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[Music] thank you Father thank you all I hope you’re all feeling good I’m feeling great just over a year ago um I feel I still feel too young for this but I became a Grandpa um you you you’re allowed to agree thank you you’re you’re allowed to agree that I look too young for that thank you um so this is is our eldest daughter who had a son and his his name is Owen that’s little Owen and now I want to so so because it was just over a year ago Owen has been learning to walk and I’m going to show you a little video very
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short video of Owen taking his first steps this isn’t just proud grandpa show off this there’s a point to this so so so so watch carefully watch carefully and there’s Owen taking his first few steps okay did you notice the intensity with which he takes every step how much he concentrates let me show you again this time in slow motion watch carefully watch every every step try that again there we go okay see that look tongue between his teeth right every step concentrating lot of hard work in in in
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taking those steps why why is such hard work it’s because at that stage he hadn’t yet developed the habit of walking yeah but we know you and I soon enough that once that habit of walking is established he wouldn’t give a second thought to every step so from from concentrating to every step to it’s just don’t even think about it and then before you know it he’s out there mowing the lawn for you right wouldn’t it be great if children could learn every habit that they needed for success in life in the same way that they learn how to walk in other words naturally but they don’t they don’t
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because there are habits of thought of action and feeling that kids just don’t learn even though they are vitally important for making decisions for relating to others and for managing emotions these are habits that have to be taught they don’t come naturally like walking does and these habits were taught by pretty much every major civilization in history before ours and even ours but until recently until recently when in the majority of schools these habits are no longer being taught as as a result in the same way that Owen had to really concentrate on
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every step that he took before he got the habit of walking we see too many people particularly young people struggling with making decisions relating to others managing their emotions now why why does this matter you might say okay so people have to struggle a bit to make a decision or they have a struggle with their emotions or struggle to establish relationships I want to suggest to you that this matters very very much and that indeed it is a major root cause of many of the problems facing our society today so poor decisions in their personal lives among young people lead
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to all kinds of catastrophic consequences as we know we also see what happens when they grow up in terms of poor decisions in business poor decisions in government all kinds of troubling consequences the inability to establish and maintain human relationships is at the root of everything from the decline in marriage with all of the terrible consequences that flow from that to the great division in our country where neighbor hates neighbor because they’re just who you vote for and then the very real pandemic of anxiety and depression particularly among young people is
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because of an inability to to manage emotions and it’s all because these habits of thought action and feeling haven’t been established that’s the root cause of these problems have you noticed among young people if you’re in a school with among your students or if you run a business or an apostolate among your young employees just how fragile young people seem to be every time a difficult decision has to be made it’s a real struggle every time some relationship issue comes up again it’s just like Owen with those kind of taking every step a real battle
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or every time a strong emotion comes up it it’s really really hard for them so so it’s just absolutely kind of draining every time one of these things happen and these things happen throughout life they are the very substance in fact of of life but look at this even even making a phone call can be a big deal for many young people there was an article about this recently in the Wall Street Journal where they cited one young guy who has a PumpUp song that he plays to get himself in the mood before he has to make a phone call right I mean this is how fragile people are there’s even lady she calls herself the phone
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lady she’ll give you training so you can overcome phone phobia for $480 an hour it’s a good business so there’s this basic set of habits of thought action and feeling largely missing from our society with terrible consequences the good news is that they are being res rediscovered in a number of places where human Effectiveness is taken very seriously places like at the University of Pennsylvania the positive psychology Center where they call these habits character strengths at the University of Michigan they have a thing called the center for positive organizations where they call them
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positive traits in consulting firms like deoe they refer to them as capabilities McKenzie and Company refers to them as distinct elements of talent and then in a small number very small number of colleges and universities like my own Catholic University and the Bush School of business where we call them by their real name so what are they called these habits of thought action and feeling somebody if you can see where I’m going with this because there was a little hint in the title of the talk which is um right there okay um the word of course for these habits is
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virtues and this is usually where it goes wrong because because the clicker doesn’t work there we go because when most people even good well-formed well-educated people when they hear the word Virtue what they hear is this a good person so be virtuous means be a good person it’s as if I came to the Nappa Institute to tell you to be good people right what would your natural reasonable reaction be if I came came here and said be good people that the world would be a better place if we were all good people
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it would be like Charlie Brown in class right virtue be good and and rightfully so rightfully so right it’s it’s kind of vacuous what am I supposed to do with that all right yeah I’m trying to be good what else do you want me to do you know so so the problem is I think we are missing the point in a very important way that that virtues are a specific kind of habits um each habit gives you literally superpowers if there’s somebody from AV going to bring me a new battery for this I think we may move more quickly there we go okay
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um virtues are a kind of a superpower habit which is why I’ve taken to calling them superh Habits Like The the virtue of gratitude virtue gratitude is an example extens scientific evidence about the virtue of gratitude um just just kind of a number of the studies here that I’m showing um that show all kinds of really interesting things of what happens when you build the habit of gratitude I’ll give you just one example of a study they took 60 people in two groups and for about two months they had one of the groups write a daily
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gratitude Journal something I’m grateful for at the end of each day proven way to build the habit of gratitude and the other group just went on with their normal daily life at the end of two months amazing difference between the two groups and the only difference being this gratitude journal the first group felt happier in their lives they also had a reduction in incidents of anxiety and depression and they also had a reduction in chronic pain just from growing in the virtue of gratitude and in fact if you look at all the research on gratitude and there’s quite a bit of it you will find
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that as you grow in the habit of gratitude not surprisingly it makes you more effective at being grateful it makes it easier to be grateful it makes you happier and it makes you healthier but it’s not just gratitude so restraint for example is also a super habit a virtue the research shows that as you grow in the habit of restraint you become more effective not surprisingly at restraining yourself it becomes easier to restrain yourself because whenever you grow some grow into something as a habit as you know life gets easier the thing gets it’s easier you get happier and you get healthier
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humility is also a virtue a superh habit and this extensive research on humility that shows that as you grow in the habit of humility you become more humble it becomes easier to become humble to be humble and you get happier and you get healthier are you seeing a pattern here this goes on and on and on across a multitude of Virtues so but your reaction might be okay so that’s good to know that grateful restrained humble people are happier healthier and more effective but what about me if I tend to be ungrateful impulsive and just a little bit arrogant right that’s just the way I
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am and that is where you would be Gravely wrong because let me remind you a virtue is a habit and each virtue is a habit that anyone can acquire so if you think that you are a disorganized person it’s not that you are a disorganized person because you have some genetic deformity it’s because you just hav yet cultivated the habit of ording us and you can anyone can if you think that you are not creative it’s not because God made you not creative it’s because you just haven’t yet developed the habit of creativity and you can anyone can if you feel like you’re overly cautious that
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fear tends to rule your life it’s just because you have not yet cultivated the habit of courage and you can anyone can but how you say do we do this well I’m glad you came and I’m glad you asked so there’s there’s some good useful stuff in the field of habits a series of books that you might have come across one of them it’s called The Power of Habit by Charles doig he’s a New York Times columnist uh Atomic habits this book has sold millions of copies by by James clear and BJ fog is a professor at Stanford his book is called tiny habits what each of these books show you is basically how to cultivate Habits by
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making tiny changes little change repeated every day makes a big change in your life the the reason these books have been so popular is it’s it’s a real kind of life hack for improving your life by making tiny little steps and then just repeating them okay what these books don’t tell you is which habits to grow in because they just assume that whatever habit you know it’s fine fair enough and so the books do what they do we don’t need to know because we already know the habits to grow in are the virtues and you can use the techniques in these books to grow in the virtues so for example I already talked about
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gratitude if you if you thought I want to become a more grateful person I want to grow in the habit of gratitude you start just by saying thank you more often or you keep a gratitude journal or let’s say a little more difficult perhaps you want to grow in the virtue of humility a lot of leaders in this room humility is occupational hazard for leaders right we struggle we all struggle with humility here’s a scientifically proven way for growing in humility every time you have a major decision to make or decision of any kind of consequence you make a list of everything you don’t know about that
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decision proven to help you grow in the habit of humility simple trick anyone can do this anyone can grow in the habit of of humility part of what’s going on here is is what is referred to as neuroplasticity so it’s the rewiring of your brain through small and repeated changes so it makes it easier and more likely that you’ll do the thing further down the line so so this sort of practicing little things exercises in humility or gratitude actually makes you a more humble or a more grateful person by building up that habit we can also call it what we’ve also called it which
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is character development like that’s basically what’s going on here what every civilization before ours did and what we are largely abandoning and the terrible consequences of this are all around us the human person needs this kind of formation this formation in superh habits or virtues through repeated practice and the beauty of it is as you rewire your brain it really does get easier easier to be effective easier to be to be good and this is desperately I think what what our young people need now it’s not just a case of okay so I’m going to get me some of these super
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habits and life is going to be better yes that is true and that is certainly the case but it’s actually even bigger than that whatever is bothering you whatever is the biggest struggle in your life right now there is a virtue for that there is a virtue for that which if you grow in that virtue through making Little Steps little changes practice every day your life in that area will become so much easier and better now how can I say this how can I say there’s a virtue for every aspect of life and the answer is is in the genius of St Thomas aquinus aquinus shows us that there are different virtues for the
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different dimensions in life he has a complete system in fact um so remember those missing habits of thought action and feeling that I was talking about before they are a central part of his system so his system includes of course the theological virtues faith hope and charity also a set of intellectual virtues and then there are this set a larger set of practical virtues that kind of day-to-day living kind of virtues and that’s what I want to focus on today so which are they aquinus observes that in our daily living kind of setting aside of course the the know the theological virtu is always
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operating intellectual maybe also but just focusing on our day-to-day living He observes that pretty much all day long everything that occupies you can be categorized as thoughts actions or feelings that’s everything if you think about your day-to-day living that’s pretty much what occupies you thoughts actions feelings it’s it’s comprehensive he then makes one extra step and he says let’s take those feelings and group them into the two kinds of feelings there are feelings that push us away from things we call those fears and then feelings that attract us to things we call those desires right they draw Us in now this
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is where it gets cool you’ve all heard of the four cardinal virtues Prudence Justice for due Temperance did you ever wonder why four why these four aquinus gives us the answer he says Prudence or sometimes called practical wisdom which is the virtue the habit of making wise decisions is what takes care of our thoughts that’s how we we think well for the purpose of kind of making good decisions Justice the habit of treating others fairly is what manages all of our actions fortitude or Courage The Habit it’s not the habit of not having fear that’s that’s impossible right fear just comes fortitude or or courage is the
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habit of moving forward despite being afraid and it is AIT habit and just like all the other habits as you cultivate it it gets easier the fear remains but it gets easier to move forward so that’s fortitude and then Temperance or self-discipline is the habit of only following our desires when it makes sense to do so and that’s the habit for managing our desires so you see how the reason these four in fact the reason we call them the uh sorry back up the reason these four are the kind of the four ones the four virtues that that we talk about is because if you have those four you cover every aspect of daily
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life right your thoughts your actions your feelings you have them you have’t covered now this is clearly very intellectually satisfying but if ainus stopped here it would be of limited use because basically what I’m telling you is if you struggle with your desires you should just get some more self-discipline like yeah thank you I know that um but this is this is where aquinus is genius really kicks in he observes that each of those four cardinal virtues is Allied to a number of smaller virtues if you will that are more they easier to develop than say self-discipline that’s why we call them
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Cardinal comes from the Latin cardo which means hinge or pivot so these other smaller virtues pivot around the cardinal virtues give you an example so courage so the habit of moving forward even though you might be afraid has four different Allied virtues one for each of four types of Courage of of challenge that you might face in life so aquinus says well we can start by grouping the challenges you might face in life into ones that can be overcome and ones that must be endured so challenges that be overcome it’s a problem you face you go at it and you overcome it great a challenge that must be end endured is
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one that you cannot overcome just now um or maybe never maybe it’s a chronic disease you try to get it healed you try to get better you can’t you have to endure it there are things like that in life we know he then takes the problems that can be overcome and groups them further into two groups and says there are fundamentally two ways to overcome a challenge and here you see how just how darn practical acinus is he says you can do it through tremendous human effort or by spending lots of money very practical guy huh or both in some cases so the virtue for overcoming problems through human effort is the virtue of
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magnanimity comes from the Latin Mana anima means big Soul so it’s the person who has a big Soul the habit of having a big Soul tackling a big issue um and and taking down that big issue for for financial effort is the virtue of munificence which is the the habit of spending significant amounts of your wealth to solve a big problem I think I say fairly accurately that both these virtues are in plentiful Supply in this room uh magnanimity is the virtue of entrepreneurs Builders leaders munificence is the virtue of great philanthropists it’s I say that
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willingness to give away significant sums of your own money to for a good cause I should highlight of your own money there there isn’t a virtue for giving away other people’s money just to just to clarify okay the um and then in terms of challenges that have to be endured ainus says we can split those into physical and mental there are physical challenges we Face mental challenges physical challenges you know I’m tired a project needs to get done but I’m exhausted maybe I’m not feeling very well the virtue of perseverance right it’s the willingness the the the habit of continuing to go on even though
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you might be physically not up feel like you’re not up to the task and then for mental challenges is the virtue of resilience which is the habit of moving forward even though mentally you just don’t feel like it’s working um so you’re suffering say from anxiety or or depression the um what is really interesting is so the way say to grow in any of these is taking little steps so the way to grow in resilience let’s say you’re crippled uh with depression for example taking a little step just getting out of bed is often the best thing you can do for overcoming something like that because
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you start to take action you start to rewire those Pathways um of course all of this is presuming Grace of course yeah um the um but another word for growing in the virtue of resilience is cognitive behavioral therapy one of the most successful treatments contemporaneously for growing in uh for for overcoming depression and anxiety and and aquinus anticipated this by 750 years so um the the uh so so how does this help if you’re trying to grow in Courage you don’t focus on Courage itself that’s a heavy lift you pick one of these four smaller virtues maybe you start with perseverance and maybe the
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little practice you do every day is I’m going to go 10 minutes longer than I normally would normally I would quit at a certain point because I’m tired and I’m done I’m going to force myself to go 10 minutes longer anyone can do some anything for 10 more minutes you know and you do that every day and what you find is it starts to get easier and then you’ve stretched that point kind of by 10 minutes and you realize okay this stuff is is elastic this is the kind of thing we try to encourage our students to do it makes it it makes it very very real and so then you grow in perseverance which then contributes to
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your growth in in Courage maybe it’s not entirely clear yet let me just give you one more example this one for self-discipline so self-discipline can be a really tough one because where courage has four Allied virtues self-discipline has 15 and I’m going to go through all of them so fair warning this is going to be a little bit like drinking from a fire hose okay but but here’s the thing you don’t need to remember any of these because you have a hand out in front of you okay so and I’ll explain the out shortly so so if you’re feeling a little overwhelmed just sit back enjoy the forest while dinella
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names the trees you don’t have to remember the names of the trees okay good so how does aquinus tell us to grow in in self-discipline how does he tackle it so self-discipline the super habit of of dealing with the desires the habit of only following your desires when they make sense to do so aquinus identifies 15 discret or different types of of Desire here they are so he says okay so 15 types of Desire we’ve got self-discipline we have so so what are the 15 again he’s grouping them he says we have physical desires like desires for nourishment food and drink we also have desires for sex and we also have
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desires for things possessions he says we have desires for more things and also for more better and kind of more luxurious things then we have non-physical desires desires for what we want and he said things we want to do and of here he says there are things that we want to do that are Petty or trivial and there are also things that we want to do that are great we also have desires to do great things yeah so the the implication is these desires aren’t good or bad they’re just desires that that we have yeah then there’s desires to know things there’s also desires to be in control so to be in
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control in the moment when a situation things aren’t going the way we want so we have desire to get that right but also desires after the fact when something went wrong it kind of keeps PL plaguing us we know this right we wish there was some way to fix it and then there’s desires for how we want to live how we want to work how we want to play how we want to move and here even there’s kind of movement with and that has sort of social repercussions and then movement that has physical repercussions like slouching for example would have physical repercussions and then finally for desires for how we want
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to dress so 15 discret different desires that human beings have and aquinus proposes 50 different virtues one for each so I’m going to take you through them quickly here comes the fire hose sit back in Joy don’t worry you don’t have to memorize any of these don’t even bother taking a picture of it it’s all there in front of you on the handout okay so what are they there’s the virtue of abstemiousness which is the virtue the habit of having right relationship to food which means fasting when it’s time to fast feasting when it’s time to feast and then just being reasonable the rest of the time
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eating just kind of what you need um then there’s of course the virtue of sobriety for dealing with drink chasteness for dealing with reproduction Thrift for the desire for more things contentment for the desire for more luxurious things for the desire for petty things is the virtue of restraint for the desire to do great things is the virtue of humility for the desire to know things is the virtue of diligence for the desire to be in control is the virtue of gentle firmness which I guarantee you you probably have never heard cuz I just made it up um and the the reason I made it up well
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I made it up a year ago but anyway the reason I made it up is the word normally used is meekness but I think for too many people meekness sounds a little too much like weakness um but but this this virtue is a very tough virtue it is a tough virtue but is an incontrol virtue so when you’re angry and you’re able to use that anger to do good without losing control so I call it gentle firmness because it’s gentle and firm at the same time easier to remember and that’s for dealing with bad situations in the moment when things are going wrong when things have gone wrong in the past and you have anger eating you up inside
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about them The Virtue there is forgiveness right that’s the virtue for dealing with that the virtue for work is the virtue of orderliness for play is the virtue of Utopia which is a Greek word that means good Leisure so having good Leisure uh for movement in social situations the virtue of Gravitas for health is the virtue of suppleness and then for dress is of course the virtue of modesty do you are you starting to see why it can be so hard to grow in self-discipline because if you’re trying to grow or get one of your kids or students or employees to grow in
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self-discipline you’re basically asking them to grow in all 15 of these virtues at once that’s not easy so instead what you do instead of trying to grow in 15 virtues at once just pick one pick one desire that you struggle with most take the associated virtue and just work on that so let’s say if you struggle with kind of impulsivity just work on restraint for a few days few weeks little practices you can do to kind of grow in Restraint and then that contributes to growing in in self-discipline I hope you’re starting to see how the implications of this can be so enormous for ourselves for our
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families our schools our organizations our companies so many problems facing our society today could be improved significantly if we could get particularly young people to start doing these little practices to help them grow in these virtues and how you can use any of these to strengthen whatever organization you’re running whether it’s a company or an apostle or a school anything any Human Institution if you’re helping the people in that institution grow in virtue the institution becomes more effective we have evidence that companies become more
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profitable when you do this this is really really good really important stuff now you may be wondering okay this sounds like almost magic and if this is so powerful how come we’ve never heard about it and the answer is you have actually heard about it probably a lot the only thing is you tend to hear about virtue from philos philosophers and philosophers philosophers tend to be you know philosophical um I’m not a philosopher I’m a business Dean and so I’m very focused on the practicality of this I just think it’s supremely practical really really helpful you and I’m also a
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Prof professor of marketing so I’m here to sell you on the importance of virtue I think we need a restoration of virtue in this country and in this world it would fix so many of the problems so there’s there’s so many of the problems that we Face there’s there’s a lot more to say but I know that my clicker is running down there um let me give you some ways to find out more if you’re interested so the uh this evening 6: p.m. right in the The Vineyard Terrace which is beside the swimming pool uh we’ll have a panel president katrick of Catholic University father coinus Gilbo who runs our campus
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ministry myself on how we’re doing this at Catholic University so if you want to find out more in terms of detail come come be with us October 16th in New York City is the day after the Eucharistic procession that Tim was telling you about this morning so the day after we have a dayong conference which is annual conference joint Bush School and uh and the Napa Institute on the to it’s called the faith and business conference but this year it’s all on the topic of the application of virtue in organizations and particularly in businesses I’m also pleased to announce I have a book coming out called superh habits which is all
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about so a book length of what I’ve just been talking to you about going into detail into each of the different virtues um and it’s published by Sophia press um the wonderful Publishers you know them Charlie mckin is here they’re the head of Sophia and I’m told that if you so so the book comes out October 15th but it is already available for pre-sale just saying um and the folks at Sophia told me that if you use the word superh habits 25 you get 25% off if you order it to if you pre-order it today and I just want to let you know the publ publishing businesses the more pre-orders you get the bigger a splash
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when the launch so think about it um and din Bella how do we pre-order your book thank you for asking here’s a QR code you could just hold up your phone right now go ahead do it and uh it’ll get you to a page where actually there’s a number of things on the page you um we have a number of writings on superh habits virtues and so on organized in a substack if you’re familiar with that you can subscribe for free to that and it’s through the QR code um we’re also experimenting with an app so if you think you might be interested in exploring this app there’s a wait list to to to be um to hear about the app and
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there’s also the link to the Sophia press’s website not seeing enough phones up but um it will also take you to the Sophia press website the um and now let me tell you a little bit about the handout very quickly so I talked about the four virtues Allied Virtues Of Courage and I also talked about the 15 virtues Allied Virtues Of self-discipline there are similar trees for justice so the Allied Virtues Of Justice things like honesty gratitude and so on are the virtues Allied to Justice and similarly for for Prudence or practical wisdom like judgment
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creativity alertness and so on which are Allied to in fact part of the virtue of practical wisdom what what we did is we combined them all onto one page and in effect kind of check this out really cool we sort of Blended them into this circle diagram so the tree structure is now kind of in the shape of a circle so you start with human life at the center and then you move outwards and it helps you choose which virtue which superh habit you’d want to be working on right now and they’re sort of from noon kind of 12:00 onwards down roughly in the order that that would be good to develop them so each of you should have a copy
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of this we call it the anatomy of virtue uh if for some reason someone stole yours they’re very precious and high demand um we have extra ones at the Bush School table so feel free to drive drop by there we also have really neat Catholic U golf caps too at the Bush School table so I think we may be handing some out afterwards but feel free to drop by for that so here is here’s that QR code again did anyone mention I was a professor of marketing um so let me just sum up here the superh habits the virtues are superpowers that anyone can acquire just through simple daily practice that are
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proven to make life happier healthier more effective even easier our world needs them desperately let’s go do this thank you