The Superhabits System

Superhabits #10 (#1 is here)

In superhabits #8 I wrote about the remarkable superpowers that Superhabits give you, and yesterday I wrote about their link with happiness. Taking simple daily steps to cultivate any superhabit rewards you with greater happiness, health, and effectiveness.

Today I want to turn to the twin questions of how many superhabits there are and how they relate to each other.

During my superhabits journey, I searched for answers to these questions for quite a while. The obvious candidate at first was the classification scheme used in the handbook published by Dr. Martin Seligman and his Positive Psychology colleagues, Character Strengths and Virtues. They put a tremendous amount of work into developing this scheme, making sure that it was comprehensive, robust, and culturally relevant. It has proven to be very useful for categorizing character strengths as they researched them. Every strength currently being studied fits into one of its six categories, or buckets: wisdom, courage, humanity, justice, temperance, and transcendence. It’s a useful classification scheme that has stood the test of time.

The one thing this scheme doesn’t do, though (and wasn’t intended to do) is give us any indication of completeness. It will tell you which bucket to put each character strength in, but it won’t tell you if any given bucket is full — whether you’ve gathered what, at least in practical terms, are all the relevant virtues for that bucket.

Why does this matter? Wouldn't it be handy to have some confidence that we'd identified all the important superhabits, that we didn't have any blind spots? It wouldn’t have to be the final word, but it should give us at least reasonable confidence that we understand how the superhabits all relate to each other and that we’re not likely to be surprised by someone jumping in and saying: whoah, you entirely missed a superhabit.

Is there some way to determine which are the important virtues, and whether they comprise a finite and relatively manageable set, so that we could develop a reliable map, a usable guide to the superhabits?

And that’s where I got stuck in my own research, until I found something very interesting in the work of a thirteenth century Italian philosopher-monk.

In mid-2020, like everyone else, I was locked down at home. In the two-and-a-half hours a day I saved from not having to commute from Northern Virginia to my work at The Catholic University of America in Washington, DC, I re-read, carefully, the part of the Summa Theologia – the great work of the medieval philosopher and theologian Thomas Aquinas – that is referred to as Treatise on the Virtues. This is one of the most comprehensive treatments of the virtues – what I'm calling superhabits – ever written. I found something remarkable there, that has been hidden in plain sight for centuries.

To show the significance of what I found there, I have to explain a core concept from management consulting.

One of the most crushing criticisms you could receive, as a junior consultant at 麦肯锡 , was to be told that your analysis wasn’t “MECE.” What that meant was you hadn’t taken apart the problem you were trying to solve in a crisp enough way: there were some gaps in your analysis, or overlaps. Whenever we analyzed a client’s business problem, breaking it into its component parts, we had to make sure that every part was covered, and only once. There had to be no gaps and no overlaps in our analysis: the components in our analysis had to be Mutually Exclusive and Collectively Exhaustive – hence “MECE.”

For example, if you were examining a problem with a company’s return on investment, you would break the problem down into investments and returns, the investments into equity and debt, the returns into revenues and costs, the costs into fixed and variable costs, and so on until you had all parts of the problem covered, and each part only once, so that you could then work on each of the parts individually and thereby solve the whole problem.

What I realized was that Aquinas, in his Treatise, did not only provide a list of virtues: he organized the virtues into what was clearly a MECE analysis of all of human life. (I don’t know that many current or former McKinsey consultants have ever read Aquinas’ Treatise, which is perhaps why it appears that no-one has ever noticed this before).

He first divided human life into its material and spiritual components (he was a theologian as well as a philosopher, so the spiritual aspect of life was important to him). He then divided the material part of life into intellectual and practical parts, the former being about abstract thought and the latter being about practical, everyday living. By far the largest part of his Treatise he devoted to the practical, everyday part of life, continuing his MECE dissection by breaking apart our everyday lives into our thoughts, our actions, and our feelings, and then further dissecting each of these areas until he ended up with 50 virtues in all.

Why does this matter so much? Because Aquinas starts out with the entirety of human life, and then repeatedly makes clear divisions into this group or that, with no gaps and no overlaps – he’s MECE throughout – we can have confidence that every aspect of our lives is covered by one of the superhabits.

Medieval scholars visualized this collection of habits as a “tree of virtues,” using the diagram of a tree to show how different virtues fit together. It showed how each virtue was related to the others — smaller branches growing off larger ones. What the tree did not show, though, was the logic for why we need exactly this group of habits.

For over a year after making this breakthrough, I searched for a better way to visualize Aquinas’s logic, drawing numerous versions of what generally looked like tournament brackets at your local pickleball league. These allowed me to show the logic at each division, but they still lacked a way to visualize the completeness of Aquinas' system: idea that collectively the superhabits covered every aspect of life.? And they typically took up 4-5 pages.

I finally hit upon a one-page solution, which I'll share tomorrow.

*Image source links: Welcome Images, via Wikimedia Commons