The Virtues as the Superhabits of Human Success 

Editors’ Note: This essay is adapted from a lecture given in October 2025 at Thales College in Wake Forest, North Carolina. The lecture transcript was lightly revised and edited for length, with the author’s permission. 

Those who make a living following trends—and trying to predict them—have taken to using the phrase “vibe shift.” A “vibe shift” is when we can perceive some kind of cultural change, where older ideas that were previously understood and respected start to feel tired and irrelevant. 

We have been living through a very big vibe shift recently. It dates to just before the second election of President Trump and probably contributed to his election. According to venture capitalist Santiago Pliego, it’s a shift toward “the speaking of previously unspeakable truths, the noticing of previously suppressed facts.”  

Pliego writes about that sense of “give” that “you feel when the walls of propaganda and bureaucracy start to move as you push; the very visible dust kicked up in the air as experts and fact checkers scramble to hold on to decaying institutions; the cautious but electric rush of energy when dictatorial edifices designed to stifle innovation, enterprise, and thought are exposed or toppled. “Fundamentally,” he writes, “the Vibe Shift is a return to—a championing of—Reality, a rejection of the bureaucratic, the cowardly, the guilt-driven; a return to greatness, courage, and joyous ambition.” 

The phrase “vibe shift” was coined by Sean Monahan, a professional trend forecaster. Over the past two decades, Monahan has identified three other vibe shifts across a twenty-year period that preceded the current one: the “hipster” movement of the early 2000s; the “post-internet techno revival” of the early 2010s; and the “woke” movement from about 2015 onward. Since each of those shifts only lasted a few years, the implication might be that this vibe shift will also be short lived, and that in another seven years or so we’ll move away from our newfound fascination with Reality.  

I do not think so. I believe that what we’re experiencing is not a seven-year shift, but something much deeper—a major global realignment, a seventy- or one-hundred-year shift. I believe we’re experiencing what Rusty Reno, editor of First Things magazine, calls the return of the strong gods in his 2021 book of the same name. Reno’s thesis is that in reaction to the horrors of the two world wars, we attempted to replace the “strong gods” of patriotism, faith, and truth—he calls them “strong gods” because they are the kind of things that people are willing to die for—with the weak gods of progress, tolerance, and relativism. These are weak gods because it’s a rare person who is willing to die for progress, tolerance, or relativism.  

The result of this change, as Reno explains, has been the atomization of society, the rise of elitist technocracy, and the loss of meaning—the loss of any sense of anything to live for. We became a nation of overgrown children who failed to launch, living alone in their parents’ basements, letting their lives be manipulated by a few self-appointed experts who tell them what they are allowed to eat, do, and think, and when they are or aren’t allowed to go outside.  

Reno predicted—and we’re now seeing—a backlash, the return of the strong gods of patriotism, faith, and truth, a return to reality. I think he was right to that extent. But, Reno also warned, the strong gods bring back with them a whole host of potential problems: authoritarianism, extremism, and war. To avoid these, he says, the strong gods have to be tempered, tamed, so that they lead in constructive, not destructive, directions. The way to tame the strong gods, and to ensure that they are used for good, not for evil; for peace, and not for war; is through virtue. We need virtues like wisdom, restraint, diligence, and generosity to tame the strong gods.  

So far so good. I’m sure that we are all in favor of wisdom, restraint, diligence, and generosity. The problem is: it usually stops there. A call for virtue is usually just that: a call. An exhortation. “Be wise. Be restrained. Be diligent. Be generous.” This doesn’t really help. It’s better than to be calling for the opposite, but the call doesn’t get us very far.  

So, how do we move from virtue as an exhortation to something real, something practical and effective that will actually make a difference in people’s lives? That’s what I want to talk about, and in large part, it’s the focus of my book, Superhabits: The Universal System for a Successful Life. The answer requires us to recover the real meaning of the word “virtue”: that virtue is not just an exhortation, and still less does it mean “virtue signaling.”  

I wrote an article for Forbes recently called “Virtue Signaling Is Dead—Long Live Virtue.” I tried to make a distinction between those two. I pointed out that the original meaning of the word virtue is a good habit, particularly a habit of excellence. The reason this is significant is, if we understand that virtues are habits that anyone can acquire through practice, then virtue is no longer this abstract ideal that we’re aspiring to, but something we can all do and become. If you want to grow in restraint, for example, each day, practice some small effort of restraint and steadily you will build the virtue of restraint, like you would build a muscle. The virtues are like psychological or spiritual muscles, which all of us already have, but which have to be exercised to be strengthened.  

Ancient civilizations knew this. The ancient Greeks and Romans would habituate themselves to virtues like courage and wisdom; they would practice them and honor them. The virtues became a sort of human operating system, underlying every personal and social achievement. This was true for almost every major civilization through the millennia, until a couple of hundred years ago, when we started to abandon the pursuit of virtue. 

Alasdair MacIntyre tells this story in After Virtue. At the risk of vastly oversimplifying the book, his argument is that virtue had become associated with religion and was rejected during the Enlightenment, along with many other things religious. MacIntyre explains that people in the past shared a clear idea of what the virtues were and why they mattered. Virtues were habits that helped people live good lives, guided by traditions and communities. Over time, however, the Enlightenment tried to rebuild a sense of morality using reason alone, and that project failed utterly. MacIntyre argues it failed because reason alone could not give people strong, agreed-upon rules for how to live. The result was a moral world where people often talk about values, rights, and maybe even virtues, but these words lack any real foundation. 

MacIntyre says that when society lost its connection to the tradition of virtue, we ended up with a kind of moral confusion. Instead of asking, “What kind of person should I become?” or “What is the good life for humans?” people started arguing only about preferences and opinions. Modern debates about ethics, he claims, sound like people shouting at each other without common ground. For MacIntyre, the way forward is to recover the older, Aristotelian tradition of virtue, where communities shape people’s character and help them live for a purpose. 

How do we do this? How do we go about turning this around, returning to virtue, updating this human operating system, so that we can tame the strong gods that are upon us? We need to reintroduce the classical idea of virtue into every aspect of society, particularly in education and in business. 

In education, we do this by promoting character education—both at the K–12 and higher education levels—because one’s character, properly understood, is no more and no less than the collection of virtues one has developed. And that collection of virtues is directly correlated to how successful one is going to be in life, in the broader sense of the word success. And in business, we do this by showing how formation in virtue of our employees actually drives better business results—and that, unlike the false claims of DEI and ESG, the evidence is clear that virtue does drive improved well-being and business results.  

What is this evidence that virtue leads to human flourishing, and to business success? Do we have to rely solely on the words of long-dead philosophers? Those ancient authorities are certainly worth paying attention to. Even still, we don’t have to rely exclusively on them. Their voices are augmented now by a wide range of contemporary empirical evidence, scattered across several disciplines, on the effectiveness of the virtues. 

There is vast literature from the last thirty years or so in positive psychology on the study of virtues: in the organizational behavior field of positive organizations; in articles by consultants at Deloitte and McKinsey; and in the research popularized in the habits literature, such as the millions of copies sold of the bestselling book Atomic Habits. 

Unfortunately, there is somewhat of a Tower of Babel effect, because each discipline uses different terminology. Positive psychology writes about “character strengths;” positive organizations about “positive traits;” Deloitte about “capabilities;” and McKinsey about “distinct elements of talent.” They’re using different words for the same things: they’re talking about courage, restraint, diligence, generosity, i.e., the virtues. Even worse, none of them, except the habits literature, make the crucial point that virtues are habits. They describe them as characteristics, and you’re left wondering, “If I wasn’t born with this particular characteristic, do I have any hope?” 

But the habits literature itself, though rich in guidance on how to build habits, says nothing about which habits are worth building. It leaves it entirely up to you to choose. It misses the most important point: the virtues are the highest-impact habits anyone can acquire. So what is the point of giving you a book about habits and then neglecting to mention, by the way, that these particular habits are the ones you should be spending your time on? 

As I became more and more familiar with these different literatures, I waited for someone to notice that they’re all talking about the same thing and bring them all together. Eventually I got fed up waiting, and did the work myself. That’s what my book Superhabits is; it’s an attempt to bring all these literatures together, and in a way that’s readable and not boring, like an academic treatise might be. I found the key that unlocked the integration of these different streams of research in the writings of the thirteenth-century philosopher Thomas Aquinas, in his Treatise on the Virtues, which I think is the best that’s ever been written on virtues before or since. And that’s at the heart of my book.  

One of the important insights to arise from reading Aquinas on virtue was how we’ve been limiting our approach to habit development. People who try to develop new good habits in their lives tend to stay focused on habits of diet, exercise, and sleep.  

Don’t get me wrong. There’s nothing wrong with improving our diet, exercise, or sleep. These are important for our health and flourishing. The problem is that we usually stop there. Those are the only habits we focus on. And habits of diet, exercise, and sleep are habits that we share with the animals: animals eat, move, and sleep.  

What Aquinas shows is that there are habits that are distinctive to our human nature, habits that only human beings can have. His work is vitally important here. It hasn’t exactly been lost for 750 years, because many people study Aquinas in great detail. But what has gone largely unnoticed is the systematic nature of how he puts all the virtues together. Where other books give us lists of virtues (and no two books agree on what the complete list looks like), Aquinas gives us a complete and nonoverlapping system. 

 

You may wonder, “What’s the big deal? So, different people focus on different virtues. So long as everyone is growing in virtue, does it really matter?” Well, imagine instead we were talking about chemistry. Each chemistry book you picked up had a slightly different periodic table of elements. This one has iron, but this one doesn’t; this one has sodium, this other one is missing hydrogen. How could we do chemistry that way? We would have no respect for the discipline of chemistry. And yet we seem to be OK with that for the virtues. 

If you believed that the list of virtues was anything that you want it to be, then the virtues themselves start to become, and I think have become, seen as optional embellishments, like different paint colors, wallpaper, or pictures on a wall, instead of the essential wood or bricks that make the wall itself. I go back to my earlier analogy of the human operating system. What we need is not an incomplete framework where we’re not sure what is and isn’t a virtue, but something that is complete, nonoverlapping, a system that says, “This is the set of virtues that it takes to be a flourishing human being.” 

Here’s how Aquinas develops that framework. It’s analogous to the childhood game of Twenty Questions: someone thinks of a person, place, or thing. Then, you ask twenty yes-or-no questions to guess what they’re thinking. To win the game, you have to make sure that each question you ask divides the remaining universe of possibilities into roughly two. If you do that, you narrow down from all the universe to half, to a quarter, and so on. And if you keep doing that you are almost invariably going to get to the right answer, because two to the power of twenty is over a million. So you will be able to discern from over a million items to just one by asking yes-or-no questions.  

How does that fit with Aquinas? He does a similar thing to life itself. Do you remember the common question, “Is it bigger than a bread box?” If the answer is yes, you can now eliminate the millions of things that are the same size or smaller than a bread box. Then the next question might be, “Is it bigger than a house?” If the answer is no, then you can eliminate anything in the universe that is bigger than a house. When Aquinas does this with human life, he starts out thinking about all of human life, and the first distinction he makes is: “Spiritual or material?” So imagine you’re trying to figure out what virtue you’d like to develop next. Does it have to do with spiritual or material life? If material, you can eliminate all virtues relating to the spiritual side of life. The next question he asks is, “Is it intellectual or practical?” On the intellectual side, there is a set of virtues there as well: thinking for thought’s sake, the kind of thing we do in colleges and universities. Where I focus my book is on the rest: the practical life, the virtues for the everyday living that we all do. 

Here Aquinas makes a really interesting observation. He says if you think about our daily lives, we have our thoughts, our actions, and our feelings.  

Think about your daily life. Taking out the intellectual and spiritual side of life, just every day, what are we doing? We are thinking, we are taking action, and we are experiencing emotions. And those are the things that, in a sense, make us human, because animals don’t think; animals move but they don’t take deliberate action like human beings; and we can debate all night long whether animals have feelings. But I think we would all agree that animals do not have the depth of emotion that human beings have, and they certainly don’t have the ability to master their emotions. Animals are just creatures of their instincts. 

He then takes feelings and says we can make a further distinction that all the feelings we have either draw us toward people, things, or situations, or against. Those that draw us toward something we would call desires, and those that push us against are our fears.   

So all day every day, you can boil down our lives to thoughts, actions, fears, and desires.  

He then connects those with the four cardinal virtues: prudence, justice, fortitude, and temperance. Those words, like so many words related to virtue, have drifted in meaning. By prudence, prudentia, Aquinas meant the habit of making wise decisions. That’s not typically what we think of when we hear the word prudence; we think someone was overly cautious. I prefer the term “practical wisdom”: the habit of practical wisdom, the habit of making wise decisions. Aquinas says that’s the habit you want to have if you want all of your thoughts to be effective.  

The second, justice, is what perfects all of our actions. Justice is the habit of being fair to others and treating them with respect. We are supposed to act justly and so if we have the habit of justice, everything we do all day long, most of our actions and interactions with others, will work out reasonably well. 

Courage, or fortitude, is not the habit of having no fear; it’s the habit of moving ahead despite fear; because fear, like any emotion, is not within our control. But the habit of courage is the habit of moving ahead even though you feel afraid. 

The last one is what used to be called temperance, but that word now is associated almost exclusively with alcohol or resistance to alcohol. The original Latin word temperantia meant self-discipline, so the fourth cardinal virtue is the habit of self-discipline, which is not the habit of having immense willpower. It’s the habit of choosing rationally when to follow a desire. When you experience a desire, self-discipline is a decision: do you follow that desire or not?  

I want to distinguish self-discipline from willpower because when you try to willpower your way through life, it can be a losing proposition. Willpower is like gas in the gas tank. You can use it up. And then once it’s used up there’s nothing you can do; you just have to rest and wait for it to come back the same way you’d refill a gas tank. The virtue of self-discipline is more like a muscle. The more you use it, the stronger it becomes. This is an important distinction. And what Aquinas is pointing out is that we grow in self-discipline not by stifling our desires, but by tutoring them in better directions.  

So if I have desires that cause me to do things or draw me to do things that I think would be stupid and I would regret, then every time I say I’m not going to follow that desire, that actually weakens that desire’s hold on me. And as to my desires that would be more constructive, every time I reinforce them, every time I follow them, I strengthen them. 

If we have these four cardinal virtues, we basically have all of daily life in good shape, because our thoughts, actions, and feelings are well managed. But developing them is a heavy lift. So Aquinas also tells us that each cardinal virtue has many subvirtues.  

For example, if one wanted to grow in courage, Aquinas gives us four different types of courage, four different virtues, and together they roll up to courage. And he continues making this Twenty Questions distinction and says, “If you want to grow in courage and you’re dealing with fear, are you dealing with fear of something that is a challenge that you can tackle and overcome? Or are you dealing with fear of a challenge that is going to be enduring?”  

For the former, he says, there are two ways to overcome a challenge in life: through hard work and spending money. In terms of hard work, the virtue is magnanimity. This comes from the Latin magna anima, or “big soul.” It’s the habit of bringing zeal to tackle a big challenge. It’s enthusiasm. It’s the kind of virtue that we see in charismatic people. But the beauty of it is that you’re not born with it. It’s a muscle like the rest of them that anyone can cultivate through practice.  

The virtue for dealing with problems that can be solved by spending lots of money is called munificence. It’s different from generosity. Generosity is actually one of the virtues that comes out of justice, in the sense that we all owe generosity to each other to a certain level. But munificence is different. It’s the only virtue that not everybody can exercise, because it means giving away large sums of wealth. Your own wealth. (There’s no virtue in giving away other people’s money.) 

Those are the two types of courage for dealing with problems that can be overcome. But for problems that are more enduring, Aquinas divides them into physical challenges and mental challenges. For physical challenges, we have the virtue of perseverance, which is the habit of enduring physical suffering. For mental challenges is the virtue that I call resilience. In Latin it’s patientia, so it’s frequently translated as patience, but unfortunately, what we mean by patience now is “Don’t be in a hurry!” But what he means in his actual definition of patientia is endurance through long sorrow. So in other words, if you are suffering from anxiety or depression or other kinds of mental suffering, resilience is the habit of moving forward despite that mental suffering.  

 

A psychiatrist at Harvard Medical School told me that the best treatment for anxiety and depression is called Cognitive Behavioral Therapy (CBT). The latest version of CBT is almost identical with the practice of growing in the virtue of resilience. So in other words, it’s saying to people suffering from anxiety or depression, “I know you are feeling anxious, I know you are depressed and don’t want to get out of bed, but getting out of bed and merely washing your face when suffering depression is an act of courage, an act of resilience. And if you do it today, it will be easier to do it tomorrow, and even easier to do it the next day.” Ultimately, that’s how you make progress against anxiety, depression, and other mental challenges.  

Seven hundred fifty years after Aquinas lived, the latest psychological science confirms what he taught.  

So, that’s for courage. For self-discipline, Aquinas identifies fifteen types of virtues. He looks at the types of desires we have, and for every type of desire is a virtue. For example, there is a virtue for disciplining the desire to know. This desire can run in many directions: it can run in the direction of doomscrolling for hours on your phone. Aquinas wasn’t writing about phones, but the idea is if you spend your desire to know on useless stuff, you’re wasting precious fuel; because the desire to know can get you to do great things and learn great things. So there’s the virtue of diligence, which is what disciplines the desire to know. 

Diligence is not a matter of bearing down, studying, working hard. Diligence, according to Aquinas, and according to the latest research in education, too, is cultivating that desire to know and directing it toward more productive ends. So take your natural curiosity and instead of wasting it on mindless surfing, focus it on something that is going to be useful to you and to others. And the way to do that is to find the things that are inherently interesting. Students, for your homework, find out how your homework will help you and help you to help other people. How can you find what’s interesting in it so you fuel your natural curiosity so you get to the point where you actually want to study? 

That’s the “super” in superhabits. The superpower that comes from the virtues is that, as you practice them, they make you enjoy doing what is going to be good for you and good for others. Enjoy doing what you should be doing. (And to help you with this, check out the companion app to my book, GrowVirtue.) 

There’s a religious joke that a friend of mine likes to tell. He says, “In the beginning was the word, and the word was no.” It makes religion seem like a real downer, like everything I want to do is not allowed. But the joy of virtue is realizing that, when you grow in the virtues, you will no longer want to do things that are destructive to you and those around you. Instead, you will want to do the things that are good for you and others. What a great way to go through life, wanting to do the right things. No wonder the ancients told us that the happiest people on earth were virtuous people. And modern scientists are also confirming this. 

To close out, I want to point out that in Atomic Habits, perhaps the most important point author James Clear makes is that, in order to establish a new habit, we have to change our self-identity to incorporate the new habit. He has us repeating, “I am the kind of person who …” doesn’t snack between meals, for example.  

Aquinas says something similar. While acquiring a new habit (a new virtue) requires repeated practice, it also requires a clear view of the goal or end you are aiming for, the kind of person you are trying to become. But Aquinas goes still further. He points out that as we grow in a virtue, we don’t just change our identity; we actually become, physically, a different person. He refers to the virtues as our “second nature” for that reason. He’s writing this 750 years ago, but contemporary neuroscience is proving him right because of what is referred to as the neuroplasticity of our brains: as we develop new habits, new virtues, our brains reconfigure themselves, they actually change, physically. No matter your age, you can always rewire your brain through the development of new habits. We become a new, and better, more effective and more flourishing person as a result of the virtues. 

What we need is a restoration of virtue in our land, in order to tame the strong gods and ensure that their power serves the good—so that the return to reality is marked not by domination, but by integrity, not by chaos, but by character. 

I invite you to join this crusade.   

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