A spoken-summary transcript by Brian Johnson (Philosopher's Notes/PNtv) of Tom Morris’s book The Art of Achievement. Johnson outlines Morris’s core framework — the seven Cs (conception, confidence, concentration, consistency, commitment, character, capacity to enjoy) — and expands on related ideas: telos/targets, chunking big goals into small steps, coherence of values and actions, and the danger of weak or wavering goals. The piece is practical and motivational, aimed at applying philosophical principles to personal achievement.
Chapters
Hi, this is Brian. Welcome back to Philosopher's nodestv Today, you guessed it, another great book, the Art of Achievement. The Art of Achievement by Tom Morris. Tom Morris is a fascinating guy. One of my favorite people. Just got to know him recently, but I've enjoyed his books. He's a double PhD from Yale, religious Studies and Philosophy basically. And then he was a professor at Notre Dame forever in philosophy and just a really cool, passionate, practical philosopher. We've done, we will do more notes on his great books. For now we've got the Philosopher's note in these five big ideas and I'm going to start with the seven Cs. So the art of Achievement is grounded in universal principles that Tom captures in the seven Cs and I'm going to share those with you from the note. So the first C is a clear conception of what we want. A vivid vision, a goal strongly imagined. It all starts with that. What's your vision? What do you want to see come to fruition? What do you want to achieve? You got to know what you want in order to get it right. That's the first thing. The second one is a strong confidence that you can attain your goal. If you don't believe you can do it, obviously you're not going to be able to do it. Third C is a focused concentration on what it takes to reach that goal. So we've got our conception, our confidence, and then we need to concentrate, focus on it. Remember the magnifying glass? Only when the sun's rays are brought to a focus can we burn something. We need to concentrate on whatever it is we're passionate about long enough to achieve it, to make it burn. The fourth C is consistency in pursuing our vision. So we're focused, we're concentrated and we're consistent. The fifth is an emotional commitment to the importance of what we're doing. So you've got to have a strong why. Whoever has a strong enough why can endure any how. What's your emotional commitment to whatever it is you're going for? The sixth is a good character to guide us and to keep us on the proper course. Tom talks a lot about extrinsic motivation, all the normal things that society is all about. Fame, wealth, hotness, power, and then the noble pursuits of becoming a better human being. Deepening relationships, making a meaningful contribution to our families and communities. We want to focus on that, our character. Then the seventh C is a capacity to enjoy the process of along the way. Those are our 7C's conception. Confidence, concentration, consistency, commitment, character and A capacity to enjoy. The book is obviously about unpacking each of those and we're going to look at a few of my favorite big ideas. The second one here, telos and target. So when I journal, almost always the first thing that I draw, that, that's a symbol for me of a target. Well, the Greeks told us that in the Greek word for target is telos. And they said that we are teleological beings. We need to have a target that we're focused at. If you don't have a target or an aim, you're literally aimless. You may notice that you're happiest when you're pursuing something of meaning. Positive psychologists say the same thing. Happy people have goals. Happy people have projects that they're engaged in. So what are your targets or what is your primary target? Need to know that, again, the first of the seven Cs is a clear conception of what you want to achieve. So remember the importance of having a clear target. We're going to come back to that in the last big idea here, but we'll leave it at that for now. You are teleological. You need targets, otherwise you're going to feel aimless. Aimlessness wandering around doesn't feel good. Third big idea, big plus small. So here's our target, right? We can represent this in a number of ways. I like to think of it as like a rubber band, right? That's a rubber band there. We've got dynamic tension. This is our target, our ideal vision of what we want to achieve. Right. It's exciting. We've got a big dream. But if we want to manage this dynamic tension, stretching a rubber band out, right, you've got this tension between your ideal, where you're pulling it and your current reality. Well, how do you manage that? You manage that by taking action, of course, and specifically through baby steps. So Tom tells us that if you want to bring big dreams to life, you need to get really good at doing the tiny things. Well, the small things, day in and day out. We talked about this with the creativity book by Eric Maisel. Chunking. You have your huge, awesome target. Great. Create a little micro version of that. What's your next little chunk you're going to get done? And take this big rubber band and make it a tiny one and then stretch it out so. So you can see. Wow. This is how I chunk and this is how I have a great day tomorrow. My primary target is literally to have a great day. What does that look like? What's a masterpiece day look like for Me and I know that if I can string together enough of those little micro wins, this is going to take care of itself. So again, process is primary. Focus on the small things. If you want to achieve the big things, it's a big idea. Fourth big idea, stand together. So I did not know that the word consistency. Consistency literally means to stand together. Isn't that cool? Consistency. So you can think of it that way. You can think of it as coherence, you can think of it as integrity. But basically our thoughts and our feelings and our actions need to stand together. We need to be consistent. What we say is important to us is what we do. Now, we're not going to be perfect, but we want to be more consistent. We want to have our values and our actions and our feelings and our thoughts. Stand together, cohere, be in integrity more consistently. Really love that word. Stand together. Consistency. That's our fourth big idea. The fifth big idea is wobbly goals. So if we go back to this little target here and think about. Tom shares something that isn't often talked about, but it's a really powerful idea. He says, look, if you're finding yourself having lapses in your behavior, in taking action consistently, you may want to look in and see if you actually have a goal that you firmly committed to, because it may be less to do about your behavior and more to do about the fact that you just haven't really committed to something. Your goal is kind of there and then it's not, and then it's there and then it's not. But if you want to achieve something great and you want to achieve that big goal, it's got to be in focus. Now, you don't want to obsess about it to the detriment of taking action and stress yourself out. But. But you also need to make sure that that goal is present and it's deeply planted into your consciousness. Stephen Covey says the same thing. We're doing a class on Getting Stuff Done 101 this week, the week that I'm teaching this or sharing this right now. And the first idea is this. You need to have a sense of what you want to achieve. And then we can talk about what you need to do in order to achieve that. But I'm going to share a quote from Stephen Covey where he says, a lot of people, when they're asked, what do you think is going wrong? If you're not quite living where you want to live or how you want to live, what do you think's wrong? Do you think it's that you don't have your priorities clear enough. Or he gives a couple of other options. Or do you think that you just don't have the discipline to do what needs to get done? Most people say they have an issue with discipline and he says, I'm not so sure. I think the issue is, Covey tells us that you haven't planted your priorities deeply enough. Because if you have a really, really clear goal of what you are going to do or who you are going to be, and that's really deeply planted into your soul, it's actually really rather straightforward what you need to do and how you're going to do it. Now, again, you're not going to be perfect, but it's a powerful thing to think about. So if you're beating yourself up about not doing certain things, check in and see is the issue that you don't actually have a firm commitment to a goal. Powerful idea. So what is your goal? What is your target? And how do you chunk it down so you can take this big goal and make it a bunch of tiny little goals that you can win with, get on that, be consistent, stand together day in and day out, create your masterpieces and you will hit your target. That's the art of achievement. Heck of a lot more that goes into it than that, but hopefully one of those ideas or more jumped out at you. What was it? Think about it and figure out how you can implement that in your life. Now take it from theory to practice and go out and master the art of achievement. I hope you enjoyed and I look forward to sharing more with you soon. Have another awesome day. See you.
