggerating their skills, their talents, their authenticity of self, if it led to the suffering of others.
It was a difficult read for me, since I've grown up so immersed in today's culture of "always be branding". It is truly challenging to untangle yourself from that constant, nagging sense of lack of productivity, fear of missing out, desire for external affirmation. It was oddly inspiring to be reminded that, in the end, they won't be reading off your resume during your eulogy.
It was a difficult read for me, since I've grown up so immersed in today's culture of "always be branding". It is truly challenging to untangle yourself from that constant, nagging sense of lack of productivity, fear of missing out, desire for external affirmation. It was oddly inspiring to be reminded that, in the end, they won't be reading off your resume during your eulogy.
Wasn’t looking for a series of biographical sketches. Ryan Holiday does a much better job in his Stoic virtue series where relevant biographical details are added. Maybe personal preference, but this just didn’t work for me.
challenging
hopeful
informative
inspiring
reflective
slow-paced
As {important} as character is, and as much as i admire David Brooks, this book.. well it was just too much for me and i am still puzzling as to why. His commentary, with examples about our society in regard to meritocracy, self-importance and lack of humility in sport, government leaders and "famous personalities" is spot on but left me feeling hopeless rather than hopeful. I am also asking myself, is it possible that at this moment in time, am i looking for uplifting solutions rather than history and anecdotes of how we got here? More personal reflection is needed ...