10
OPINION
What are we made of?
These four virtues will help you survive and thrive in all parts of daily life, both personally and professionally.
W hat is the good life, and how can we achieve it? Not just personally, but within our career choice and our professional life. After all, we spend around 30 percent of our adult lives at work or thinking about work. The concept of the good life was considered by the ancients in their dialogues, so this goes back 20 centuries.
Liam Watson
In modern times, longitudinal research such as the Grant Study have looked for evidence of what leads to a good life. Being virtuous is a large part of that equation. In consideration of that, there are some specific virtues that are an immensely important element both personally and professionally. Knowing this world we live and work in is loaded with volatility, uncertainty, complexity, and ambiguity, what do we need to navigate to success? I believe there are four key virtues we need to exercise that are a large part of the goodness of the human condition. These are critical to helping drive us to a fulfilling purpose. Through the practice of these virtues, we can survive and thrive in all parts of daily life, both personally and professionally:
■ Wisdom. Considering all the good virtues that exist, it is hard to start at any other place. In the same way we are not born with the ability to lead or read, we are not born with any wisdom. It simply must be learned over time. We are born with an incredible amount of fluid intelligence, which enables us to learn at a rapid rate. We learn how to eat, crawl, walk, talk, socialize, read, write, and account. This all happens in less than a decade. Advancing on this for the next 20 years, we develop unique talents and become skilled practitioners and experts. At about the age we are imbedded in our careers, fluid intelligence tapers and with a bit of luck we transition to crystallized intelligence. This is when we are better able to consider what knowledge we gained and then begin to solve problems and
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THE ZWEIG LETTER APRIL 28, 2025, ISSUE 1583
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