System Building

If you want fitness to permeate the world, you begin by empowering the most driven and intense people. They will push themselves to the extreme and develop all kinds of lessons and skills along the way that can then be passed on to the masses. The church started this way. The desert fathers and monks were extreme personalities, bent on learning how to be virtuous. Extreme personalities like Cassian, Aquinas and Gregory the great analyzed virtue in huge tomes but eventually broke it down into lists of 7 virtues and 7 vices. ...

Isn’t Measuring Virtue Bad, Boring, and Impossible? No. Read why here. How Do I Acquire Measurable Amounts of Virtue? There is a simple formula to acquiring virtue. Create measurable embodiments of virtue, develop a scoring system, then track your performance. Don’t try to acquire a virtue like “mercy”, it’s too big. Instead, focus on mastering its specific embodiments. You see “mercy” embodied in people when … They aren’t critical of a boss doing a poor job. They don’t get angry when people cut them off in traffic. They don’t bring up faults of their spouses in a fight. There are hundreds more examples … So, for three weeks, pick some specific embodiment. For example: ...

PART 3: Measuring Virtue: Impossible? How can I possibly know how humble I am? Am I 10 units more humble than last week? How do I compare against the church’s average? These are all fair questions. The first key insight is that humility is not a thing that you can measure. It is too big. It is too general. Just like basketball’s concept of “Shooting ability.” Shooting Isn’t Measurable, But Shooting Skills Are Shooting ability is a real concept, but there is no way to measure it. ...