David Brooks is one of my favorite living nonfiction writers. His writing is a rare mix of humility, simplicity and breadth. He thinks deeply about what makes a good person and a good life, questions that are impossible to answer and invaluable to understand yet commonly ignored.
His op-ed The Service Patch is a particular favorite. To quote:
Many of these students seem to have a blinkered view of their options. There’s crass but affluent investment banking. There’s the poor but noble nonprofit world. And then there is the world of high-tech start-ups, which magically provides money and coolness simultaneously. […] In whatever field you go into, you will face greed, frustration and failure. You may find your life challenged by depression, alcoholism, infidelity, your own stupidity and self-indulgence. So how should you structure your soul to prepare for this? Simply working at Amnesty International instead of McKinsey is not necessarily going to help you with these primal character tests. […] It’s worth noting that you can devote your life to community service and be a total schmuck. You can spend your life on Wall Street and be a hero. Understanding heroism and schmuckdom requires fewer Excel spreadsheets, more Dostoyevsky and the Book of Job.
It resonates with the deepest-felt dilemmas of my 20s, which themselves were the result of questions I ignored in my teens, in the pursuit of Ivy League acceptance letters and resume-varnishing job offers.
David Brooks gave the below talk on character at the Aspen Ideas Fest. I took extensive notes with a reminder to review them often. I wanted to share them with you.
Here is how I’d summarize the below
- we are mostly good people who aren’t taught about character and its importance in our lives
- the Greek character code is based on honor and strength and excellence
- the Biblical code is based on humility and love and kindness
- it’s the struggle with this duality that makes us who we are
- to build character, focus on the right habits, surround yourself with the right people and be organized
- religion plays an important role, giving us “awareness of something bigger than yourself”
And here are the full notes:
David Brooks — The Character Code @ Aspen Ideas Fest — REVIEW OFTEN
- David grew up in Greenwich Village to liberal Jewish parents who hung out with hippies
- he went to UChicago — “the school where fun goes to die”, a “Baptist school where atheist professors teach Jewish students St. Thomas Aquinas”
“world full of good people who don’t have a good vocabulary for character” - imagine a world where you have the neutron, gravity, neutrino, but no system to fit them together
- study asked college students to name a moral dilemma, most couldn’t; when pushed,
fell back on a “motive-ism” — what feels right for me is right for me, what feels right for you is right for you - existence of uber moms — weigh less than their children; kids raised in this atmosphere are trained in everything, but the most important — character — they’re on their own
- there’s a character code from history, that we’ve forgotten
- (a lot of warfare history that I left out)
- what motivated Athenian decisions?
- grew up with ideology, inspired by Homer (they quoted him like Christians quote Bible today)
- an Honor Code based on how transitory/fleeting life is,
how deeply insignificant an individual life can be - you should fight against that insignificance, behave courageously to achieve eternal fame and glory
- THE GREEK CODE — “Homeric man risks life to win honor”
- extremely competitive; if won Olympic medal, free meals for life
- asserts self, brags and shows off
- prowess,
be excellent at something and display it to the world - lack of self-doubt, very proud
- the Homeric code, inspired many: Alexander the Great, Napoleon, American founders; Alexander Hamilton called desire for glory “the ruling passion of the noblest minds”
- seen in sports heroism, all politicians, action movies — brave, strong, never self-doubt
- there is another code — Moses and the Bible, Jesus
- Moses is meekest man on Earth
- bad public speaker, quiet shepherd
- when anointed by God, he said “you’ve got the wrong guy”
- Jesus, sermon on the Mount, turns every Greek virtue on its head
- loftiness of spirit by caring for downtrodden
achieve greatness by demonstrating meekness - power through dependence on God
- strength through vulnerability
- wisdom by accepting ignorance
- GREEK versus BIBLICAL model
- Western Civilization tries to fuse the two
- chivalry — Greek emphasis on honor with Christian emphasis on love
- Abraham Lincoln personifies — ambition with submission
- George H.W. Bush — ran for President, but raised not to talk about himself, when he did so in campaigning, his Mom would call him and say, “George, you’re talking about yourself”
- Joseph Soleveitchik and the two Adams (for more, see Wikipedia), the majestic versus the covenantal; both willed by God, competitive versus cooperative
- in merging these two strains, we’ve lost them both
- first, we don’t teach Western Civ anymore
- lost touch with Heroic code because it’s elitist
- lost touch with Biblical code because we’re uncomfortable with sin, assumption “that we have it baked into us”
- “good people who are a little formless”
- people living this duality
- Atul Gawande in a famously self-confident profession (surgery), but incredible motivation/modesty to see unpleasant facts; does something daring but starting from feeling of weakness
- Jim Collins — sort of a moral philosopher, “always celebrating a certain sort of hero”
- celebrates the quiet unassuming CEO — boring, anal types
promotes a sort of moral code — diligent, prepared, Level 5 leaders “extreme personal humility with extreme personal will”
- Clayton Christensen — spent an hour each day asking, “what is my life about”
- humility is: not thinking too highly OR too much about yourself, understanding your own weakness and that life is about struggle
- how do we instill these qualities?
- “you can’t change your mind and then your behavior, if we did that, New Years resolutions would work”
- get the little habits right; when they asked Greg Maddux “how’d your day go”, he responded “67 of 73” (as in, 67 pitches left his hand how he wanted, had no control after that)
- being organized, neat
being around exemplars ; we are mimic machines — baby at 43 minutes old wagged her tongue in response to a wagging tongue- we’re formed by institutions
- religion has an important role to play
grace, gratitude, awareness of something bigger than yourself - St Augustine in Confessions said he spent 4 years beating himself up for stealing an apple when he was 14
- generally most impressive characters he knew were either deeply religious or grew up in religious atmosphere