These four virtues will help you survive and thrive in all parts of daily life, both personally and professionally.
What is the good life, and how can we achieve it? Not just personally, but within our career choice and our professional life. After all, we spend around 30 percent of our adult lives at work or thinking about work. The concept of the good life was considered by the ancients in their dialogues, so this goes back 20 centuries.
In modern times, longitudinal research such as the Grant Study have looked for evidence of what leads to a good life. Being virtuous is a large part of that equation. In consideration of that, there are some specific virtues that are an immensely important element both personally and professionally. Knowing this world we live and work in is loaded with volatility, uncertainty, complexity, and ambiguity, what do we need to navigate to success?
I believe there are four key virtues we need to exercise that are a large part of the goodness of the human condition. These are critical to helping drive us to a fulfilling purpose. Through the practice of these virtues, we can survive and thrive in all parts of daily life, both personally and professionally:
- Wisdom. Considering all the good virtues that exist, it is hard to start at any other place. In the same way we are not born with the ability to lead or read, we are not born with any wisdom. It simply must be learned over time. We are born with an incredible amount of fluid intelligence, which enables us to learn at a rapid rate. We learn how to eat, crawl, walk, talk, socialize, read, write, and account. This all happens in less than a decade. Advancing on this for the next 20 years, we develop unique talents and become skilled practitioners and experts. At about the age we are imbedded in our careers, fluid intelligence tapers and with a bit of luck we transition to crystallized intelligence. This is when we are better able to consider what knowledge we gained and then begin to solve problems and make good decisions. This is wisdom. Anyone who has decades of experience knows it does exist. As teens, I am sure many of us recall asking for advice on numerous occasions. Now as an experienced professional, I am often asked for advice. Through the acquisition of knowledge, leverage your fluid intelligence to make wise choices for yourself and for those around you, while helping others do the same.
- Courage. According to Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics, the moral virtue of courage is in the center between two opposites. Courage is known as the “golden mean.” Too much courage is reckless, and too little is cowardly. The target is somewhere in the middle. Wagner Dodge knew about courage. With a team of smoke jumpers, he was dropped into a remote part of Montana to extinguish spot fires in a valley. After hiking down to the valley, it became clear the fire was going to win. Their only hope of survival was to hike out of the valley to safety. At some point Wagner dropped his pack and, on a dime, proceeded to light an escape fire. As a result, Wagner survived along with two others. Having on the spot courage means thinking again, making a tough call, and dealing with problems as they arise.
- Justice. Understanding what is right and wrong is not complicated. In our modern western tradition, we know this as justice and the justice system. It is a system of laws that provides guidance for us to obey, otherwise one must face the consequences. Morally and personally, we know this as ethics. Being morally good can be defined by the golden rule which is to do unto others as you would have others do unto you. Every day if we look hard enough, we will see some sort of injustice in society, and maybe in our professional life, although we hope not. Many businesses and professionals comply with a code of ethics. This is a valuable statement of moral ground and commits people to a common goodness.
- Temperance. Being in full control of all things is just not possible. In the course of our daily life, we are faced with events that try to grab our attention. What matters next is not necessarily the event itself, but how we react to the event. Tempering that reaction is what counts. There are two types of events that occur in this world. First, there are those that we have no control over, which include the weather, the outcome of a sporting event, why and what other people think and speak. Second, there are the events we have full control of, those include what goes into our mouth, our level of ambition, and what we as individuals think and speak. I would argue that in our modern society we trend toward spending the majority of our time on the first. We should consider flipping that script, and instead, focus our brain power on what we are in control of, in other words, practicing the virtue of temperance.
Think about your own profession and personal experiences where you have been impacted by them or impacted others by exercising those virtues. Try incorporating these virtues into your daily life and look to mentor others. Because I believe using these virtues can and will make you better at what you do and how you live your life.
Liam Watson is a vice president and information technology director at SCS Engineers. Contact him at lwatson@scsengineers.com.