Christian Miller  03:35

I should say that I’m a philosophy professor, so I always like to begin by defining my terms and making sure we’re really clear about what we mean. I’ve had conversations where people were talking past each other because they think we’re talking about characters in movies or in tapes or something like that. That’s really not what I’m focused on. I’m focused on moral character.

Moral character has to do with moral fibers; how we’re supposed to think, feel, and act when it comes to moral matters. That’s the general philosophical abstract way to characterize it, but I think it helps to go a little bit more detailed and specific. Character comes in two forms. There’s moral virtue, as the good side of character; and there’s moral vice, as the bad side of character. In both cases, you see these three components going on.

You see character having to do with how we think. An example of a moral virtue would be honesty. Honesty has to do with how we think about the world. We believe it’s important to tell the truth and not to cheat on our taxes; that kind of thing. Same thing with dishonesty. Dishonesty also has to do with how we think about the world, except that, in this case, we might think it’s important to cheat, or it’s a good idea to take advantage of someone else. So that’s the thinking side of character.

There’s the emotional and motivational side of character. With our examples of honesty, an honest person doesn’t just have these thoughts, but also has the appropriate motivation. They want to tell the truth and care about not cheating others. They don’t want to steal. Then you just do the reverse for dishonesty, and the motivations go in the other direction of wanting to cheat, steal, and lie when you think you can get away with it and not get caught.

So, there’s the thinking component, the emotional and motivational side, and then the third part, which is the behavioral, the outward expression of your character.

For our example of honesty, you’d expect an honest person to tell the truth. When someone asks, “What were you doing last night?” An honest person says, “I was doing…”, and then fills in the blank with what really happened. Of course, when we go to the other side, with dishonesty, you would expect a pattern of behavior that does not map on to the truth, that shows a lot of lying, cheating, and stealing.

So, to sum it up, there are three components to character: thinking, feeling, and outward behavior.

Sean Murray  06:04

When we think about character, why does it play an outsized role in our life? Or why is it so important? Why should we focus on it?

Christian Miller  06:13

I think there are a number of reasons. We could start with its impact on ourselves. A character makes a big difference to our own individual lives. This actually goes in a virtue and a vice direction.

There’s good empirical evidence to support the idea that the better character you have, the better your life will go. There are studies that have been done that correlate measures of good character, like hope, conscientiousness, and honesty, with things that benefit us like being in a better mood, being healthier, achieving more in life, have better life satisfaction, and more purpose and value.

One reason is just that it actually seems to make our life better if we have good character. On the flip side, having bad character makes our life worse. Now, I wouldn’t want to stop there though, because that makes it sound like it’s all about me. It’s all self-interest. It’s all egocentric. There are other reasons to care about character too, beyond just that one. But I think that’s an important one, we shouldn’t neglect it.

Another reason is that all the major world religions care about character. I think it’s important we run the gamut from Judaism, Christianity, Islam, to Eastern religions, like Confucianism and Hinduism. They all say it’s important to cultivate good character to become a good person. Some religions would say, “Because God designed you that way, you have a good character as the person you should become.” That’s the second reason.

The third reason is that it’s good for society. If we have good character, that actually benefits other people around us and the world we live in. If a society where the citizens are just, and especially the organizing leaders, is compared to a society where the virtue of justice is not widespread, we can see the difference between them.

A final reason why I think character is so important, is that we are often emotionally-inspired by examples of good character. So, the first three reasons I gave are more philosophic and intellectual reasons, arguments for why we should care about character. But the fourth one taps into a different part of our psychology, which is that emotionally, we resonate or connect or click with people who exhibit good character. When we see someone run into a burning building, risking themselves to save a child who’s trapped in the building, we become emotionally inspired. We admire that person, and then we want to become more likely them in our own lives by seeing their example.

That’s an example of one-time behavior. But then when we study Ives, people like Abraham Lincoln or Harriet Tubman or Jesus or Confucius or Gandhi, we can similarly see an emotional resonance with what they do. Not to say that I like them, but that I want to become more like them because they are doing something that’s really special that I might not have in my life yet, and I want to conform my life better to the life they’re living.

Sean Murray  09:34

If character is essential to living a good life, and it helps us become a better person, helps us live a better life, and helps us create a better society for others to live in, how do we improve it? I’m building off of what you just mentioned. We’re uplifted by stories, and it seems like one way that we learn about character is through stories. It might even start with the wisdom of our grandparents and our parents to reinforce from a very young age doing the right thing, that character and integrity matter. But what is it about stories? You also mentioned in the book the power of stories to teach character.

Christian Miller  10:19

There’s a lot packed in there. First, there’s the underlying assumption that we don’t have good character already. If we’re already virtuous, we’re already great people, then there’s not much need to care about improving our character because we’re already pretty set. Later on in our conversation, we’ll get into reasons for thinking that our character does need some improvement. When we think about how to improve character, I think there are a number of strategies we could adopt. Hopefully, we’ll have time to get into those two.

I think the one you’re highlighting right off the bat is a really important one, which is the role of exemplars, like moral saints, small heroes, and moral role models, which can have an emotional impact on us. You’re right *inaudible* How do we encounter those exemplars? Well, we can encounter them in all kinds of different ways. But one very influential way we encounter these exemplars is through stories. When I say that, that’s not the only way though. Hopefully, we have actual people in our lives –a neighbor, a friend, a boss, a mentor, a religious leader –whoever, who face-to-face serves as a role model for us, and can call us out when we fall short and inspire us to do better. I hope that’s true of everyone’s life. It’s essential.

Another way these role models can come along is through indirect representation. By that, I mean they can be presented in a book or in a movie, a piece of poetry, a play or whatever, whereby we can exceed our lives without coming face-to-face with them. This can take a variety of forms. These could be fictional role models or exemplars. They do not need to be real people, but they can be, of course, real people as well.

My favorite example of a fictional role model would be the priest in Les Miserables who forgives Jean Valjean, as opposed to turning him in to the authorities, which would have meant he go back to prison for the rest of his life. The priest powerfully exhibits the virtue of forgiveness, and that story, in a way, grips me. I think it has gripped many readers for years.

For real story examples, we could read a biography of Lincoln or Harriet Tubman, and see and learn from how they lived their lives. Those facts could also trigger in us an emotional response. I was touching on it a little bit, but now I could say more about that. It can come in two forms. First, it can come in the form of admiration. I can admire what Lincoln did in telling the truth. I can admire what Tubman did in exhibiting courage. It’s admiration at a distance. I admire all kinds of things that don’t have much impact in my life. I admire what the Olympic bobsledding team did.

The second emotional response is elevation or inspiration, where I’m moved not just at a distance, but I’m moved, personally, to try to change my life so that it better conforms to that person’s life. Not in every respect, but in the respects that really matter when it comes to character. So I’m not moved to become the president of the United States when I read about Lincoln’s life, but I might be emotionally moved to become more honest when I read about those specific details of his life. That’s a little bit more about how storytelling and reading about exemplars of character can have a character impact in our own lives.

Sean Murray  13:49

The title of your book is The Character Gap, and the subtitle is How Good Are We? So, what is that gap and how good are we?

Christian Miller  13:58

What I did in the book is I set it up into three parts. My first part is defining our terms. What character is, then why it’s important, which we’ve already been talking about. The third part is on how we can improve our character? I approached this with an open mind, not making any pre-judgments about how good or bad we are. But I can’t really get my head around an answer just by sitting here in the armchair, as a philosopher trying to think, “How good are people in general?” What I did in my research on this was I went and consulted psychologists on what they have been doing for the last 50 years, which is running lots and lots of carefully controlled experiments. They put participants into a morally relevant situation where they have an opportunity to lie or cheat or steal or help or harm and see what happens. How do participants do? The experiments don’t have not just one sample. That’s not so interesting. That’s why drawing inferences from the media about how one person behaves is not so reliable. We’re looking at studies where dozens, or ideally hundreds, of people were put into this situation. How did the majority of them behave? Have we looked at these studies for many years? I aggregated them together. Here’s the bottom line.

In my interpretation of the results, the message is that most of us, not all of us, but most of us have a character of a mixed bag. We have some positive sides to our character but not enough positivity to be virtuous, and some negative sides to our character but not enough negativity to be vicious. So we have what I call a mixed character or mixed race. You might say this is encouraging because we’re not as bad as we could be. If you read the news, you might get really depressed, but no, actually we have a mixed character. We don’t have a vicious character. On the other hand, if you’re a really positive person, you might take this in a negative way and say most of us are not virtuous people, we fall short of the kind of person we should be. Most of us are not honest, or compassionate, or just.

Now I’ll end by saying, firstly, that we can get into studies if you like. I can give you some concrete examples, maybe to make it less abstract. But secondly, let me say why I say “most people”. Because I think there’s a bell curve here. I think most of us are in this murky middle ground. As in a bell curve, there are going to be outliers. On one end of the curve, you see virtuous people; not many, but some virtuous people. You can pick your favorite example, like Lincoln for honesty or Tubman for courage. And then on the other side of the curve, you’re going to see some vicious people. Pick your favorite example here. You can pick your Hitlers or your Stalins, but I think most of us are not, in general, like those exemplars of the virtue nor the vice.

Sean Murray  16:58

On the cover of your book, you have Gandhi on one side, and Hitler on the other. That’s quite a bell curve, but that’s what I picture, and most of us are in the middle somewhere. I love the book, by the way, it’s a great reflection on character. I encourage everyone to read it.

You present a fairly high bar for character. You already mentioned a couple. One is that a good person takes on a good action for the right reasons. You have to have in your heart the right reason, and you do it in a way that’s appropriate for that circumstance.

Also, you mentioned that to have high character, you have to exhibit that character reliably across a lot of different actions. You can’t just be honest with your friends. You can’t just be honest with your family. An honest person goes out into the world and is honest with strangers.

You also mentioned that to be a good person, you must be good even when people aren’t looking. So it’s not just that you’re good to win over the friends of others or to put on a show. You display good character so you can gain all the benefits of having a good character. Even when you have an opportunity to cheat in some way, and sort of gain an advantage on others, you can’t do that and have a good character. That’s a fairly high bar.

I just have to mention a story from Plato because we’ve had a few guests on recently talking about the Great Works of Western Civilization and 1,000 Books to Read Before You Die. James Mustich talked about that. And Scott Hambrick recently talked about the great works. You bring up in your book a very famous story from Plato’s Republic, called The Ring of Gyges. This high bar of character is something that philosophers and writers have been talking about for years, and thinking about this goes all the way back to Plato. So, maybe you could talk a little bit about that story and what it tells us about character.

Christian Miller  19:02

First about the high bar, and then about Plato. You’re right that I set the bar very high. I think we would want to distinguish between perfect virtue and unvirtue. If it’s a matter of being a perfectly virtuous person, that person will always have virtuous motivation, always think the right way and always act appropriately no matter what the situation.

Now, if that’s the criteria, that’s very defeating because none of us are ever going to meet them. In fact, when you start thinking that way, you may just lose motivation to improve in the first place. So I would not really want to stress that as the goal we should be aiming for. What I think is more helpful is just making slow gradual progress and getting our character better because [character]’s not just virtue. It is not all or nothing; either you have it or you don’t. You can be weakly virtuous. You can be moderately virtuous. You can be strongly virtuous. And maybe only Jesus or saints or whoever gets to that perfect virtue.

I just want to encourage my own life and other people’s lives; trying to move the needle slowly towards virtue, and away from vice. Having said that, there is this famous idea that our true character is revealed when no one’s looking. Even a vicious person will often mask virtue when around others in self-interest. You don’t want to be like flagrantly cheating in public because soon enough, no one’s going to trust you. If it’s financial cheating, you get arrested. Penalties are stiff. Even a dishonest person, most often in a personal context, exhibits a lot of the same behavior as an honest person.

What really counts is what’s in a person’s heart, underlying the behavior. Where is the heart, really? To see that and behavior, you want to see how they act when no one’s looking. What do they do on the internet, for example, when no one else is around? How do they perform on a test when they have an opportunity to cheat and get away with this and improve their score? Those are the kind of really insightful measures of true character.

How does Plato figure into all this? Plato’s Republic is arguably the greatest work of Western philosophy. It’s a long book featuring a dialogue between Socrates and a number of other conversation partners, in particular, his brothers Glaucon and Adeimantus. In Book Two of the Republic, there’s a discussion between Socrates and Glaucon and Adeimantus about this very issue of “Are people good in general or not? And how can we tell?” and so, Glaucon, brought up this example of Ring of Gyges. The example goes like this: Suppose a shepherd’s out in the fields. One day, he finds a ring, puts the ring on, turns it around in a certain direction, and it makes him invisible. He tests it out; completely reliable. No one can see him when he turns the ring in a certain direction. What does he do? He could do anything. He has a lot of opportunities, lots of options in front of him. In the story from Glaucon, the shepherd takes advantage of the ring to heal the king of the lands, marry the queen, and basically, rule over, and gain power, wealth, and pleasure. Not very flattering picture of character at all.

This example indicates that most of us are don’t really care about virtue. Because if we did care about virtue, the ring wouldn’t matter to our behavior. We’d still do the right thing. But Glaucon bet on, if most of us found a ring like this, we would do something similar to what the shepherd did in our own time and place. Whatever that would look like; whomever that person you fantasize about is; whatever that money you’ve always wanted to have is; whatever the power that you’ve never had in your life, now you have a chance to get it. It’s yours for the taking, and we would grab for it. That was meant to be an empirical prediction about how we would behave in an imaginary situation. It is supposed to be accurate as a reflection of our true nature, of our true underlying heart.

Sean Murray  23:34

I’d like to bring up an example in the modern world, where this story from ancient Greece plays out. It’s something that we continually think about. There are a lot of value investors that listen to this podcast. And one of the exemplars that we often look to in the value investing community is Warren Buffett. Warren has said that, when making a decision, he doesn’t want to be anywhere near the gray area of whether something is morally correct or not. If you think in terms of a spectrum like you do in the book, of makings decisions that could get a little morally compromised or potentially illegal. He says he always wants to make a decision that’s so far away from that line, that it’s never a question. If you have to question where you are along the line, you are already in the wrong spot. You know what the right answer is.

He has another mind trick that he uses, which is to imagine making the decision. And the following week, the decision is in the New York Times, on the front page, written by a journalist who is not necessarily predisposed to your position. And your family, your wife, your kids, your community is going to read that article. I enter into an internal dialogue with myself when I’m making a decision to discern if a decision is getting near some kind of moral line. I find that that little dialogue has actually helped me many times to set myself right and say, “Okay, Sean. Think about it in that perspective,” and it just sort of clears my head and I say, “Okay, I don’t want to go down that road.”

Christian Miller  25:27

That’s really helpful advice. I would endorse that recommendation as well. This connects to two things. One, it nicely connects to our discussion of the Ring of Gyges, and what your heart is really like. So, if you have an opportunity to do something, have a visibility ring, and no one else would see you do it, you could apply this test, and say, “Okay, what if it were revealed a week later in the New York Times? What will be the assessment of my action?” To a student that has an opportunity to cheat the test to get a better grade, pause for a moment and think about a week later. If all your peers at the university and your professor find out about this, what would you do? How would you react? And you’ll come quickly to the realization, “No, this is wrong. This would be terrible.”

This is a really helpful test we could employ. I don’t think it’s foolproof. Some people are going to say, “Well, I don’t care what others would say. If it helps me and I benefit, too bad. It’s all about me.” The person who is so self-focused, so egotistical, may not care what others have to say. But fortunately, most of us are not like that. I hope not. And so, I think it’s a very useful criterion to employ.

Sean Murray  26:49

Buffett has another quote or rule when he looks to hire people. I think it’s revealing of character. What he says is, “When you’re looking to hire someone, you look for three qualities: integrity, intelligence, and energy. If they don’t have the first, the other two will kill you.” If you think about that, it’s true. If you hire somebody without integrity, you really want them to be dumb and lazy because if you don’t have the integrity, and you have all that intelligence and energy, they could wreck a lot of havoc.

I think there’s a lot of wisdom in that that speaks to what you’re talking about. The importance of character is really supreme when it comes to looking at who you want to surround yourself with; who you want on your team, the kind of people you want to go into battle within business or in life. You want people with those three qualities, and of the three, integrity is the most important.

Christian Miller  27:49

I think that’s very wise and also very true. My reaction to that is I’m the last person who would probably object to that since I wrote a book on character, and I think character is extremely important.

My follow-up question would be: How do we measure it? How do we assess it? Of course, if I were hiring someone, I would want the person, first and foremost, to be a person of integrity. How am I going to be able to assess from the applicant pool who rises to the top there? Similarly, when it’s a matter of my friends, I want them all to be people of integrity. How do I tell whether they have that virtue or not? How about my children? I have three young children. I’m trying to raise them to be people of good character, but how do I know whether they’re moving the needle in that direction or not?

The assessment becomes a very tricky issue because, as we’ve been talking about this entire interview, it’s not just external. You can’t just look at their external behavior and read off from that for what their genuine character is like. Ultimately, it’s a matter of the underlying motivation and thinking. Your true character is how you are in your heart supposed to be as a person.

Now, that’s not to say that behavior doesn’t matter. Of course, behavior is a sign of your true character. The better you know someone, the more you can pick up on their hearts from their manifest behavior. It is really hard to mask things in your heart in the long run when you’re around people continually. But when it comes to quick decisions that you have to make about hiring someone or firing someone or not, then it becomes a lot trickier to identify those people whose character bubbles to the top arises to the top from a larger group of people.

Sean Murray  29:39

That will probably take a whole other podcast to figure out. Although, I’m not sure there are any great answers for figuring out, determining, and assessing the character or integrity of someone.

I think the best way, as you mentioned, is just to spend time with a person. With human interaction, over time, we seem to get a sense of someone’s character especially if we see them in challenging situations, making tough choices with trade-offs, and making choices in situations that could benefit that person at the expense of other people. That’s where I think our true character reveals itself. You definitely don’t get that from an interview. You do get that from reputation. That’s one form of information or a signal that comes out you.

Buffett has another famous quote, “It takes 20 years to build a reputation and five minutes to ruin it. If you think about that, you’ll do things differently,” and that gets to your whole point about reliability. To have character, you have to be reliable over time, you can’t just be honest, 95% of the time, or have a good character 95% of the time. You’ve got to be consistent, and that’s not easy to do.

Christian Miller  30:49

No, it’s not. And if we’re going to hold ourselves to that standard, we’re never going to meet it. So I think we have to bring in another character trait which we haven’t talked much about, which is forgiveness. If we’re going to hold our employees or our spouses or our friends to the standard of complete reliability, they’re not going to meet that standard. We’re going to beat on them. We’re going to beat up ourselves, and it’s going to potentially spiral in a negative direction.

So, one really important virtue that I want to commend for further thought and reflection is the virtue of forgiveness where you recognize, “Okay, no one’s perfect. People are going to slip up.” You hope that the person who’s made the mistake is genuinely repentant and is taking steps to try and address why he or she did this action. And at some point, you’re willing to say, “Okay, there’s no point in me holding this against you forever. I’m willing to forgive you and move on from the situation.” That itself is a virtue. The virtue of forgiveness has cognitive components; motivational component and behavioral component. That’s also something I think that we need to cultivate in our lives especially in acknowledgments of the fact that most people are not virtuous. We’re probably going to need to exhibit forgiveness pretty often.

Sean Murray  32:07

Yeah, and probably forgiving ourselves, at times, because we have to live with our own character. I actually find that a very motivating factor for virtue and character is just to remind myself that I know what’s in my heart. A lot of people honestly don’t want to, but if you want to look at yourself, you have to live with your character. Sometimes, you have to forgive yourself because we’re not perfect.

Christian Miller  32:30

Interestingly, some people are the best judges of their own character. But not everyone is.

Sean Murray  32:34

That’s true.

Christian Miller  32:36

Often, people tell themselves fabricated stories, or rationalize things or deceive themselves from having to confront the truth, and someone else –a friend or family member, a therapist or religious leader– has a better insight into that person’s character. Having said that, the goal is to move away from a lot of those blinders and to acknowledge what we are even if we don’t like what we see. From there, we can work on the negative parts; forgive ourselves where we slip up or haven’t made enough progress on. Work on those negative parts, so that the virtuous parts are strengthened, and the vicious parts go away.

Sean Murray  33:23

Let’s talk about improving character now. We did touch on it a little bit with storytelling, but you go in detail in the book, different strategies for improving character. So what else can we do to improve character?

Christian Miller  33:38

I have three chapters. One chapter talks about strategies that I don’t think are very promising, so I’ll set that to one side. The next chapter talks about strategies that I do think are promising. I’ll expand on that in a minute. And the last chapter goes into a more religious perspective, for those who are religious and want to think about how their religious beliefs might intersect with character improvement.

So, in the second chapter are the strategies for improving character. The first one, we have touched on by a fair amount, which is trying to find role models of good character in one’s life through stories or actual people who can exemplify and disciple us and teach us and be role models for us. We talked about that with a fair amount. Let me mention two others. These others are not competitors. It’s not an either-or. Whatever is going to happen with character improvement, it’s going to have to be messy, multifaceted, and take a number of different forms.

So, a second idea is to have moral reminders in our lives because often, we can be led astray, and our focus gets onto things that shouldn’t be focused on. We can tend to focus too much on ourselves, and get pleasure or power or money, and lose a broader moral perspective. What moral reminders can do is to get our focus back where it needs to be. These can include things like starting your day off with a reading that talks about values and what’s important in life. It can be getting text messages throughout the day on your phone that remind you of what really matters. It could even take the form of things like body art or messages that you have in your environment, up on the wall or in your office.

These moral reminders have been found in studies to make a big difference in subsequent moral behavior. I’ll give you a quick illustration. In a study involving an opportunity to cheat or not cheat on a test; where you would be paid more money the more correct answers you got; and where, when you have the opportunity, you could cheat and not get detected at all for your cheating. If we run a study like that, people would tend to cheat a lot more than their actual performance warranted. They would say 14/20 correct when, in fact, they only got 7/20 correct. But when a moral reminder was introduced, like an honor code that university students signing for their school, the cheating disappears, and their performance accurately reflects how they really did on the test. That’s the second strategy.

The third strategy is greater self-awareness and self-understanding. This is what I call “getting the word out.” Why I called it that is because, by reading more about the psychology research and new discoveries that are being made about who we are and how we’re doing, we can gain a deeper understanding of how our characters are put together. Get the word out about these results to a larger audience to learn from it.

To make that less abstract, I give an example of the bystander effect of how, in a group context, we tend to not help if others are not helping either. In a research where people were educated about that, subsequently, in an emergency where others were not helping, they were much more likely to help than the control group who never learned about the research. Being aware of these parts of our minds and other things like this can help us in the future to be more on guard and behave better when the situation arises.

So to sum up, I go through three strategies. The first is moral role models. The second is moral reminders. The third is getting the word out and learning more about our own psychology.

Sean Murray  38:03

I just have a couple of thoughts on those strategies. The moral reminders, what comes to mind is one of my favorite writers, Montane. He, very famously in his study at around the age of 38, holds himself up in a tower to just write and reflect and think. What he did was he put all these inscriptions around, on the rafters and on walls. I don’t know if they’re all moral reminders, but they’re famous aphorisms and quotes that helped guide his life. He writes about that in his essays. That influenced me in another strategy that I use, a journal. I try to write down quotes that speak to my heart that will remind me to take good actions. I’m not in my tower in the Bordeaux region of France in the 14th century like he was, but that’s my way of doing that.

Another point that I took away from your book is about understanding some of these effects, like the bystander effect. That, if you get injured or something happens to you, it’s much better if only one person sees you than a full crowd. And so, I don’t know if that’s ever going to come up in my life, but it has got me thinking. If I see someone injured, the first thing I usually do is check who else is going to help that person? I guess there’s a part of me that hopes that other people are going to get there first and relieve me of that duty. I find that those are real strategies that are helpful and can help us all improve our character.

You do mention that having good character’s almost like being a major league baseball player or a concert pianist where it requires practice, practice, practice every day. You need to devote a certain amount of energy to it if you want to improve. You can’t just hope that it’s going to improve over time without the same kind of effort it requires to reach those levels in other professions.

Christian Miller  40:08

Yeah, that’s very good. Real quick on the first couple of points. You can start your day by having a designated reading. You also end your day by having a journal. I love that idea. Start your day with a good orientation, and then when the day is over, look back over the day and pick out the things that were really important about the day.

You’re also right about the group context, where what often happens is, if no one else is doing anything to intervene in an emergency, we’re held back because maybe those other people have a different read on the situation than we do. Maybe they see something going on that I’m missing, and so here, a fear of embarrassment kicks in. If I suddenly run out and help this person, and it wasn’t actually an emergency where that person needed help, I might look silly. I might look like a fool in front of the crowd. So, the underlying story is that a fear of embarrassment is most often keeping us back from intervening, and we need to overcome that. If this really is an emergency, we need to overcome our fear of embarrassment to do the right thing.

Now, about the very point that you raised, you’re absolutely right to stress that character change is not an overnight matter. I wish it was. I wish I could snap my fingers and make myself a better person. The same thing with my kids, sometimes, when it comes to patience or whatnot. Give them a magic pill or whatever that could make this move along more quickly. Unfortunately, it doesn’t work like that. Of course, I’m not the first one to notice that and make that comment. Aristotle famously said thousands of years ago that good character development is a matter of habituation. It’s a matter of practice. It’s a matter of routine. It’s a matter of trial and error. Also, that there’s no linear progression here that every day we’re going to get better and better. It’s a slow gradual process full of many setbacks where we can improve one day. We might have a setback the next day. We can improve the third day after that.

This is frustrating in one sense because we’re so eager to make quick progress and get quick fixes. On the other hand, it shouldn’t surprise us because, as you nicely noted, character traits are analogous to other skills in life. I think this is a helpful perspective to have to give us patience about the process of character formation. We can’t become a major league baseball pitcher in a matter of a week or a month or a year. It takes years and years of practice to get to that level. Same thing with a chess master. You’re not born a chess master. You can’t become a chess master quickly or overnight. You’re going to lose a lot of things. There’ll be a lot of setbacks, and a lot of disappointments. The hope is, eventually, you can make gradual progress and get further down the road to the destination you want to achieve. I think that is a really helpful perspective to think of character improvement by analogy with any area of expertise or training or developments, which takes a long period of time.

Sean Murray  43:07

All this reminds me of Benjamin Franklin’s biography. He mentioned stories being inspiring and uplifting, especially when we read about people that are virtuous and have good character. It’s not to mention that Benjamin Franklin had a perfect character. When you read the biography, you see a very complete person with a lot of flaws. But what he did do was write in his journal every day, listing out a number of virtues, rating himself on those virtues, and actively tried to improve every day. It’s never worked for me. I’ve not tried that. There may be ways I can do that, but maybe not exactly like Benjamin Franklin. But what do you think of the Franklin technique?

Christian Miller  43:47

Yeah, I’ve mixed feelings about that. I mean, first of all, there are a lot of virtues. I don’t know what his list looks like, but on a widely used list in positive psychology, they have 24 virtues. They’re called Character Strengths. It would take a lot of work to assess myself on each one of those. I think that could be a little bit discouraging too. “Did I devote enough minutes to integrity? How is my honesty today? What did my temperance look like? My courage? I didn’t get to devote much time to this one. Oh, we better do a better job on that one tomorrow…” I don’t know if that’s the right and healthy perspective.

What I would maybe commend instead is something like the following: person by person, as much as one can have accurate self-assessment, think about one’s self and one’s moral life, and try and pick out maybe one or two areas where you think you need to grow the most. There may be some areas you think you’re doing pretty well. You could set them aside as an area of conscious focus. But there are other areas where you might say, “Oh no. I have not been very honest with my spouse recently,” or, “I’ve really been focused so much on myself and have not been helping others in need recently.” And in precisely those areas, I would give a lot of conscious deliberative focus to working on them.

Sean Murray  45:10

That’s a great strategy. Well, this has been a wonderful conversation. I appreciate you coming on The Good Life. Where can people learn more about your book and other writings, and what you’re up to?

Christian Miller  45:24

So first of all, thank you for having me on the show. I really enjoyed our time together in our conversation. They can go for a couple of different directions. If they’re interested in the book itself, it’s in the usual places like Amazon. It’s currently out in paperback too, so it’s really inexpensive at the moment. If they want to just see what we’re doing here in my university, Wake Forest, and some of my other research, they can follow me on social media. I’m @charactergap on Twitter and Facebook. I also have a website that Google can take them to right away. If anyone’s really interested in carrying out the conversation one-on-one, feel free to send me an email. I probably can’t promise a response the same day, but in the next two or three days, I can usually get back to any questions that might come up about character. I welcome future interaction.

Sean Murray  46:14

Well, thanks for being on The Good Life!

Christian Miller  46:16

Thanks so much for having me.

Outro  46:18

Thank you for listening to TIP. To access the show notes, courses, or forums, go to theinvestorspodcast.com. This show is for entertainment purposes only. Before making any decisions, consult a professional. This show is copyrighted by The Investor’s Podcast Network. Written permissions must be granted before syndication or rebroadcasting.

Given that we’re part of The Investor’s Podcast Network, I also want to mention I have a whole team here at the network. They help me pull together an informative webpage for each episode. You can find it at theinvestorspodcast.com. You’ll see a link to The Good Life. It will take you to a page with all the past shows, show notes, transcripts, contact information for guests, and it has my contact information.