The Road to Character by David Brooks

Notes

Two opposing sides of our natures:

• Adam 1
  • career-oriented, ambitious side of our nature
  • wants to have high status and win victories
• Adam 2
  • wants to embody mora qualities
  • a quiet but solid sense of right and wrong, not only to do good, but be good
  • wants to have cohesive inner sould

Takeaways

Roughly rephrased takeways from the last chapter of the book:

1. We don’t live for happiness, we live for holiness

• we seek to live live of purpose, righteousness, and virtue, not just for pleasure
• best life is oriented around excellence of the soul, moral joy, gratitued, and tranquillity

2. The above proposition defines the goal of live

• road to character begins by understanding our nature
• the core being that we are flawed - tendenecy toward selfishness and overconfidence

3. In the struggle against your own weakness, humility is the greatest virtue

• humility is having accurate assesment of our nature and place in the world

4. Pride is the central vice

• pride blinds us to our weaknesses, makes us more certain and closed-minded, makes us more coldhearted, and deludes us into thinking we are authors of our own lifes
• because of pride we try to prove that we are better than those around us

5. Once the necessities for survival are satisfied, the struggle against sin and for virtue is the central drama of live

• winning is not possible, the goal is to get better at waging the moral war
• there are heroes and schmucks in all parts of world

6. Character is built in the course of your inner confrontation

• one does become more disciplined, considerate, and loving through a thousand small acts of self-control, sharing, and friendship
• character is about engraving certain tendencies into our mind

7. The things that lead us astray are short term - lust, feat, vanity, gluttony
8. The things the compose character are long term - courage, honesty, humility
9. No person can achieve self-mastery on their own
10. Defeating wekness often means quieting the self

• the struggle against wekness requires reticence and modesty, muting our own ego

11. Wisdom emerges out of a collection of intellectual virtues

• knowing how to behave when perfect knowledge is lacking, which is almost always

12. No good life is possible unless it is organized around a vocation

• vocation is not found by looking within but by asking what life is asking of us

13. Maturity is achieved by being better than you used to be, it is not comparative