How does "Know your two selves (Adam I and Adam II)" work?

Brooks borrows theologian Joseph Soloveitchik’s distinction between Adam I (ambitious, achievement-oriented, outward-facing) and Adam II (moral, seeking goodness, inward-facing). The insight is that these two selves run on different logics: Adam I applies the market logic of effort and reward; Adam II requires surrender, not strategy. Confusing the two — trying to optimize your way to virtue — is precisely what makes virtue elusive.

How does "Name and wrestle with your besetting weakness" work?

Brooks argues that character is built primarily in the encounter with your own darkness, not through building on strengths. The "besetting sin" — arrogance, cowardice, self-deception — that keeps appearing in your life is precisely where character-building work needs to happen. Naming it clearly breaks the loop of unconscious repetition; choosing a daily practice that addresses it is what produces change rather than insight alone.

How does "Make a commitment that transcends self-interest" work?

Brooks holds that the self is ordered by what it loves most, and that a self ordered only around its own interests remains weak and directionless. Commitments that place something — a relationship, a vocation, a community — above your own comfort act as an external spine: they make decisions for you in moments when willpower fails. Research on self-transcendent goals is consistent with this: purposes larger than the self are associated with greater persistence and meaning.

How does "Practice structured humility" work?

Brooks, drawing on Augustine and others, argues that pride is the root vice precisely because it closes the self off from correction, from others, and from growth. Structured humility — actively seeking your errors and crediting others for your good — keeps the self porous to the feedback that character development requires. Without a practice of humility, every other virtue becomes performance.

How does "Learn from suffering rather than managing it away" work?

Brooks observes that the people he studied who developed deep character almost always went through a defining ordeal they could not simply solve or escape. Suffering that is worked through rather than numbed or bypassed produces the self-knowledge and compassion that comfortable success rarely does. The mechanism is twofold: it strips away the illusion of control, and it forces encounter with the actual self rather than the curated version.

How does "Choose a character role model and study their biography" work?

Brooks structures The Road to Character around biography because character cannot be extracted into a formula — it is carried in a life. Studying someone who exemplifies the virtue you most want to develop reveals that the virtue was built through specific struggles, specific choices, and specific daily practices — not through inspiration. The biographical model gives you a concrete human example of the path, rather than an abstract aspiration.

David Brooks

What are eulogy virtues, and how do you build them according to David Brooks?

Shifting from résumé virtues to the deeper character that outlasts achievement

Short answer

David Brooks distinguishes two sets of virtues: résumé virtues — the skills and achievements that get you hired — and eulogy virtues — the moral qualities like courage, honesty, and loyalty that people mention when you die. His argument is that modern culture relentlessly develops the first set while neglecting the second, and that deliberately cultivating character requires different work: self-examination, wrestling with weakness, and submission to commitments beyond self-interest.

In The Road to Character, David Brooks studies historical figures — Augustine, Montaigne, Samuel Johnson, Dwight Eisenhower — looking for what shaped lasting character. His diagnosis is that we live in a culture saturated with self-promotion and personal branding, optimizing for a résumé nobody reads at a funeral. The eulogy virtues — kindness, courage, honesty, faithfulness — are built differently: through humility about your own limitations, through commitments that cost you something, through the long slow work of confronting your own faults. Below are the core practices his framework implies, each with its mechanism and a candid read on where the evidence is strong and where this is philosophical argument.

The practices (7)

Why it works

Imagining the eulogy forces a values clarification that résumé-style goal-setting cannot reach, because it asks what kind of person you were, not what you accomplished. The gap between the eulogy you draft and the life you’re actually living creates productive dissonance — the same motivational engine that drives values-based approaches in research. Seeing the gap clearly is the beginning of choosing to close it.

How to do it

1Set 30 minutes. Write the eulogy you would most want given — focus on character and how you treated people, not on résumé achievements.
2Read it as if you are a mourner who knew you — is it honest, or aspirational?
3Identify the one character quality mentioned that you most need to develop and name a specific current situation where it is tested.

Evidence

Mechanistic

Regret-minimization and mortality-salience exercises that prompt reflection on what truly matters are associated with shifts in values and priorities in social psychology research, though the "write your own eulogy" format itself is a practitioner exercise without its own trial evidence.

Honest caveat: Terror management research shows mortality salience affects values, but effects are complex — it does not uniformly shift people toward deeper character. The eulogy exercise is a thoughtful application of the idea, not a tested protocol.

Common mistake: Writing the eulogy you think you should want — full of humble-brag achievements dressed as character — rather than digging honestly into how you actually treat people under pressure.

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