Embed your virtues in a practice community
The virtues needed for excellence in any serious practice (craft, sport, relationship) are real virtues — find the practice that calls them out.
Key takeaways
- What it is: The virtues needed for excellence in any serious practice (craft, sport, relationship) are real virtues — find the practice that calls them out.
- Why it works: MacIntyre argues that virtues are best developed within "practices" — coherent, complex forms of activity with internal standards of excellence, like medicine, chess, farming, or parenthood. A practice confronts you with standards you did not invent, that resist your shortcuts, and that require the virtues to meet. Virtues developed inside a practice are genuine — not performed for social approval but tested against real resistance.
- Evidence: Plausible mechanism, limited direct outcome data.
- Avoid: Engaging in a practice only where you are already competent, which provides no resistance and therefore no character development.
Why it works
MacIntyre argues that virtues are best developed within "practices" — coherent, complex forms of activity with internal standards of excellence, like medicine, chess, farming, or parenthood. A practice confronts you with standards you did not invent, that resist your shortcuts, and that require the virtues to meet. Virtues developed inside a practice are genuine — not performed for social approval but tested against real resistance.
How to do it
- 1Identify one serious practice in your life with real internal standards of excellence — one where quality is not defined by you.
- 2Name the virtues the practice demands (honesty, patience, precision, courage).
- 3Deliberately engage with the hardest parts of the practice — the parts that require the virtues — rather than staying in comfortable competence.
- 4Let the practice give you feedback about your character you would not invent for yourself.
What the evidence says
MechanisticThis is a philosophical framework (MacIntyre) rather than an empirically tested intervention; research on deliberate practice and expert development supports the idea that serious practice with real standards builds more robust skills and dispositions than practice without standards.
Honest caveat: Ericsson’s deliberate practice is about skill, not virtue; the transfer to character development is a Macintyrean extrapolation, not a directly tested claim.
- — Ericsson, K.A. et al. (1993), The role of deliberate practice in the acquisition of expert performance, Psychological Review
Common mistake
Engaging in a practice only where you are already competent, which provides no resistance and therefore no character development.
IX Coach helps you identify where in your current serious activities the virtue-demanding moments are — and prompts you to engage them rather than route around them.
Practice this with IX Coach →