Back Up Values With Virtues

The fourth key to being awesome

How to Be Awesome, continued…

I didn’t get all of the planned posts out for last month’s inner growth theme, “How to Be Awesome,” before the calendar closed, so we still have three more keys to awesomeness left to explore.

Key 1: Be a Work in Progress.
Key 2: Choose Your Own Curriculum in the School of Life
Key 3: Practice Radical Self-Honesty

This is the fourth segment in the How to Be Awesome series.

Key # 4: Back up principles and values with practices and virtues.

As extremists, we tend to be very clear about our principles and values. For instance, we value freedom, probably above all else. In support of this value, we have adopted principles such as those of Self-Ownership and Non-Aggression. These principles help us understand how to act in the world based on our values, and they help us to explain our morality and our vision of society to others. They are simple, elegant, and infinitely adaptable to all kinds of life situations.

But in clarifying our values and principles, there are a couple of traps we often fall into:

1. Failure to examine beyond the core value

At the banquet of your personal moral and ethical beliefs, liberty may be the table. The Non-Aggression Principle is sturdy, imminently useful, and capable of supporting a hearty and well-rounded meal that will nourish you and your guests—the people you interact with on a day-to-day basis—for a lifetime. But if all you have is a table, you don’t have a banquet. You have an impoverishment.

There are many wonderful dishes one might place upon the table. Values such as compassion, generosity, hope, truth, and wisdom make splendid serving plates. Ultimately, it’s your banquet, and the dishes you serve will be a unique expression of your individuality: your principles, preferences, and values.

And then, the way you prepare, season, and garnish your recipes is a further opportunity to bring your individual goodness into the world. Do you add a dash of quiet integrity to your casserole of human connection? Do you sauté your truth in the oil of acceptance-of-what-is, or toss it in the vinegar of resistance?

Perhaps you use different cookery in different situations, and certainly you will change out the dishes as you grow and learn, as your tastes change over the course of your life, always trusting in the foundation of the table to support your banquet. That is all good and well. The main thing is not to leave your table bare.

2. Failure to bring our values and principles out of our heads and into our lives.

It’s one thing to say “I believe in freedom.”

It’s another thing to behave as a sovereign entity, which is to commit to the highest level of personal responsibility that you are capable of expressing.

You can have all the libertarian talking points memorized. You can have the deepest and most coherent possible comprehension of the arguments of Mises, Spooner, and Rothbard. You can wax eloquent all day on social media about how liberty works and how a stateless society is the most moral option. If you devote all your free time to this pursuit, you might even make a convert or two over the next five years.

But where the rubber meets the road, what are you doing to put your own freedom into action?

If your understanding of the value of freedom and its attendant principles is purely intellectual, if you lack the experiential knowing and the real-life commitment to these truths, then your philosophy is only half-baked—or, to hearken back to the banquet analogy—your table is made of cardboard.

Okay, Starr, but what does this mean in my day-to-day life? How do I bring the principles out of intellectual-realm and into the real world?

Through practices. And virtues.

For some people, that might mean taking more radical accountability for their health: how they exercise their body and what they put into it. Taking responsibility for your health increases your freedom (because it keeps you able to do the things you want to do), and it avoids the messy situation of having to rely on someone else (like your kids, or the taxpayers) to take responsibility for your illness later down the road. So you adopt the practice of healthy eating. You commit to the virtue of going to the gym.

For others, it might mean being more mindful of how they treat others. Being honest, reliable, and kind in your personal interactions increases your freedom because it helps ensure that you have and can maintain connections with others, and that they will value the real contributions you make to the relationship. Not blaming others for your own failures, even on an emotional level, increases your freedom by helping you to relegate your action into your locus of control. Doing that means that your efforts in life will be more potent and effective.

Some people might need to develop practices and virtues around fulfilling their own desires and dreams. You take responsibility for your dreams by working toward them on a consistent basis. This is a practice that transforms your dream into an objective, and eventually into a reality. You are not free in your mind, and certainly not in your life, if you don’t take action toward your desires, instead waiting for the universe to deliver them gift-wrapped.

Every one of us has some area in our lives where we could inch closer to freedom by embodying greater self-responsibility.

Including me.

For much of my life, I’ve been somewhat irresponsible with my budget. I pay my bills on time, of course, but I have also amassed debt and failed to adequately save or invest for my future. This means that when big unexpected expenses come up—like a car repair or a medical expense—I often have to scramble to cover them. Or, worse: I have to increase my debt load. Or when I want something that requires a larger investment than I can currently afford, I just go “oh well, maybe some day,” and don’t make a plan to get me to that some day.

You can easily see how this lackluster implementation of responsibility ends up inhibiting my freedom.

In the beginning, it was due to ignorance, and then, as I got older and wiser, there was really no excuse for it. I had the intellectual understanding, but I hadn’t exercised the discipline to put that understanding into practice.

A common theme that comes up when talking to EBA members about personal growth topics is “you don’t change until you’re sick of your own bullshit.” Recently, I got sick of my own bullshit in the fiscal responsibility realm.

Luckily, as in all areas of growth, Extremists Being Awesome had my back. One of our members, Kason Bryden, has this wonderful business (Wealth Battle) that helps people (mostly extremists) learn to budget and invest for their financial future. I attended one of Kason’s free presentations a few weeks ago, and it alleviated a lot of my anxiety about getting my financial house in order.

Ladies and gentlemen, Kason Bryden!

I joined Wealth Battle earlier this week and yesterday morning, Kason personally guided me through the creation of my own first budget. (Okay, it’s not technically my first budget, just my first budget that knows what it’s doing and doesn’t suck.)

He didn’t just do that for me because we’re buds. He does that for every new subscriber of Wealth Battle. Definitely check it out if your current growth focus is in the fiscal realm, or if you just have bills to pay and goals to unlock.

So I’m on the road to financial responsibility, which means advancing ever forward to greater freedom. I’m putting a dish of good wealth stewardship on my liberty table, and seasoning it with the virtue of disciplined budgeting.

What new dishes do you intend to place on your liberty table over the coming year? What aspect of your life could benefit from a greater helping of personal responsibility? And what practices or virtues can you put in place to back up your principles and values? Share your thoughts in the comments.