Excerpt
SUMMARY: What do Dwight Eisenhower, George Eliot and Dorothy Day all have in common? Besides achieving career success, all overcame a personality weakness -- such as a bad temper or big ego -- that led to internal transformation. Judy Woodruff sits down with David Brooks to discuss his new book, “The Road to Character,” and rethinking our personal priorities.
JUDY WOODRUFF (NewsHour): Now: our newest addition to the NewsHour Bookshelf.
In “The Road to Character,” our own David Brooks urges us all to rethink our priorities.
I talked with him late last week at Busboys and Poets, a restaurant and bookstore chain in and around Washington.
JUDY WOODRUFF: David Brooks, thank you for talking to us about this.
DAVID BROOKS, Author, “The Road to Character”: Good to see you in a strange setting.
JUDY WOODRUFF: So, the people who see you every week on the NewsHour analyzing the news or read you in The New York Times may not realize that you have a lot of interest in things that go beyond politics and policy.
And they may be asking, is this the same David Brooks I see on television who wrote this book?
DAVID BROOKS: Yes. I wasn’t born with a tie or with Mark Shields stapled to my left hip. I have another life.
And that’s sort of the balance of what this book is about. The idea is based on the idea that we have two separate sets of virtues, which I call the resume virtues and the eulogy virtues. And the resume virtues are the ones we bring to the marketplace. Are we good at being journalists or teachers or accountants?
And the eulogy virtues are the things they say about you after you’re dead. And they’re deeper? Were you honest, were you caring, were you courageous, were you capable of deep love?
And we live in a culture and I have lived a life that’s spent a lot more time thinking about the resume virtues than the eulogy ones, but we all know the eulogy ones are more important. And so this book is about people who developed those deeper virtues and how they did it.
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