Character As Destiny: Getting Destiny to Help Build the Life You Want

By Timothy A. Keune

Do you want to cast aside old ways of thinking about success and replace them with behaviors that re-tool and re-invigorate your thinking about the future? In Character as Destiny, author Timothy A. Keune shows you how vision is the first step to realizing your dreams.

Divided into four sections, Keune offers a message of life planning and quality thinking as the keys to success, he discusses:

- Fate, destiny, fortune, luck, virtues and vices, strategy and tactics, principles and values and presents the nature of self and character, their role in our lives, and how virtues, vices, and principles work together under the umbrella term character
- Tools you can use to follow your dreams, including the role of vision and how it morphs into purpose and planning for the future
- Important capabilities, including judgment—making decisions and understanding their consequences
- The traits of virtues and vices

• Language: English
• Publisher: Lulu Publishing Services
• Release date: Dec 18, 2014
• ISBN: 9781483417073

Book preview

CHARACTER AS

DESTINY

Getting Destiny to Help Build the Life You Want

TIMOTHY A. KEUNE

Copyright © 2014 Timothy A. Keune.

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, stored, or transmitted by any means—whether auditory, graphic, mechanical, or electronic—without written permission of both publisher and author, except in the case of brief excerpts used in critical articles and reviews. Unauthorized reproduction of any part of this work is illegal and is punishable by law.

ISBN: 978-1-4834-1706-6 (sc)

ISBN: 978-1-4834-1708-0 (hc)

ISBN: 978-1-4834-1707-3 (e)

Library of Congress Control Number: 2014915241

Because of the dynamic nature of the Internet, any web addresses or links contained in this book may have changed since publication and may no longer be valid. The views expressed in this work are solely those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of the publisher, and the publisher hereby disclaims any responsibility for them.

Any people depicted in stock imagery provided by Thinkstock are models, and such images are being used for illustrative purposes only.

Certain stock imagery © Thinkstock.

Lulu Publishing Services rev. date: 11/24/2014

CONTENTS

Preface

Introduction

Part I :   Taking Charge Of Your Life

Chapter 1 :   Starting Out

What Do You Want To Be?

Defining And Following Your Dreams

Traditions, Peer Pressure, And Commitment

Who Do You Want To Be?

Finding One’s Calling

Defining Who You Are

Taking Control Of Your Destiny

Quiz

Chapter 2 :   The Person Behind The Curtain

The Paradox Of Self

Taking Control

Quiz

Chapter 3 :   Mastering Your Destiny

The Problem Of Control

The Journey Metaphor As Control Framework

Quiz

Part II :   A Preparation Tool Kit

Chapter 4 :   Vision

I Have A Dream!

Visualization And Planning

Strategy Vs. Tactics

Defining Requirements

Extending The Journey Metaphor

Quiz

Chapter 5 :   Making The Vision A Reality

Planning As An Activity

Executing The Plan

Putting It All Together

Quiz

Chapter 6 :   Sisyphus Unchained

Lessons Learned

Multiple Dreams

Multiple Timelines

Fate As The Big Picture

Quiz

Part III :   Character Development

Chapter 7 :   Character Building

Early Development

Identity Formation

Becoming An Adult

Character Defined

Quiz

Chapter 8 :   The Apparatus

Some Preliminaries

The Brain

Memory

Mental Processes

Important Concepts

Quiz

Chapter 9 :   Belief Structures

Thinking Frameworks

Social Structures

Traditions And Schools Of Thought

Disciplines And Specialties

Quiz

Part IV :   Putting It To Work

Chapter 10 :   Testing Your Mettle

Cultural And Personal Identity

Learn To Act Confidently

Learn To Feel Confident

Coping Skills

Drawing From The Well

Quiz

Chapter 11 :   The Really Big Ideas

What Is My Purpose?

What Is The Meaning Of Life?

What Is Friendship?

What Is Love?

Why Does Freedom Always Seem In Conflict With Law?

What Are Values And How Do They Differ?

Can Someone Have Vices And Still Be A Virtuous Person?

Does God Exist?

Chapter 12 :   Life Altering Choices

Marriage

Divorce

Having Children

Chapter 13 :   Life Altering Emergencies

Family Behaviors

Natural Disasters

Family And Personal Disasters

Personal Health Records

Chapter 14 :   Virtuous Behaviors

Appreciation

Assertiveness

Awe

Awareness

Balance

Beauty

Bravery

Calm

Caring

Cautious

Charisma

Charity

Chastity

Cheerfulness

Cleanliness

Consideration

Cooperation

Contentment

Courage

Creativity

Decisiveness

Dedication

Determination

Devotion

Diligence

Discernment

Discipline

Discretion

Empathy

Endurance

Enthusiasm

Fairness

Faithfulness

Focus

Forbearance

Forgiveness

Fraternity

Generosity

Gentleness

Grace

Gratitude

Helpfulness

Honesty

Honor

Hope

Humanity

Humility

Humor

Idealism

Impartiality

Independence

Industry

Intelligence

Initiative

Innocence

Innovative

Integrity

Joyfulness

Justice

Kindness

Mercy

Mindfulness

Modesty

Observant

Openness

Orderliness

Optimism

Passion

Peaceful

Perceptiveness

Prudence

Purpose

Quiet

Reliability

Respect

Responsibility

Reverence

Righteous

Safe

Self-Reliance

Sensitivity

Serenity

Simplicity

Sincerity

Sobriety

Spontaneity

Thankfulness

Tolerance

Toughness

Trustworthiness

Truthfulness

Uprightness

Valor

Vision

Wisdom

Chapter 15 :   Unvirtuous Behaviors

Absentmindedness

Aggression

Anger

Antagonism

Arrogance

Bigotry

Bitterness

Boastful

Callousness

Capriciousness

Carelessness

Corruption

Covetous

Cowardice

Cruelty

Defiance

Denial

Dependence

Despair

Destructiveness

Dishonesty

Dishonor

Disrespect

Enmity

Envy

Favoritism

Filthiness

Flightiness

Flippancy

Foolishness

Frivolity

Glumness

Gluttony

Greed

Harshness

Hostility

Humorless

Ignorance

Immodesty

Immorality

Impatience

Impiety

Indifference

Indiscretion

Ingratitude

Injustice

Insincerity

Intemperance

Irresponsible

Irreverence

Laziness

Licentiousness

Lust

Meanness

Miserly

Negativity

Nervous

Officiousness

Omissiveness

Parasitism

Passivity

Permissiveness

Perversion

Pessimism

Prejudice

Presumptuousness

Promiscuity

Purposelessness

Rashness

Reckless

Rudeness

Ruthlessness

Savagery

Self-Degradation

Selfishness

Shortsightedness

Slackness

Sloth

Spiteful

Strutting

Stubbornness

Stupidity

Tactlessness

Timidity

Treachery

Ugliness

Unfairness

Unkindness

Unscrupulousness

Untrustworthy

Vanity

Violent

Volatile

Weakness

Wiliness

Chapter 16 :   Variable Behaviors

Opposing Virtuous Behaviors

Measured Virtuous Behaviors

Stance Virtuous Behaviors

Miscategorized Virtues Or Vices

Afterword

Bibliography

Biographical Notes

Supporting Tools

Examples

Self-Improvement Procedure

Quizzes

Chapter 1

Chapter 2

Chapter 3

Chapter 4

Chapter 5

Chapter 6

Chapter 7

Chapter 8

Chapter 9

Chapter 10

Glossary

Forms

Planning

Self-Improvement

Endnotes

PREFACE

Ninety percent of the world’s woe comes from people not knowing themselves, their abilities, their frailties, and even their real virtues. Most of us go almost all the way through life as complete strangers to ourselves.

—Sydney J. Harris

Life consists not in holding good cards, but in playing those you hold well.

—Josh Billings

Character is destiny.

—Heraclitus

The world today is a complicated place, full of challenge and contradiction. We are confronted daily by a non-stop flood of images in which successful looking people are doing things that inspire us or that fill us with wonder at how someone so inane or shallow could be successful. Popular culture seems obsessed with the trappings of success: wealth, fame, prestige, and power to name a few. These seem to be the things people crave everywhere, but are they really attainable by the average person? And are they really what people want, or is this just another idea the media is selling? The media certainly seems obsessed with stories of successful people leading lives of excess or those who have fallen from grace and are completely miserable, having been exposed as vile, corrupt or both. It makes us wonder if that is an aberration or the more common truth behind the mask of fame and success. Ask yourself, What am I willing to do to achieve my dreams? Be honest. Does it include destroying yourself? Your family? How about selling out your friends? Think of the image Lance Armstrong sold to the public for so long, then what he did to achieve that image.

Everyone says that couldn’t happen to them; but the sirens song of success has drawn many to just that kind of doom. The good news is I believe the common view is correct—it doesn’t have to be like that. If dreams are expressions of our desire to achieve great things or to pursue an ideal, we should be able to do that in reality given sufficient desire and honest, competent effort. So, what is it about the successful person that sets him or her apart from an ordinary person? Is it their fate or destiny to achieve these things? Maybe they were just really lucky or benefited from extraordinarily good fortune. Perhaps successful people are gifted in a way that makes them uniquely qualified to be successful without having to employ the darker aspects of their nature. Did they start out ordinary and by some unknown process, learn, develop or train an ability to do things successfully? Or is it really an illusion that ordinary people can achieve success without selling themselves or others out, or that they need the help of a higher power?

Human behavior is complex and many of the beliefs we cling to are myth based historical concepts or incorrect and outmoded ideas, but there is a body of knowledge that has been in use for centuries that enables people to achieve what they want by acquiring characteristics and skills anyone can develop. What sets the extraordinary performer apart from the ordinary is the extent this body of knowledge is sought, learned, and applied to navigate life. It doesn’t seem to matter whether a person recognizes or even understands how it works. What matters is that they learn how to do it and then use it consistently to build and maintain their capacity to perform beyond the ordinary.

I’m not what I would consider an extraordinary person. I’m of modest intelligence. I wasn’t overly gifted at sports or academics in school when I was young. I grew up in a dysfunctional working-class family, but I was spared the kind of Good Will Hunting¹ horror story I’ve seen others endure. My parents were good people but somewhat flawed and over occupied by their own problems—and because of this, I had many things stacked against me. I was able to overcome these obstacles because I had a natural desire to prove to myself and my family that I was better than they thought I was. I developed a few important virtues that started me in the right direction as I developed: curiosity and determination. Sometimes that’s all it takes—adopting a few critical ideas, skills, or traits that are so powerful they empower you to continue growing in the right direction, enabling your breakthrough to ever greater levels of performance.

It took a lot of work, sacrifice, frustration, and failure, but I eventually figured out how to achieve much of what I wanted from life. It also became very clear to me as I worked this all out that an important reason more people don’t do what I did is the overwhelming blare of confused, erroneous, and misleading messages telling us how to be a success. Unfortunately, many of them are wrong or work only for people with a special talent or who were born into situations where resources are readily available to them. Many of the purveyors of these messages are also out to take your money, which makes it doubly difficult to succeed, especially when the message they provide is incomplete, specialized, incorrect, or fraudulent.

I’m not trying to sell anything. I believe my message is a direct explanation of the knowledge, skills, traits, and attitudes necessary to build a character that serves you well. I make no promises though. It’s up to you to make it all happen. As Morpheus told Neo in the movie The Matrix, "I can show you the door, but you have to walk through it." I’m talking about character—that vague, almost mystical quality we all develop that makes us who we are.

I didn’t figure this out right away. It took years, and I couldn’t write about it until I’d learned how by teaching it to my young nieces. They, too, faced a difficult family life with many developmental challenges. They were good kids, smart and outgoing, but I watched them absorb many immature and self-defeating behaviors from television, school, their friends, and the many dysfunctional friends of their parents, and the parents themselves. I eventually had to write an informal, spiral-bound book to spell out what they needed to understand to be a success. I’m glad I did that. They both liked the book because it spoke to them directly as one adult to another. Since they’re both happy and doing well as I write this, it clearly helped.

That was many years ago, and I was content to leave it at that, but I’ve had some major challenges put in my path since then, including a crippling downturn in health. One of my treatment goals has been to keep my mind focused and active, so I defined a project both challenging and rewarding to formalizing the book I wrote for the girls into a version suitable for the public. But after I started, I found the original to be far too limited in scope to help a general audience. Since I wrote that book, I’ve learned so much more about vices and the things that draw us away from our virtues. I also concluded I should add the adult parts of my tool set so everyone can know what I used: a technique called life planning.

This is all firsthand knowledge for me, because the bills have come due from my wild and crazy days as a young adult. It’s a lesson we’re all forced to endure as we age: coping with the mental and physical decline that comes from the biological failure of our bodies. I’ve learned that aging is a very different kind of challenge from growing up and building a life.

While we are young, growing and learning is a process of adapting to the changes in our bodies; integrating and adapting to the expansion of knowledge, skills, and capabilities; and later on, achievements, responsibilities, wealth, status —and failure/loss. Aging is just the opposite. We’re forced to overcome and adapt to major losses of capability, such as our senses, sexual desire and intensity, strength and stamina, balance and coordination. Then there are the varying degrees of mental decline: short- and long-term memory loss, slow degradation of reasoning and judgment, changes in personality and temperament. The impact these have on our professional and social status is serious, but it’s the emotional toll this takes as our colleagues, friends, and family members start treating us differently that is the most troubling, further undermining our sense of self and confidence.

Another chilling feature of aging: you have very little say in what happens to you. Though you can maximize your potential by making healthy choices throughout your life, what happens to us, like it or not, will occur and with little or no warning. How we react to the changes imposed by these events is a function of character, but most of us haven’t acquired the knowledge, attitudes, and skills necessary to successfully cope with sudden changes in the very fabric of who we are. I didn’t. That has been the real challenge of aging: as it attacks who we are, we must find the will to develop the knowledge and skills to keep us focused so we can identify and understand all that is happening to us.

It became clear that the new book I was to write needed a more comprehensive approach to character including its development and maintenance in the face of changes to what makes us who we are. That meant writing a book not just for tweens and teens, but for their parents and grandparents as well.

INTRODUCTION

Nothing is good or bad, but thinking makes it so.

—William Shakespeare

This book is about thinking and character. Before I decided to write this book, I looked at many other books on character and its development to supplement my prior research on thinking and intelligence. Unfortunately, many of the authors of these books were in the full grip of one of mankind’s major sources of bias: religion. Thinking is the processing of information and stimuli to perceive reality as accurately as possible and make decisions using the understandings we derive from what we learn, from sensory experience, and from thinking about it so it might guide our behavior while pursuing safe, productive lives.

I’m an atheist, but I didn’t start out that way. One of the major dysfunctions I faced in life was a confused religious journey right up to and including my early years in college. This was the product of a hostile and pejorative religious education as a child, which was fortuitous for me because it gave me an instinctive skepticism and curiosity which lowered many boundaries early in my life— something I used to great advantage. Late in my education in science and engineering, I turned to theology and philosophy to seek answers to the questions I couldn’t find in scientific reasoning. I eventually found the various theories of mind, philosophy of science, and epistemology² in particular to be the topics of study giving me most of the insights I needed to make peace with the many questions plaguing me. I found this so compelling, I continued as a researcher into intelligence and artificial intelligence right up until poor health made me stop.

This book maintains a neutral stance toward thinking and character. This is the major flaw I saw in other books on the subject, where many of the religious biases and attitudes of their authors shaped and colored their message. I will say now, categorically, your ability to think well does not depend upon the strength of your faith, your piety, or any other measure of religious compliance or worth. Quality thinking is about understanding the difference between true and not true, about the proper use of deductive and inductive logic, and the basic processes of investigation: analysis, deliberation, and judgment. Quality thinking can serve you well no matter what system of belief you care to follow, though it may cause you discomfort and heartache since you’ll be better prepared to recognize the many rhetorical devices, falsehoods, and unsupported claims woven into the fabric of the many myths, traditions, and cultures we embrace. It can also help you discover the amazing treasure of wisdom woven into those myths and traditions and an unconscious or winking acknowledgment of sound thinking as the necessary component of moral behavior in many religious and secular social contexts.

For in much wisdom is much grief: and he that increaseth knowledge increaseth sorrow.

—Ecclesiastes, 1:18; King James Bible

This book is organized into four parts to focus on the specific knowledge and skills I believe are necessary to establish and maintain good character. Part I works with many of the important ideas used rather freely these days, but not always clearly: ideas like fate, destiny, fortune, luck, virtues and vices, strategy and tactics, principles and values. It also presents the nature of self and character; their role in our lives; how virtues, vices, and principles work together under the umbrella term character; and especially how to recognize and amend unwanted vices that sneak past our defenses.

Part II presents a set of tools you can use to follow your dreams, including the role of vision and how it morphs into purpose and planning for the future. It presents a powerful investigation strategy (the analytic cycle) you can use to gather the information you need to populate your plans with what is needed to make them real. Perhaps most important, it shows how you turn the crank to keep the dream machine running so you can achieve dream after dream.

Part III presents advanced discussions to help you with important capabilities including judgment—making decisions and understanding their consequences. This covers how the role of deliberation can be used to mitigate the risk of deciding. Additional areas that are discussed include identifying and understanding multifaceted beliefs such as social mores and taboos, preferences, values, and principles and the nature and role of systems of thought such as disciplines, traditions, customs, cultures, subcultures, superstitions, biases, stigmas, etc. All are discussed because they can be confusing and easy to misinterpret.

Part IV brings it all together in detailed discussions of virtuous and nonvirtuous behaviors commonly called virtues and vices, but I also discuss a few variations on those themes. Some behaviors can be both virtue and vice depending upon how they are used. There are also those referenced in various sources that do not fit the definition I use for a virtue or vice. Lastly, I discuss some of the big questions so you can flex your thinking muscles and compare your thinking to mine and others which I’ve presented as quotations sprinkled throughout the book.

There are several appendixes to support independent work in particular topics of interest. Included is a detailed bibliography where the resources used for this book are cited. Biographical information on the sources of the quotations used in the book is provided as well so you can see the personal, professional or historical contexts of the people making them. I also identify where I use my own unpublished work as a resource. Lastly, there is an index and detailed table of contents to help you find specific topics and ideas quickly to make this book useful as a reference tool.

I believe you’ll find this book enlightening, maybe even fun to read. I wrote it both to inform and to entertain. It’s my fervent hope that it helps you understand just how much power you have over the course of your life, even if you don’t live in a free society. Unfortunately, accident of birth can engulf one in seemingly impossible challenges, even for life itself. Learning to survive is itself a virtue if you can keep what you’re forced to do to survive from being a permanent influence over who you are or want to become.

As difficult as life can be, sometimes the best we can hope for is to avoid or escape the immediate obstacles to move on to better conditions and opportunities. This has been proven by many refugees achieving amazing success stories despite impossible odds. As difficult as your burdens may seem, they are still just obstacles to overcome. If you want something badly enough, you’ll find a way to improvise, adapt, overcome.³ The will to choose and then act in accordance with that choice is the power behind destiny. Just be sure what you choose is want you really want, because when choice and desire meet, there are few limits to what you can achieve. After all, the United States of America evolved from a population of predominantly poor, working class people, refugees, bonded servants, and slaves.

PART I

TAKING CHARGE OF YOUR LIFE

Much learning does not teach understanding.

The way up and the way down are one and the same.

There is nothing permanent except change.

—Heraclitus

CHAPTER 1

STARTING OUT

Hope lies in dreams, in imagination and in the courage of those who dare to make dreams into reality.

—Jonas Salk, M.D.

What Do You Want to Be?

What do you want to be when you grow up? Though it’s often asked lightly or thought to be frivolous, this is a serious question, with an answer that strikes to the very heart of character. What makes you feel capable of pursuing particular things or roles in life? Do you know how to go about it? If not, why do you believe you could achieve such things? Have you even considered these kinds of questions?

If you haven’t done so, stop reading and think about them now. If you have already thought about these things or if you have a reasonable sense of who you are already, continue.

When I was a child, I spake as a child, I understood as a child, I thought as a child: but when I became a man, I put away childish things.

—Corinthians 13:11, King James Bible

While young we often do think childish things, but that’s why being a child can be so fun: we don’t have to think about or even be aware of the consequences of our behavior. For this reason, childish or even adolescent thinking is often characterized as being innocent or naive, mostly because of a lack of real-world experience. While young we’re still free to let our imaginations soar unfettered by the weight of experience (subject to the vagaries of adult tolerance of course). That can be both fun and enabling, but it’s also why so many of those dreams die quiet deaths. Being a cowboy, a fireman, a princess, an astronaut, or professional athlete is fun and exciting until the idea gets stale or the acrid smell of hard work hidden behind the image spoils the fantasy. Childish dreams fall from grace rather quickly, to be replaced by newer, fresher dreams as long as our capacity to have them continues.

Defining and Following Your Dreams

As we get older, many of our most treasured dreams are overwhelmed by family expectations, traditions, or the legacy of a family business or a common calling such as medicine or law—and not strictly within what is accepted as normal, e.g. with law, you become an enforcement officer, politician, or lawyer, on either side of the bar set by society as good or bad, i.e. mob lawyer or prosecutor.

Tradition simply means that we need to end what began well and continue what is worth continuing.

—Jose Bergamin

Tradition is very often an excuse for people who don’t want to change.

—Red Barber

Immorality sanctified by tradition is still immorality.

—Bernard Rollin

Traditions can be a powerful thing. While they can severely limit our choices in life, they can also provide a considerable amount of structure and support when stepping into the adult world for the first time, which can be a good thing. However, it can also be the source of a great deal of pressure and performance anxiety. With criminality, it also undermines the greater good by undermining society and the rule of law while perpetuating vice-based lifestyles that provide long-term corrupting influences in the community. It can also stigmatize and isolate young people from noncriminal peers.

While traditions can provide ready-made structure and identity for those starting out, they also compete with their own dreams for the future, which might be more reflective of the person’s temperament and personality, sowing the seeds of future conflict, personally and in the family.

Traditions, Peer Pressure, and Commitment

Don’t underestimate the powerful call of tradition. I had a teacher tell me a story on a flight to a Caribbean island where she was teaching third grade in a local school. During our conversation, the power of some of the socializing influences in local society came up and she told me about something that had utterly stunned her the previous term. As part of social studies, she’d asked her class what they most wanted to be when they grew up. To her surprise and my disbelief, a majority of her class said, thief. In discussion, she learned the most successful people in the kids’ families or social circles were the thieves on the island. The thieves almost always had money, good clothes, jewelry and a car —all powerful symbols of success. For the kids of poor or working-class parents, who often couldn’t provide such things regularly, thieves had a status that made them role models. This is what happens when parents are too busy providing to identify and rectify the harm such influences have.

Pressure to conform can be coercive when applied by one’s peers or family. My early desire to be a tailor was met with open hostility from my father, since he didn’t think it manly I was making clothes for my teddy bear. Never mind that I was surrounded by women as a child. This is how it goes for many childish dreams, and while I might have been a great tailor as an adult, my father was much happier when I abandoned that in favor of becoming a doctor. I held onto the doctor dream until I’d entered a pre-med curriculum in college, which I abandoned once I experienced firsthand what it would take to become a doctor.

Reading the book Intern by Doctor X⁴ had fanned my fires in high school, but a dose of reality doing weekend work in our county hospital ER exposed me to the worst of what medicine has to offer. It wasn’t until years later that the movie The Doctor⁵ with William Hurt in the title role helped me understand why I turned away from my dream: the continuous stream of crisis and misery wore me down. I was also repelled by the high incidence of drug and alcohol abuse by doctors, the significant divorce rate, etc. After that experience, I knew instinctively my compassion and humanity weren’t strong enough to carry me through a medical profession. While I’m no wimp, I could see this was a mistake and chose discretion as the better part of valor.

The key to this collision of dream with reality is something everyone faces. When it came for me, I had only the vaguest notion of who I was and what I wanted or stood for. I’d also run headlong into my idealized self—that image we all construct that has more to do with how we’d like to be than how we actually are. This dichotomy is critical to understanding how we evolve our sense of self. I thought I could do anything I put my mind to, but that turned out to be wrong. What I believed about my idealized self wasn’t true for my actual self—a painful thing to learn, but a lesson well made.

Over time I learned commitment is often a test of how highly we value what we’re seeking and how it contributes to our sense of self. If you haven’t done your homework, you won’t understand what that is and will be forced to wing it as I did. It’s easy to get hooked on the freedom of winging it, and if you’re lucky, you’ll never have your resolve tested as I did, but the cold facts are 1) winging it means you’re making important decisions without understanding the nature and scope of what you’re deciding, and 2) you are making decisions with insufficient, ambiguous, or incorrect information—not good scenarios for quality decision making at any time.

After my rude awakening, I always tested my ideas and continued to do so until I found a calling that felt right. Here is the lasting lesson of this painful and uncertain phase of my life: the greatest advantage you can give yourself is the understanding of who or what you want to be, as early in life as possible. I didn’t find out until I was well into college, and how I found out was a complete accident. How you find out is up to you, but the most straightforward way is to try a number of different pursuits. That’s what makes being in college so exciting at times: working different jobs, volunteering to do different things.

I worked in sales, chemical labs, at a rental car agency, landscaping, as a musician and volunteer in many different pursuits. Your need to earn money may limit what you can do as a volunteer, but you can still mix up your experience doing that. If you can afford it, volunteer for charities or non-profits. They don’t often pay or pay less than minimum wage, but the experience you can gain will give you a valuable reference and opportunities to do things you could never get any other way. Use a strategy when picking your summer jobs to put the efforts to good use in your search for purpose.

Who Do You Want to Be?

Knowing early in life who you are and what you want to do in life will save you a great deal of time, money, and pain. It will also help you focus your resources on high return activities and avoid many of the frustrations and unnecessary failures that come with nomadic search. High return activities contribute to your progress toward achieving your dreams. This means getting the right education, acquiring the right skills and experiences, and accumulating the resources you’ll need. However, knowing isn’t a sure thing either. For the same reasons, you must understand the depth of your commitment to what you choose so you don’t waste a lot of time and money on something that wasn’t right for you in the first place. Just remember, people grow out of things so don’t feel like you’re chaining yourself to a monument. If you consistently make good choices, a few mistakes won’t throw you off the path.

Finding One’s Calling

But the bravest are surely those who have the clearest vision of what is before them, glory and danger alike, and yet notwithstanding go out to meet it.

—Thucydides

This above all: to thine own self be true, and it must follow as the night the day thou canst not then be false to any man.

—Shakespeare

Pain is inevitable, suffering is optional.

—Buddhist Proverb

I believe the key to this understanding is an awareness of the emotional return we get from what we choose. This is the hidden factor motivating otherwise capable people to take on jobs or roles having low prestige or pay or which offer little or no social status. They are driven by the emotional return that flows to them from the job or role itself, an energy that resonates with their inner sense of self, something that can easily compensate for a lack in prestige, social status or competitive pay. Talk to the people who are already doing what you believe you’d like to do. You’ll recognize when it is right for you when you understand why they do the work they do, and feel the energy they get from it by the way they talk about it. I know I was always excited by the prospect of making machines do the things I wanted them to do, but pleasantly surprised at the sense of freedom, gratitude, peace, even joy at being able to take on the responsibilities I eventually embraced and the sense of purpose this gave me. The professional football player, Patrick Tillman demonstrated this idea as well as it can be.

Tillman left his linebacker position with the Arizona Cardinals—a high-paying, high-prestige role in the National Football League—to become a US Army Ranger in Afghanistan. His choice no doubt mystified many people, including me, but not those who knew him. The choice flowed from who he really was as a man and a patriotic American moved to action after the 9/11 attacks.⁶

Defining Who You Are

This also demonstrates an important distinction between who we are, which is defined by character, and how we live our lives, which is driven by character. While choosing a vocation or role to play, getting it right is important; but you can still change your mind when necessary. In fact, in the modern world, you can count on having to change careers more than once over the course of your life due to changes in society, economics, technology—and your own preferences, capabilities, family responsibilities, etc. Choosing what kind of person you will be is far more important simply because it’s more permanent. Understanding the distinction between the two is critical.

This can be confusing since many people identify so closely with the kind of work they do (so much so, that people used to adopt their trade as their family name: Butler, Baker, Carpenter, Cooper, Farrier, Miller, Wainwright, etc.). However, you don’t have to change who you are to change your job or even your career. You may be a teacher, but you can change the school, or even the grade level at which you teach; or as I’ve seen many do, you change your manner of teaching (i.e., giving up teaching children to become a corporate trainer for professionals, medical patients, etc.).

This illustrates what is true for anyone having the character to meet challenges head on. Tillman’s choice cost him his life, but he was living his values, staying true to who he was. That’s important because the behaviors that define who you are settles in over time, becoming more difficult to remove or change as we get older. This is why it’s so important to develop the habits necessary to perfect the characteristics others see as virtuous over the course of your life. Change is possible when you’re older, but it is far more difficult. I’ll go into this in a later chapter.

For the very true beginning of wisdom is the desire of discipline; and the care of discipline is love.

—The Wisdom of Solomon, 6:17, The Apocrypha

When we see men of a contrary character, we should turn inwards and examine ourselves.

—Confucius

Character is what you do when nobody is looking.

—J. C. Watts

Taking Control of Your Destiny

Let’s say you have the answer: You know what you want or who you want to be. Is that enough? Does knowing define any goals for you, accomplish or identify any skills or knowledge you might need? Does knowing who or what you want to be define your destiny or fate in any meaningful way? Does it show you how you might accomplish what you want? These questions sum up the primary dilemma of dreaming.

What is the connection between character and destiny? How does accomplishing things we truly want (consistent with our moral compass) build character? How does this become our destiny? Very nicely, I would say—a flippant response I know, but it’s also true. There are about as many ways of learning as there are people, and we all develop a highly personalized set of learning behaviors. However, to employ one of the trendy new terms in common use today, there are best practices—processes shown to be naturally superior to other approaches in their speed, efficiency, ease of use, etc. In fact, one important way of spotting intelligence in many creatures is their ability to recognize better ways of doing things and replacing their clumsier or less effective methods with newer, more efficient or easier-to-use ways of accomplishing the same thing. When it comes to finding things out, I’ve always relied on a simplified variation of the scientific method. By using a continuous cycle of reflection, analysis, investigation, deliberation, action, and follow-up, I’ve been able to find out what I need to know that is sufficient for anything I want to do.

By knowing what we want or who we wish to be, we know two things immediately: our starting point and where we want to go. This is why chasing a dream is best thought of as a journey. Getting from point A to point B requires navigation, a nautical term for using a chart to plot a course. Difficult or lengthy journeys may require us to make stops at intermediate locations, making the course in the journey a connect-the-dots line between points A and B. Intermediate stops may be required for resupply, repairs, additional learning, or to pick up new skills, update our information about the terrain ahead, etc. There are a limitless number of reasons, but the important point is to recognize the need for them so we avoid running out of gas or the obstacles on our path we’re not prepared to meet. Intermediate destinations are called waypoints because they are on the way to where each of us is going. When planning for life, one trip in a journey ends at a waypoint, and getting there is called a goal. When the waypoints are important or at crucial locations on the way, we call them milestones.

Goals/waypoints help us break down difficult accomplishments into smaller tasks (trips) that, when achieved, make a larger activity’s accomplishment (a journey) seem easier. It gives us an opportunity to eat the burger in bites instead of swallowing it whole. It also gives us the time to perfect what we’re doing and understand why, giving us multiple opportunities to fine-tune our planning and execution as we go—or return to port should a compelling reason to do so arise (like a major flaw in our understanding!).

So, we’ve started, but where should we really begin? The first thing we should do is get in touch with who we really are. Don’t assume you know. Take a test to measure your self-knowledge. If you’ve already done this, you can skip ahead to chapter 3; however, I do recommend you read chapter 2 anyway to familiarize yourself with the terminology I use throughout this book. If you skip chapter 2 and see a term you’re unfamiliar with, just find it in the index and jump to the location(s) indicated in the book to figure it out, or consult the Glossary section at the back of the book.

Quiz

I’ve put my interpretations to the questions below in the Quizzes section. Consider the questions and write what you think, then compare them to my responses to see if you saw it the way I did.

• What is meant by the Corinthians quote at the beginning of the chapter?

• What about the quotes just before the previous section?

• What are their relevance to this chapter?

CHAPTER 2

THE PERSON BEHIND THE CURTAIN

Ninety percent of the world’s woe comes from people not knowing themselves, their abilities, their frailties, and even their real virtues. Most of us go almost all the way through life as complete strangers to ourselves.

—Sidney J. Harris

No man for any considerable period can wear one face to himself and another to the multitude, without finally getting bewildered as to which may be the true.

—Nathaniel Hawthorne

The Paradox of Self

We’ve all seen a variety of metaphors for manipulation: puppeteers, brainwashing, people-like robots with little creatures inside driving them, etc. The Wizard of Oz⁷ provided a good example as well, though the Great Oz was more of a figurehead for the man that Dorothy’s dog, Toto, discovered behind the curtain. What is interesting about this example is how it shows the large difference between the idealized⁸ self and the actualized⁹ self we come to know in the movie. The wizard wanted the world to think of him as a loud, fearful, authoritative, and omnipotent taskmaster because he believed that was what everyone expected of him as the all-powerful Oz. Once discovered, he proved to be very different in reality.

This is the paradox of self-image and the character that lives within. Given this mystery, few of us really delve very deeply into who we are, but is this wise? Do we really need to understand our selves to know the character that drives our behavior? If it were unimportant or something easily repaired or replaced, I would say it didn’t matter; but since character is critically important to the quality of our lives and not easily fixed once it is broken, it is important to know as much as possible about building, protecting, and repairing the character which operates within the self.

Self-Image and Character

Why is character so mysterious? That’s not so difficult to answer, because character is like a chimera. It can look very different to different observers, something made worse by its constant state of change as we adjust our attitudes and update and add to our knowledge, especially our understanding of ourselves. How outsiders see us is more difficult because we often behave as different people depending upon our point of view (POV) at any given moment or how we perceive the situation we’re in.

Points of View

The subjective I is where we interact with the world directly, from an action perspective. Our perceptions and interpretive thinking comes to us as a stream of consciousness that gives us the sense of reality that allows us to effectively move and function within it. We see our actor self in this POV, doing our bidding in the real world. The actor is a composite of our actualized and idealized selves that behave as required by the demands of our situation in the real world (i.e., they act to achieve whatever is called for by our needs, goals, and desires and to respond to whatever is happening in our perceived reality).

The objective me governs how we think for our own benefit, (i.e., planning for or pursuing activities that will satisfy our needs). This is the introspection or integrative modes of thinking, where learning is absorbed and assimilated into our existing bodies of knowledge. It’s where our likes and dislikes, attitudes and passions live. These interact with our actor through subconscious means such as in our likes and dislikes, attitudes, intuitive thoughts or premonitions. If you’re in a conversation where you need to remember something, it’s me mode subconscious processes that provide your actor an answer.

The social we governs how we think about our place in society and social situations, which enables us to function within groups of individuals, working to achieve harmony and pooling of skills and needs to our mutual benefit. It’s how we understand our place in a given group, the role we play and our status within the group. It’s we mode subconscious thinking that enables productive, harmonious interaction within complex social situations—or not. For example, when we’re not a member of a group or we have insufficient knowledge of the group’s members or its social order (such as a stranger, boyfriend, etc.)

There are other points of view as well, especially when psychosocial pathology is involved. Delusion and obsession are two examples where a person’s perceptions of reality and their emotional balance are skewed by incorrect and/or unrealistic beliefs. Psychopathy is an example where one deliberately and with full knowledge of their actions, works to deceive and victimize others for their own benefit, even to the extent of physical and mental torture and murder.

This is one of the really powerful aspects of human thinking processes: it enables us to exert significant control over how we present ourselves to the world. Our manner in doing this is called our affect by psychologists. Good character enables most of us to maintain a positive affect without having to think about it, but there are many reasons why being able to consciously control our affect would be valuable. Professional actors need to do this to deliver a convincing performance. Sales people, politicians, con men, etc., all use this to persuade or deceive others. Spies and cops need this ability to stay alive when working under cover. Not being able to control our affect is also valuable to law enforcement and parents. When you don’t control your affect, other people can sometimes read things about your inner thoughts, such as when you are lying or when you are genuine in your expression of commitment or determination. It also helps us spot people whose body language is dissonant with what they are saying (such as a criminal about to attack us.)

You cannot dream yourself into a character; you must hammer and forge yourself one.

—James Anthony Froude

What Is Character?

So what is character? To the outside observer, it’s what they come to understand about the predictability and trustworthiness of another person’s behavior. Many of the virtue names that are commonly used describe aspects of a person’s character that define their worth: honorable, capable, loyal, courageous, honest, trustworthy, etc. It’s why the saying, They weren’t worthy, strikes a discordant note. However, when one judges the character of another, it is through a filter of the judge’s own beliefs, attitudes, needs, and desires. That is how mothers can judge their sons as good boys, even though they’re convicted serial killers. This is the reason juries in the trials of prominent crimes can be so difficult to seat. The rules require selection of people who can be reasonably capable of an impartial decision based upon an objective evaluation of the case’s evidence, but it’s hard to find people who haven’t been tainted by sensationalized media accounts of the crime or who have not formed preconceived opinions about the prominent people involved in a case.

From a dog’s point of view, his master is an elongated and abnormally cunning dog.

—Mabel L. Robinson

Building Character

For us, our visible character depends upon which observer’s eyes we look through, (i.e., their point of view [POV]). If we’re interacting in person and looking through our eyes, we’re likely to take the actor’s perspective and offer a composite view of our idealized and actualized selves. Still looking through our eyes, if we’re trying to be honest and objective, we do a phase shift to limit our sight from only our actualized self unless other mental processes are involved that distort the focus in different ways. For example, shy or insecure people tend to minimize their knowledge and capabilities while braggarts and criminals often have a boastful bias that makes them exaggerate their knowledge and capabilities.

Childhood Phase

If we see character as traits that give a person worth, how do they enable us to behave in a worthy way? I’ll give a simple answer here, and develop it by adding detail as we go. Character is constructed from specific examples of how we would like to act. Most of this is absorbed from our environment while we are children, but we also have a natural desire to emulate others we find appealing and that is how many unattractive behaviors enter our lives. I’m sure we’ve all heard the phrase, Monkey see, monkey do, sometime during our lives. This is directed at this kind of behavior, which can be both good and bad. This is because we’re naturally drawn to the behaviors of people we see as important and often emulate them. This changes when our internal sense of self starts to develop. Up to that point we were still trying to get our arms around an identity of our own without really understanding what that is or why we are doing it.

In a negotiating class I took, the instructor explained that fully internalized behaviors pass through three distinctive stages before they are fully operational. In time sequence, these stages are (1) unconscious-incompetent, (2) conscious-incompetent, and (3) conscious-competent. The example he used for illustration was children tying their shoes. When starting out, kids are always frustrated by failure and their ignorance of the reason—their incompetence at not having fully learned the procedure or acquired the physical skills to manipulate the shoelaces properly. Then, they learn the procedure and become aware of the reason they failed, but remain frustrated by their lack of physical skill in forcing the laces through their paces. Lastly, having honed the necessary skill and being armed with full knowledge of the procedure, they triumph each time they successfully wrestle the laces into varying degrees of tied perfection. After a few successes, they forget about their failures and rarely think about the act of tying them again, having achieved full operating status.

Competency and the Rise of Identity

This same kind of development occurs with the self. When working on new behaviors, we’re all unconscious-incompetents, but when we become fully aware of the behavior we want to have, we move into the conscious-incompetent phase, since "knowing the path isn’t the same as walking the path"¹⁰ as Morpheus told Neo in The Matrix.

The vast population of this earth, and indeed nations themselves, may readily be divided into three groups. There are the few who make things happen, the many more who watch things happen, and the overwhelming majority who have no notion of what happens. Every human being is born into this third and largest group; it is for himself, his environment and his education, to determine whether he shall rise to the second group or even to the first.

—Nicholas Murray Butler

Getting Unstuck

Many of us get stuck in the middle phase, but if you’re to exert positive control over yourself and your destiny in particular, you need to move into the conscious-competent realm, which is where the people who make things happen live. We know things in our lives go awry, so we need to understand why in order to discover what we can do to be better next time. This is the key to getting unstuck: learning to do better and working to understand why we fail or are denied what we want. It’s the logic of failure¹¹ that holds us back. Most of us don’t like failure and because of that, we tend to avoid it. The justifications we use to help us do that is what I mean by the logic of failure. The idea has a much deeper and broader context (which the referenced book discusses), but this simple explanation is what blocks greater achievement in most of us.

Adulthood and Embracing Responsibility

Our destiny is shaped by the quality of the choices we make. This is especially true when it comes to judgment. When we make decisions (including the decision to defer judgment), there are consequences. All choices have consequences, some of them intended but many that are not. The important thing here is that you recognize that the consequences of your actions are generally your responsibility, and the degree to which you accept responsibility for the consequences flowing from your actions (or inaction) defines a major aspect of your character. When you consistently take responsibility for your actions (or failure to act), many other virtues seem to develop in parallel, most notably bravery, honesty, integrity, and reliability.

Virtues and Vices

The only proper way to eliminate bad habits is to replace them with good ones.

—Jerome Hines

We are what we repeatedly do. Excellence therefore is not an act but a habit.

—Aristotle

Virtues and vices are both packaged behaviors that are repeated consistently over time until we use them without thinking about it (i.e., as concious-compentants, they become operational). They often seem to come bundled with one or more other behaviors by specific mental and emotional biases. For example, if you are said to be charitable, you may also have supporting virtues like empathy, generosity, humanity, and mercy as well as certain biases such as compassion or pity. This is because human behaviors aren’t just a single set of actions with a label on them like canned tomatoes. They are networks of smaller thoughts and actions bound up with emotions and drives. The reason they seem packaged or bundled is that they often share many of these component behaviors and emotions as a machine might share the same type and size gears and sprockets or, to use a more modern example, a common set of software subroutines packaged into dynamic load libraries (DLLs).

Taking Control

Taking the steps to move into the conscious-competent phase is where our desire to choose our own path meets the understanding to determine what is wrong so steps can be defined and taken to fix the problems we see. This is when we begin the long, often painful experience of weeding out the childhood beliefs that conflict with our idealized self and replace them with more accurate or practical adult beliefs. Ideally, this process continues throughout our lives. In exceptional performers, it evolves into a regular process.

The highest reward for man’s toil is not what he gets for it, but what he becomes by it.

—John Ruskin

Character lives and grows within as a reflection of our beliefs, knowledge, passions, attitudes, likes, dislikes, feelings and emotions. That is why people notice a person’s character—it’s a way of quickly sizing up a person’s value, whether they are someone to be trusted, watched, or avoided. That is why it’s important to understand what drives our character and how to control it. But what does that really mean? Would knowing our behaviors or the huge body of knowledge, beliefs, attitudes, etc., used by those behaviors help us shape the way our character is portrayed?

Understanding Values

Absolutely. In fact, putting the dynamics of character to work is what enables us to seize control of our destiny. However, given the quantity of knowledge, beliefs, and attitudes we accumulate over a lifetime,