Interview: Philosophy for Geniuses (<--That's You) with Tom Morris

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Hi, this is Brian. Welcome back to the Optimal Living Interview series. Today I'm thrilled to be chatting with Tom Morris, one of my favorite teachers. He's a former professor of philosophy at Notre Dame who, who has a dual PhD from Yale in both philosophy plus religious studies. He's an uber practical and public modern day philosopher and he's just a great guy, you know, conversations. I've always been blown away by his enthusiasm and energy and I am thrilled to connect. Tom, thanks so much for taking the time and.

Oh, it's always good to be with you, Brian. Thank you so much, man.

All right, well, let's just step back and talk about philosophy because, because most people have a weird sense of philosophy in a kind of ivory tower, esoteric, pedantic style. Tell us about what it really means, classic Greek roots and how we apply it to our modern lives.

Well, you're right, there's this misunderstanding of philosophy. It's old bearded guys in even older tweed jackets, right, who kind of mumble about things that make no sense. But it's funny, the word philosophy itself comes from two Greek root words. Philo, love of Sophia, wisdom. So, you know, etymologically, philosophy is just the love of wisdom. And when you think about what wisdom is, it's just insight for living, you know, how to get our bearings in the world, how to have the right perspective so we're not going to be wasting our time in this life. How to really fulfill ourselves and make a positive difference for other people. Philosophy was really launched with this kind of quest for understanding the world we're in and understanding what our lives should be in this world. What is it to live a good life, you know, what is it to live as a successful human being? So it's unfortunate that there are two sides of philosophy. The theoretical side, you know, epistemology and metaphysics and philosophical logic and stuff like that can get pretty complicated. It's a lot like science or mathematics. And then there's the practical side of philosophy. Questions about the good life and about happiness and about challenge and about how to deal with difficulty. You know, I was trained like most philosophers for the last hundred years in the theoretical stuff. And we've almost forgotten the practical stuff in our colleges and universities now. That's starting to turn around a little bit just in the last few years. But when, when I first started being asked, hey, did the philosopher say anything about success or about happiness or about ethics? I had to say to the People asking me these questions. Well, that's not the kind of stuff I learned in graduate school. Let me look into it. Well, lo and behold, I discovered there's this entire half a philosophy that we're forgetting about in the world today, the whole practical side. So it's been my job and my unexpected joy for the last 25 years to be rediscovering the practical side of philosophy. That, that study of wisdom, that, that attempt to find insight that'll really make a difference for us day to day. So that's the way I look at philosophy now. Mainly about getting our bearings in the world and, and making the most of our time here.

Well, you've already got me fired up.

Well, you're a natural born philosopher anyway.

You just embody for me another classic Greek ideal. Right. And theos, that enthusiasm, that light which I think is the natural byproduct of living consistent with these ideas, talk to us about, when we talk about true success, which is a big part of the through line of your work, you, you talk about greatness of spirit, as Socrates described it. Can you tell us about that?

Yeah, it's like most of us live narrow, restricted lives for whatever reason. It's almost as if we're somehow afraid to become everything we're capable of being, or we grow up having restrictions imposed on us. Well, you can't do this, you can't do that, and people like you don't even try this, and you just need to be who you are. Wait a minute. Being who you are can mean something pretty extraordinary. I think a lot of people live in a tragically reduced circle of being, whereas the great philosophers like Socrates, he wanted to expand the circle, he wanted to blow up the bubble. He wanted to say, hey, you know, life is about more than what you may think it's about. He went around in his day questioning everybody about all the beliefs they had, all the knowledge they thought they had, and so much of the knowledge was that they thought they had was limiting beliefs. And he kind of punctured a hole in all these balloons. And people were shocked. You know, the things they had taken for granted maybe weren't true at all. So there's this whole history stemming from Socrates. Look, let's question limitations, let's question restrictions. Let's try to see if there can't be more to our lives. If we can't dig deeper and rise higher, then we typically think. And that to me is the liberating nature of true philosophy, that we discover forms of success in forms of human functioning. And fulfillment that we might not have even had a glimpse of, you know, earlier in school. And even when we took philosophy courses that didn't touch on things like this. So to me, Socrates was kind of the great example of a guy not doing philosophy in a classroom, not just treating theoretical questions, but he was out on the street, you know, and he was talking to people, he was challenging people, he was shaking up people's assumptions and people's ideas, and the whole history of philosophy has resulted from that.

So good in true success, you talk about seeking greatness of spirit, and you quote Plato quoting Socrates in the apology, and you said that it was Socrates firm belief that wealth does not bring about excellence, but excellence brings about wealth and all other public and private blessings for men. My understanding is the. The word excellence in this context is the Greek word arete, which directly translates as excellence, but has a deeper meaning. Can you tell us about arete?

Yeah. Another translation of it is virtue, which we get from the Latin virtu, which meant strength or prowess. Aristotle believed, following his teacher Plato, following his teacher Socrates, Aristotle believed that we bring to any challenging situation, we bring to any opportunity certain strengths of character. We're best off to bring the most strengths we can to any challenging situation or any possibility situation. And he wanted to identify what those strengths were for human living. Now, when you ask people now name the resources any human being ought to seek, a lot of people are going to say, well, money, wealth, maybe fame, maybe status. But the Greek philosophers like Socrates, Plato and Aristotle saw more deeply. You know, we need to seek those strengths of character. That's the true wealth, the things within us, the arete, the wisdom and virtue together that we can bring to any challenge, that we can bring to any opportunity that will cause us to grow. That's what true success is really about. The other stuff, the externals, the money, power, fame, status, you can name a lot of. They are the sometime consequences of true success, but they never define it. And that to me, was revolutionary. I was first asked to speak on the topic of success before I studied it at all by a group of Oldsmobile dealers in the Midwest. They said, look, we have these motivational speakers every year, and they basically say the same thing. Set goals, believe in yourself. Did the great philosophers talk about this? And I, the guy who's asking me, I said, well, you know, I've got to look into that. And when I did look, I did two things. I read all the motivational books that people were reading at the time, which were often about how to make as Much money as possible, how to get as famous as possible, how to get a game, gather as much power as possible, how to get promoted, how to become a millionaire. And then I'm reading the philosophers and they're talking about something really different. They're talking about something really different, deep. They're talking about the soul, they're talking about the spirit. They're talking about the inner person, the kind of person who'll be capable of using, well, stuff like money and fame and status and power. They're not talking about anything antagonistic to these externals. But Plato seemed to have the attitude, you're never going to get the externals right until you first get the internals right. And I said, ah, bingo.

That's what I want to do again, wow. You describe them as high goals. You kind of juxtapose the intrinsic vis a vis the extrinsic. Yeah, tell us more about that.

Well, you know, it's funny because we tend to see paraded around us in our society examples of successful people. Well, we're shown people who are, who've attained these externals, right, who have positions of great power or they're people who are celebrities, they're very famous for what they do, or they're people who make a lot of money for what they do, or all of those, you know, all of those things sometimes wrapped into one package. And of course, when you're looking at somebody on television or in the movies or in a documentary or in a magazine, or you read a biography of a person, you don't really get the soul of a person. You do just see the externals, right? So it's been one of the great mistakes of the modern world to kind of think those externals are the kind of, the whole deal, you know, that's, that's what it's all about. Whereas the philosophers have always wanted to say, no, you got to start from inside. It's an inside out job. You know, you, you've got to build foundations. In fact, there's this great image I like from the ancient world that if you want to build a really tall tower, you'd better have really deep foundations. Now if you just want to build a tent, you need no foundations at all, right? But if you want to build a high tower, a tower that can really be a beacon to others and to be a source of great pride and honor for yourself, dig deep. Dig the foundations deep. And that's what the philosophers were always reminding us of. And that's what in our time we really need to be Reminded of so.

Good and as you know, just so parallel with what I'm so passionate about, that I love the idea that if you want to see how tall a building is going to be, look at how deeply they're digging the foundation.

Absolutely.

And the tower versus tent, that's a great distinction. So tell us, what things should we be thinking about and acting upon to create a solid foundation?

Well, the philosophers, as I've studied the philosophers on this issue, I wanted to isolate what I considered to be the most universal framework of ideas or the most universal toolkit. And by universal, I meant at least a couple things. I meant, number one, applicable to everything we do, whether professional or personal, you know, whether in your work life or your private life, anything you do, what's going to help you do it well, secondly, whatever your context is, and whether you're working, struggling with something as an individual or whether you're working as a part of a team, whether you're doing it in the US or you're in another part of the world, what's going to universally be helpful? And also another aspect of universality, what's been recognized by the wisest people in every human civilization where folks talked about stuff like this. And so you can go, I went to Lao Tzu and I went to Confucius, and I went all over to the Hindu holy texts and sort of searching world wisdom, as well as the Greek philosophers and the Roman Stoics and people like this. And, you know, I also consulted great performers in every field imaginable, you know, great athletes and great explorers and the people who've done great work across every human discipline, basically. And it kept coming to me, the same seven things. So I isolated seven universal conditions for success. They structure the first book I wrote about this, which is called True A New Philosophy of Excellence. It's been around since 1994. And then I came to realize that each of these conditions for success that I had identified each of the seven, they were correlated with a skill or a kind of an art that we can cultivate and get better at. It's one thing to be told, all right, you need these seven things. But what about if you hear these seven things and say, hmm, I'm not really good at that? Well, the fact that there are arts or skills associated with these seven things means that you can get better. That's what skilled behaviors are. It's not like a light switch. It's more like a dimmer switch. Right. You can turn it up and turn it up and turn it up. You can get better at these things. So I wrote a book about that called the Art of Achievement. Same seven conditions for success, but a whole new look at them with respect to this kind of artistic side, the skill set side, explored, you know, these conditions in a bunch of Stoics, the Roman philosophers. A book called the Stoic Art of Living. And then I did an ebook last year just called the seven Cs of success, which is the little name for my framework of ideas. So I can't stop writing about this stuff. I mean, I write about all kinds of other things as well, but I mentioned that only because the framework seems so simple on the surface. But deep down here I am on book four, you know, of trying to, to plumb the depth of all the insights and I'm still going as a philosopher. So it's like the ideal, it's like the ideal philosophical tool. It's really simple on the surface and kind of easy to use. But it's in each of these things is inexhaustibly deep as well. And that's the wonderful combination. Because sometimes there's superficial cheerleading. We need. You can do it, come on, try your best. Sometimes all we need in our lives is somebody sort of cheering us on and encouraging us. But often we need something deeper than just encouragement. We need real insights about. Okay, I've tried something a number of times here and I failed every time. What can I do? Should I give up? Or is there a way around this problem or over this hurdle? You know, and the most successful people in human history have never been people who didn't ever experience difficulty or failure. Sometimes they're people who failed a lot. I mean, PBS started showing in my part of the country last night this two part thing on Walt Disney. And the first part one was two hours long. And you watch the first two hours on Walt Disney's life and you say, oh my goodness, this guy failed over and over and over. Almost went bankrupt and did go bankrupt and, and you know, he'd come out with one success and then make a little money. And then the next two movies were total failures that blew through all that money and, and he was in danger of losing everything again. And you think, wow, wouldn't it be great amidst the turbulence of life, the ups and downs, if we had some reliable tools that have always stood the test of time that we know we can use and make a difference with. And that's what I've kind of spent the last 20 years identifying.

Yeah, that's amazing. And one of the seven Cs so very quickly, the seven Cs are conception. We need to have a vivid vision of what we want. A goal. Confidence is number two. Right. Which I want to talk about in depth, related to failure that you just mentioned. Concentration, consistency, commitment, character, and then a capacity to enjoy the process. But let's go back to confidence and piggyback on what you just said about Walt Disney. You talked about the importance of embracing failure and to build our confidence. Why is that so important?

Well, it's a funny thing. First of all, failure is one of the potentially greatest learning experiences we can have. Right? Failure is rich with information. When. When we succeed, sometimes we don't learn that much because often success comes from the world surprising you by cooperating with you a lot more than you expected. It's like you'd say, gee, this is great, right? But. But when you run into a wall, when you fail at something, you're often knocked back on your heels and caused to think it through. Okay, why didn't this work? Well, that's a great learning opportunity. And we all make mistakes. The key is learning from our mistakes. Well, the more mistakes we make, and if we make them right, the more we learn and so the more we should be confident, because we are. I like to say I stand in my life now. I'm 63 years old. I say life now. I stand atop a high mountain of mistakes from which I can see much farther than I've ever been able to see before. So rather than mistakes undermining our confidence, it's like up to us how we react to them and learn from them. And ironically, what we learn from our failures can actually be fuel for building our confidence. Which reminds me of all the great athletes I've ever known. And I've talked to a number of national champions and gold medalists and people like that about the seven Cs, and they've told me to a person about this confidence condition, you know what? It's important to not let your confidence be circumstantial or situational derived. You can't just be reactive in your confidence. You've got to be proactive. You've got to bring confidence to the challenge, not wait for the challenge to give you confidence. It's what William James, the great Harvard psychologist and philosopher, called precursive faith. Faith that runs ahead of the evidence for cursive in Latin, to run and pre ahead. Faith that runs ahead of the evidence. The evidence of the past is always insufficient to predict the success of the future. James said the champions are precisely the People who don't let that hold them back, they run ahead of the evidence precursively believing in themselves in any new challenge. So they bring confidence to the situation. They don't wait to feel confident confident, they kind of manufacture their own confidence. You know, it's not a reactive thing, it's a, it's a proactive thing. And that's meant a huge amount to me in the, the fact that, as you know, Brian, I've lived my life launching myself into all kinds of unexpected adventures. Like it wasn't enough to be a full professor in a philosophy department, I wanted to be a public philosopher. So I left the environment where I knew what I was doing and launched out into the unknown. You know, that's the recipe for any great adventure. But you go on to the unknown, you don't know what you're doing. So, boy, you better bring your own confidence with you. You better pack your confidence and take it with you. Because your experience of the unknown is not likely to generate its own confidence. You know, at first you're just kind of stumbling forward, but in any adventure, we're not going to get anywhere unless we kind of bring confidence to the party.

All of it. Again, awesome. How do we do that? What's the number one tip you can give on, on kind of creating, constructing that confidence?

Well, there are a few things. I mean, one thing is you've got to cultivate confidence, right? I mean, it's like some people just try to use positive thinking only, you know, just look in the mirror and say, I'm great, I'm great, I'm great, I can do this. Well, I think positive self talk is an important part of the formula, but it can't be the only thing. There's this old British proverb I love in this regard. It says, don't bolt the door with a boiled carrot. I love that image, right? Bolting the door with a boiled carrot. Well, it's not going to work, right? And sometimes just trying to use positive self talk as the whole basis for yourself, that's not going to do the job either. We need to truly try to cultivate the competence we're going to need, right? We need to remind ourselves, when you're doing positive self talk, don't just be whistling as you walk by the graveyard, right? But be reminding yourself of the competencies you do have, the skills you do have that might be transferable into this new situation, right? And so far as you can work on those things, work on those, you know, hone those skills, strengthen that Stuff. Secondly, surround yourself with the support of other people. You will be more confident if you're not flying totally solo, and if you can get other people around you to help you, support you, encourage you. Man, that's building a fortress of confidence right there. You know, remind yourself what's at stake in the situation. Because usually when you're fighting for something noble, you're trying for something great, your spirit is more likely to rise to the occasion. And as you rise to the occasion, you will feel more confident. But one of the most important things is that action itself, forward motion tends to breed confidence. A lot of people who come out of situations where their actions were described as heroic, they will say, and it's almost become a kind of a cliche, they'll say, look, before I did what I did, I sure didn't feel courageous or heroic. But it was only in the taking of the action that they began to feel the confidence that comes from action. Aristotle understood that we are active, dynamic beings. You can't just sit at home and manufacture confidence in your head and in your heart. You got to be doing, you got to be trying, you got to be on the path. And as you act, the confidence begins to come. So, you know, those are. Those are things that just initially come to mind. You know, remind yourself of your competence, surround yourself with support. Think about what's at stake in the situation and take action. These things together start giving you that precursive faith, that confidence you need to bring to the situation.

Amazing. And remember, the boiled carrot.

The boiled carrot.

Be confident and let that generate a lot of our confidence. So then let's step back for a moment because we just looked at. At the second of your seven C's. Let's talk about the first conception. And specifically you ask, I call it the question, how can I make my contribution? And really finding that way, that noble goal, as you said, that in itself inspires us. Tell us about that.

Oh, this is so simple. When people, most people set goals, they think about what they want to get rather than about what they want to give. And it's kind of backwards because you only get the most from any new situation when you give the most in that situation. So we should be thinking like the. The philosophers who've worked with me through the years. And I have a little group of philosophers I'll occasionally send to places like Istanbul or Athens, Greece or Brazil to do some philosophy when I'm too busy to travel internationally. And I've always said to these philosophers, look, impact first, then income. Never think of income first. Think of impact first. How can I make a difference here? How can I bring something positive to this situation? And then you're going to benefit in so many ways. Financial could be one of those ways, but there are a lot of other ways as well. So I've seen too many people in their goal setting be way too narrow. And they just think about what they want to get out of a new possibility, out of a new situation. Think about what you want to give and then the gain, the getting will be probably much beyond what you could have imagined at the outset. But that's never your ultimate motivation. Your ultimate motivation is to make your difference in the world. Be who you're created to be in this situation, in this world, make your positive impact. You know, then things start happening. In fact, we talk about setting goals, but the more I thought about goal setting throughout the years, the more I realized that it's we who are setting ourselves on a new path toward a goal. A goal is a commitment of the will. If you're not setting out in new actions, if you're not doing new things, you don't yet have a new goal. I've known a lot of people who thought they had a new goal for their life or their health or their income, their work or something. And all they had was a fantasy or they had a desire. But they, they hadn't truly changed their behavior yet. They hadn't really committed themselves to a new path of action. So they didn't really have a new goal yet. A goal is commitment of the will. And we set ourselves on a new path when we have a new goal.

So good. You just made me think of Aristotle and being teleological. Can you tell us about the Greek concept of having a target and why that's so important?

Oh yeah, well, so the Greek word telos meant bullseye or target. Aristotle really believed that every human being needs a target to shoot at at all times in our lives. We are essentially goal oriented beings. That's built, that's hardwired into our core. So if, if we're living at a time in our lives where we're not setting new goals or we're not pursuing goals, something just won't feel right. There's something, there's a deep itch in us that not being scratched, there's something that's not being fulfilled. And I've known people who said no, I mean, we shouldn't set goals, we should just go with the flow. We should just be in the moment. And I'm a great Believer in being in the moment, in living in the now and sort of relishing the present. And I believe that people get too caught up in the future and in the past. But goal setting at its best is a healthy concern with using the present properly to prepare for a better future. And Aristotle really is the one who taught me that if we're not doing that, we are not going to be fulfilled. So people really think about, wait, what's the relationship between, for example, success and happiness? I've always wanted to be happy, so I decided if I could get really successful, I'd be happier. Somebody else says, well, no, I think the happier people are going to be the more successful people. Which comes first? Well, it's integrally interrelated. Success and happiness both arise out of this teleological behavior that's healthy, that's harmonious, that's right for you. That's why I tell people, when you're setting goals, goal setting should be an exercise in self knowledge. Who am I? What's right for me? What's right for my context right now? Because you can set goals that would be right for somebody else, but not for you. You're never going to feel satisfied. That's why too often we see a friend or a neighbor succeeding in a certain way. We try to. We try to imitate that form of success, but it's not right for us. It's against the grain in our nature and our personalities. The Stoic philosophers in particular, Epictetus, Seneca, Marcus Aurelius, they were always talking about living in accordance with nature. Living in accordance with your nature, finding in the metaphor of wood, find your grain and carve in honoring that grain. That's the way you produce a masterpiece, a real work of art in your life.

So good, we could unpack that for a weekend. Let's go to consistency and the importance of. We're kind of jumping around these Cs, but this will be the fourth C. Consistency. Talk to us about how that is the key to empowerment.

Well, well, it's funny, the word itself, the English word consistency comes from two Latin roots. A verb, sto stare steti, that means to stand, and a particle, it means together. So consistency is etymologically, somehow about standing together. And when you think this through for a second, you say, oh, I get that. Do my actions stand together with my words? Do my actions today and my actions tomorrow? And did my actions yesterday stand together or are they pulling apart? You can ask this about people in an office, about family members, a family. Are we standing together or are we pulling apart? Consistency is not about always doing things the same way. In changing circumstances, we may have to change the way, we may have to adapt and adjust a lot. But consistency is always, hey, am I standing together with my highest goals and my deepest values? Am I standing together with the people on my team? It's always about standing together. Every. And it's funny, Chinese philosophers have a great image that I've always loved of moving water. Flowing water. They say, you know, moving water, when it comes across an obstacle, what does it do? It goes around it, it goes over it goes under it, pushes it a little out of the way. They have this saying, be like water. And they ask a question, what's stronger water or stone? And I remember asking my students that at Notre Dame several semesters, you know, 17 year old, really bright kids, Philosophy 101 their freshman year, I would say, okay, tell me this, what stronger water or stone? And I would get these perplexed looks from most students. They would say, well, how can you even ask that, professor? I mean, I mean, stone is massive and dense and hard and, you know, water is just liquid. And then I'd remind them real quickly, well, you know, dripping water goes through stone and it's like, oh, you know, the Chinese philosophers have the saying, be like water. And hey, by the way, when this liquid encounters radically transformed circumstances, it can become a solid. And when it encounters circumstances just as radically transformed in the opposite direction, it can become a vapor. But here's the key. It never abandons its essential nature. I mean, that to me is the greatest image of consistency I've ever come across. It's like adaptivity to the max while never abandoning your essential nature. That's consistency.

Amen.

We're like the philosophical version of a Baptist camp meeting.

You're a preacher, you're not a philosopher. This is great. Oh, so good. Okay.

Yeah, if Billy Graham had been a Platonist, you know.

So good character. We're skipping up to the sixth one now. Yeah, character is so key. We touched on in the beginning. But what is good character?

Yeah, it's like, you know, Aristotle thought this was like super important. And it's funny people don't realize this, but J.K. rowling, the author of the Harry Potter books, she was a classics major in college and she was particularly impressed by Aristotle and by Aristotle's understanding of character, that the character is that cluster of strengths or virtues like that we talked about earlier, that set of habits or dispositions in your own soul that you bring with you everywhere you go. To any situation, to any opportunity, to any challenge, to any business assignment, to any new possibility in your life, to any relationship. You bring a certain set of characteristics. And Aristotle thought, hey, we'll be better off to bring strengths, not weaknesses, right? So J.K. rowling has Aristotle in mind when she's writing the character of Albus Dumbledore. Well, she also has him in mind for Harry Potter himself. But really, Albus Dumbledore, Harry's headmaster. I mean, he's this amazing paradigm of Aristotelian virtues. I mean, you can kind of go through the list of. Aristotle thought it was courage was the pinnacle of the virtues because unless you have the virtue of courage, you're not going to live in accordance with any of the other virtues when the pressure's on, you know. So courage is like terrorist number one virtue. Well, that was Harry Potter's number one quality. He's a scared little kid. And how does he manage to stand up to every danger of his time? Well, he's very courageous, you know, and Albus Dumbledore, amazing displays of courage. And Aristotle has these other things like, of course, stuff like truthfulness is an Aristotelian virtue, right? A strong disposition toward honesty. Now, when the pressure is on, right. Are you going to tell the truth or are you going to fudge a little bit? Well, it doesn't just take courage to be on a battlefield in a war. It takes courage to navigate the everyday challenges of life. You know, at work and at home, are you going to step up and, and tell the truth even though it may embarrass you half to death? You may feel shamed by the truth, you may feel awkward, you may sort of think you're putting yourself in a weaker position by owning up to something. Well, Aristotle thought his truthfulness is very important, but you're not going to be truthful unless you're courageous. So all the virtues that Aristotle analyzed as important for us to bring to any new situation. And he had other virtues like justice, a basic commitment to treating others well, or wittiness, believe it or not, the ability to see and express humor appropriately. I mean, you'll see again in the Harry Potter stories, Albus Dumbledore will defuse a tense situation with an appropriate joke. And all of a sudden, people who are all balled up in nervousness and stress, they all sudden relax and think creatively and clearly again. So when I talk about character, you know, when you ask and sort of grab somebody on the street or, you know, make sure you're gonna go even to a university Campus and grab somebody and say, define character. A lot of people use words like integrity. That kind of need definition just as much as the word character does. Okay, what does integrity mean? Well, it comes from root word for integer, you know, for whole number. It kind of means wholeness or something. Wholeness or health or connectedness. And connectedness with what? What kind of wholeness and health and harmony and Stu, you start. And then you start teasing that out and, and you get you. Pretty soon you're in hailing distance of Aristotle's view of the whole person. The harmonious set of virtues that will position you well for success. That's what we're talking about with character. We're talking about a whole set of strengths. They're going to position you. Hey, you got a clear conception of what you want. You got a strong confidence, you're going to be able to do it. You got a focus, concentration on what takes to reach the goal. You're working consistently toward it. You got an emotional commitment to the importance of what you're doing. Character. Character, man. It's going to guide you. It's going to keep you on course. It's going to give you that inner, those inner resources, that inner strength that you need when things are tough. That's how important character is. I can kind of go on about that. I could kind of go on about that. It's not like I'm a master of character or anything. I've had my lapses just like anybody, you know. But it's probably because of our mess ups in life that we come to understand that what we should have been doing. And you say, yeah, when you see in my life, if I haven't had a clear conception of what I wanted to do, or if I haven't had enough confidence, or if I haven't been acting consistently or if I've had a flub up, a character flub up of some way I wasn't courageous enough or I wasn't truthful enough. Nothing's going to go as well as it could go. And so you keep. Did Aristotle make this up? Well, he was looking at the successful people and at the people who weren't successful in his time. And he was saying, like, what makes the difference here? And at its best, he saw these were the reliable things you could keep going back to.

You talked about courage. Can you do your etymological analysis of the word courage?

The core of the heart, right? This has got to come from the heart. And what is the heart? It's this metaphorical center or core of the person. And kind of every culture has had the heart, right? We're not just talking about cardiology here. We're talking about the center of everything where. Where thought meets feeling meets action meets attitude. We're talking about the innermost part of the person. If you have strength there, then you're going to be able to take whatever the outer world throws your way. I've got this little phrase that I used as a subtitle for a book, the Stoic Art of Living. The phrase is inner resilience and outer results. This courage, this stuff of the core, the heart. And of course, we get our word encouragement right from that. And if you two of my favorite words are encouragement and enthusiasm, and I know you share that enthusiasm for enthusiasm, right? And it's just like, hey, if we're right on the inside, we're going to be able to fight the good fight on the outside.

Let's take that thread a little further, if we can. This goes as now we're bouncing back to number five, commitment. You talk about how important it is that our work feeds the fire of our hearts. What does that mean?

Yeah, you know, it's funny because love and learning tend to go together. When you're learning something new that's great. It's just blowing your mind. All the stuff you're learning, let's say you're learning about a new person, people early in dating situations, you know, you're getting to know another person and you just love. You just love what's going on in your life. You just. You're awake, you're alive, you're. You're on fire with this. This person, this relationship, or with this new hobby or with this new sport or this new job. But then there often comes a time, months or years down the road, when the fire seems to have ebbed a little bit. The flame is much smaller. That initial first love has. Where's it gone? You know, I'm. I'm not feeling it anymore. You know, I'm going through the motions. I mean, I got the phone calls and the paperwork and the emails, and I've this and I've got that. And I tell people, you know what you got? You got to recapture your love. You got to recapture that emotional commitment, because that's the driving force. That's the fire. And I love the image of fire here because the bigger the fire is in your heart, the more you can deal with the obstacles and debris that life throws your way. I mean, imagine that you're walking down a road toward your goal And. And the world's throwing in your path all kinds of garbage, all kinds of imag. Imagine trees falling across the path. Imagine, you know, just people just dumping just junk in front of your way. Well, if your fire is bright enough, that's just more fuel for the fire. Right? It just. The fire is stoked higher. If you throw too much on a small flame, it's going to smother it. It's going to go out. If you throw the same amount of stuff on a big flame, that's just more fuel for the fire. So I love this ancient image of the fire within us, that commitment we have. But it was really. There's gonna be times of discouragement. We all go through it. And unless you have that fire burning on the inside, you know, unless you're doing something that you can be committed to, you're not gonna stick with it. So commitment, again, like all these other conditions, it's not just those sort of. Would be nice kind of thing, but it's really a central thing.

Amazing. I love that image of the fuel for the fire. If the fire is big enough or you're just gonna overwhelm it. Well, let's. Let's bring this to the final C of the capacity to enjoy the process along the way.

Yeah, it's not like it should have been enjoyment, but then I would have had six season and eight, because, you know, I really came to realize you can't enjoy every moment of every day. There are tough days. There are tough times. You may have to make a decision that breaks your heart. You may confront a situation that's just tragic. And if you're, you know, I mean, you. You'd be. You'd be psycho if you're grinning and whistling through a tragic situation. Right. I mean, we're. We're supposed to honor the suffering in the world and the suffering in people's lives by almost, you know, with an empathy that kind of is incompatible with a big grin on your face. Right. When things are tough, you know, somebody's. Some people got to be laid off at work. You know, I'm not going to do a little dance of that. You know, I'm just gonna feel really bad because there. So there are times you can't. Here's what I'm. Here's what I truly believe. Everything in this world, either you can enjoy it or you can learn from it. There are a lot of things that can be enjoyed. There's some things that can't be enjoyed, but those are precisely the things you can learn. A lot from. And then you can later on enjoy having learned. So the capacity to enjoy the process we got to see here. We got a capacity because the capacity to join. Insofar as we cultivate a capacity to enjoy the process of our work, not focused on the results, focused on the process that produces the results and enjoying as much as we can of the process, then the good days are even better and the bad days are not so bad. If you've got this baseline enjoyment and you're more creative in goal setting, you're better at confidence building. All the other conditions benefit when you have a capacity to enjoy the process along the way. And also these things, these conditions work back and forth. For example, if you've set the wrong kind of goal, if you have a clear conception of what you want, condition number one, but it's not right for you as a person, it's going to be real hard to enjoy that process. If you are determined to cultivate a capacity to enjoy the process, well, that's going to make you rethink certain possible goals. You might say, hey, could I really enjoy the process of that? In fact, Brian, that leads us to a really deep situation here. The seven Cs of success, as I call them, are a diagnostic tool, a test for any potential goal. Can I have a clear conception of this? Can I pursue it with confidence? Can I focus my concentration on is, is it possible for me to pursue this consistently with my other commitments in my life, that kind of thing? Use it as a test for a potential goal? If the goal passes all the tests there, then that's a good goal for me to set. Then they become a support tool, these seven Cs for attaining the goal. And if you ever feel along the way that something's not quite right, they become a diagnostic tool. Not this time for the toward the goal necessarily, but toward you and yourself. Am I, am I forgetting one of these seven conditions in my life? If things are not going well in some aspect of my life, it's because I'm neglecting or not putting enough attention toward at least one of these conditions. It's a wonderful diagnostic tool.

Let's move into that and kind of conclude and again we can talk for a month. It'd be amazing. Really appreciate you and your energy. And I'm just as I hearing you describe this and the passion and just conciseness with which you communicate all these ideas. What do you do on a daily basis in your life to stay plugged in to that enthusiast, to generate this level of enthusiasm?

Yeah, I Try to. I try to. Well, I do really have this capacity to enjoy the process along the way that we were talking of. I love what I do. I love most aspects of what I do. You know, I don't love it when my flight gets cancelled and I have to spend the night away from home. I'll go through stuff like that, right? But I enjoy. But what I'll do is when I have to spend the night away from home because of a flight cancellation, I'll have something great to read or I'll have something I'm writing that I can enjoy. Or so I always, you know, I get up every morning sort of excited about what can I do today to support my goals. What's this matter? Why am I doing any of this? And I'll remind myself and you know, other people help if I get an email from somebody saying, hey, this book of yours changed my life. I try to remember that I had an old friend who was a promise prominent history author, written a lot of books, and he said, a good review will make me glow for an hour. A bad review I can quote verbatim 10 years later. And I decided in my life to flip that around, do everything I can to flip that around. And anything I do for people when they tell me, wow, your ideas have really helped me, I try to live with that. I try to keep that with me as part of my motivational structure. Just because I'm not doing this for myself, I'm doing this for a lot of other people. We're doing this together because when they write, when people write me to tell me how they're using the ideas I brought to them in one of my books or something, it just makes me a better philosopher.

Well, I will give that to you right now. I appreciate that. And just it's both your wisdom. For me, what I find so inspiring is your wisdom and your embodiment of when's the last time anyone's heard a philosopher preach like this and to really embody it. When I found your work, it was really like I found kind of what we've talked about in our private conversations, like a big brother or an uncle or just someone that's really had been there and done that. When I was dropping out of law school, I actually wrote down, I'd be an evangelist if I only had a religion in which I believe. And I have goosebumps as I say that, because when I hear you talk today, I see that aspect of myself reflected in a really beautiful, uninhibited, powerful way. So I Just want to reflect that back.

Hey, thanks, man. I appreciate you saying, you know, when I left the classroom 20 years ago, this year is 20 years ago, I left the university structure, which I was trained to think that was how philosophers served. You got to be in the classroom, in a university, you know, the bigger the university, the better, you know. And when I left that whole structure to kind of be philosopher on my own, to be a freelance philosopher. Who ever heard of that? You know, it's just been the greatest adventure of my life. And I just want to reiterate that every adventure we're on is preparing us for the next one. Sometimes in ways we can't even imagine. The more we can use the wisdom of the ages for whatever that next adventure is going to be and whatever the one is we're on now, the better, the better it's going to go. And my life has kind of shown that.

Amazing. Well, I like to wrap up these chats by kind of pulling all the way back and asking if you could only share one piece of wisdom, it might have been something we touched on or something outside of it. With individuals passionate about optimizing their lives, what would that one piece of wisdom be?

Okay, it's different today than it would have been this time last year. This time last year, I would have said, be an activist, take action. The most successful people are people who take action. That's what I would have said. My one thing is today I'm going to say something very different. I'm going to say, you've got to use resources deeper than your conscious mind. You got to get below the chatter. You got to get beneath the clutter of those thoughts that are whizzing through your head every day. What have I got to do? I got this list. Here's my to do list. Here's my get that back with that email. I got to return that phone call. You got to quiet the chat. You got to get beyond the clutter. You got to open up your conscious mind to the deeper resources of the unconscious. Then you're in touch with something powerful. You're in touch with something very precious. And you're in touch with the resources that can take you where nothing else can. So that's what I would advise. The one thing. Get beneath the conscious mind meditatively open yourself up, even if it's just for a few minutes a day, to the deeper resources. Then amazing things can happen.

Let's take that one step further. How?

What?

Give us a little more clarity on. On someone who maybe not doesn't do that a lot yet. What specifically would you recommend they do?

Well, I didn't do it a lot. In fact, I really had never done. I tried to medicate a couple times and I'd make it about two and a half minutes and I'd say, okay, enough for this, you know. But four years ago, four and a half years ago, February of 2011, I was getting up from the breakfast table and all of a sudden I had this vivid daydream. I'm a daydreamer. I love to daydream. But this was the most vivid daydream I'd ever had. It's like a movie playing in my head. An old man and a young boy, they're sitting in the sand under a palm tree and they're talking about life. And I run upstairs to my study and start typing down what I'm hearing and seeing in this little mental movie. The movie played in my head for four years. It's generated eight novels, a million words. But I learned something on day two and day three of this process that I never expected to happen. I never planned. Talking about unexpected adventures. I didn't think I'd be a novelist. I think. I didn't think I'd write fiction. I learned that the only way I could get the movie to play would be to sit at my desk and quiet my mind. And just quiet my mind. Just be at peace. Just breathe. Just quit thinking about stuff, quit worrying about stuff, quit planning stuff, quit. Quit scratching those itches of the day to do list of the day. Just sit and be calm. And within a few minutes, this movie would start playing up. It would start playing in my head. Sometimes I write for six hours and it seemed. Would seem like 20 minutes. You don't experience the passage of time. The most creative I've ever been in my life. The deepest resources of it. This movie set in Egypt in 1934 and 1935. A time and place about which I knew almost nothing. I've got these eight novels that. That fill out an entire world that I couldn't have come up with. It's stuff I don't know. It's Arab names I didn't know. It's people and places and things I didn't know about. It's the most radically crazy example I've ever had in my own life of being in touch with something deeper than the conscious mind. And it all came from learning. Like Pascal once said, most of our problems come from not being able to sit quietly in our room. I've learned to sit quietly in my room. And even if you just do it a few minutes a day, the results can be pretty spectacular.

Amazing. Well, I'm looking at the first installment that you sent me, the Oasis within, which I'm very much looking forward to reading along with the remaining installments as they come out.

Yeah.

So thank you for sharing that and just thank you for being you and being so plugged in and so passionate and so wise and articulate in sharing what you've committed your life to.

Well, back at you, Brian. I mean, what you're doing with the philosopher notes and optimal living concerts and all that, you're. You're making a huge difference in people's lives. You're. You're giving us opportunities to think about things and share things in brand new ways. And so my philosophical hats off to you. I wave my toga at you, man.

Right on. And then tell us where people can go to learn more about you and your work and all that good stuff. Yeah.

Come to Tom V. Morris. V as in Victor. Tom V. Morris.com. i blog there a couple times a week and there's all kinds of resources@tom vmarris.com and those new novels I'll told you about. There's a site called the Oasis within dot com. People can come to Tom vmarris.com or the Oasis within dot com and kind of see what I'm doing. Plug into what I'm doing. Subscribe to the Tom V. Morris website. You get updates about the exciting things coming up, coming up, all kinds of things going on. You'll get the blog whenever they come out. I love hearing from people, people.

Amazing. And then what's your book on Harry Potter? As you were describing that, I realized I haven't read it yet. What was the title of that one?

Oh, you're gonna have fun with this. It's called if Harry Potter Ran General Electric. Kind of Subtitle is Leadership Wisdom from the World of the Wizards. It's that whole substratum to the Harry Potter books that nobody knew about. And, and I wrote about all the stuff that J.K. rowling is building into the Harry Potter characters and the events and stuff. And one of my friends, a CEO of a major cor and said, well, I haven't read the Harry Potter book, so I'll be lost when I read your book. I said, neil, I think I've managed for the people who've read each book, each Potter book 37 times. They still get excited when they read my book because it's a side of things they suspected, but never could put their finger on. But the people like you, I said, who've never read a single Potter book, you will never be lost. I've tried to write it for everybody, so I think you're going to have a lot of fun with this book.

Oh, I can't wait. Yeah, the way you describe Dumbledore is just awesome. And then I didn't mention in the intro, but Tom also wrote, literally wrote, philosophy for die.

There you go.

So good. All right. Well, thank you again. Appreciate you.

Yeah, man, thank you.

Isn't it a bit odd we went from math to science to history, but somehow missed the class on how to live? For some wacky reason, optimal living 101 never made the schedule. Of course, it's too late to go back and change that and you're too busy to read full time to catch up yet. If you're like us, you're all about optimizing your life and actualizing your potential. So imagine this. Imagine having someone read the best books on optimal living and pulling out the big ideas that can truly change your life. You know those sections you asterisk and underline and mark all up. Then imagine that guy, me, connecting those ideas to other great books and helping you apply them to your life today. Well, that's what I do with something we call Philosopher's Notes where I break down each great book into a simple 6 page PDF, 20 minute MP3 and 10 minute Philosopher's Notes TV episode. Then imagine me taking the absolute best big ideas from those great books and sharing them with you in fun, inspiring, super practical optimal living 101 classes on stuff like purpose 101, confidence 101 business 101 meditation 101, that sort of thing. You got a personal trainer? I'm kind of like your personal, personal philosopher. Ancient wisdom plus Modern science plus Common sense plus virtue plus Mastery plus fun. That's what our optimized membership program is all about. We'd love to have you join us. Check us out at BrianJohnson. Me join.