The Value of Character, With Ed Brooks

Does character always win? In business, investing, and life? What is character anyway? Can we measure it? Manage it? Improve it? These are just a few questions that we address with Dr. Edward Brooks, executive director of the Oxford Character Project, as we dive into the long-term benefits of being virtuous.

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This video was recorded on Oct. 4, 2023.

David Gardner: Does character always win? With past guest author, Warren Berger, who writes books about beautiful questions, we might ask, is that a beautiful question? Does character always win? Well, it's an ambitious question at least, but what is character? Assuming we can find an acceptable definition this week, how can we find good character in ourselves and others? How might we score that if we even should try? How do we grow our own character toward a better world for ourselves and others? Well, we have a most worthy guest, a Beatrice for our visit into the underworld and out as we dig deeper toward understanding this week, what good character is, how it can benefit you as a human being, as a business owner, probably even as an investor to character, good or bad, runs all through investing, business, and life. Let's talk about it. Let's learn only on this week's Rule Breaker Investing.

Before we start this week, I want to thank my daughter, Kate Gardner, who got to spend a few days a couple of years ago in and around Ed Brooks and his Oxford Character Project. Kate came back to the US effusively praising the man you'll meet today and his work. So I want to thank Kate, who among her many virtues, has a remarkably good eye, remarkably good discernment in finding people and ideas of value and connecting with them and connecting others to them. Thanks, Kate. Dr. Edward Brooks is Executive Director of the Oxford Character Project. His research is currently focused on virtue ethics, hope, and character and leadership development. Particular interests include the relationship between character and culture in business, leadership for human flourishing, and leadership development in universities and businesses. Ed leads a major multi-million dollar interdisciplinary research project funded by the John Templeton Foundation on culture, character, and leadership. These are all words that I dearly love, focusing on the sectors of, that's another good word, technology, finance, law, and business. Ed, a delight to have you on Rule Breaker Investing.

Ed Brooks: Thanks, David. It's a great pleasure to be with you.

David Gardner: First things first, tell us a little bit about your childhood. What kind of family did you grow up in? What was the moment in the younger Ed Brooks' life that may have put him on the path to the work he does today?

Ed Brooks: Well, thanks, Dave, and I love this question. So I grew up as the second of four children. Dad worked at IBM and then became an entrepreneur. Mom was a primary school teacher. We lived in a village called Gerrards Cross, which is built at a cross roads on the old main road between Oxford and London and it was a great place to grow up. My first job as a local paper around, my second job was a waiter at the old inn called The Bull Hotel, and I played lots of sport, especially rugby, which I would practice for hours and hours in the garden and that perhaps is the anecdote that I might share in terms of something from my earlier days that prefigures, maybe what I'm doing now. I don't know how much you know about rugby, but the position I played was called hooker. One of the key skills if you play that position is throwing the ball in line out when the ball goes out of play and you throw it overhead like an American football pass and to a member of your team who's lifted up to catch it. It's a target practice thing. I would practice this skill for hours and hours, throwing the ball against the flat wall at the back of our house. My dad put up this board and I'd try and hit the board. Sometimes I'd hit it, sometimes I'd miss, and occasionally it would hit the window. You can imagine how annoying this was for everyone in the house. I've since heard the noise that it makes from within. But I used to do this for hours, and hours and hours. What I was learning at the time was that intentional practice paves the way for growth and that does. I got better and better at this skill as I practiced. I wasn't particularly talented, but I was really passionate and I put my heart into it. I became captain of my school team. We did quite well and made the national finals I played at university. But what I really developed in those days, I think was a disposition of persistent effort and endurance that then translated to a whole bunch of different areas. I was building character with have a go, keep going approach to life and I think that is prefigured what I'm doing now, which is all about this idea of character and character development and thinking about how to and strategies to develop character enable others to do that as well and across their life in different domains as well.

David Gardner: I always love hearing the superhero origin story. That's always the best movie of the inevitable, several that will come from any good superheroes. The first one, most of us enjoy hearing how that person became that person. So I want to dig in a little bit more there. Did you learn more about the world from newspaper delivery or waiting tables?

Ed Brooks: Oh, a bit of both. Newspaper delivery was good because it was always the newspaper I delivered was the local one, which went out Friday evening after school and I'd come back home from school and delivering the local newspaper was the last thing I wanted. But to do sometimes, especially through the winter, you can imagine. I think that taught me self discipline and endurance to get out there, and I was given a firm push from mum back home. I learned a lot from that. Then the experience of waiting tables was a good one of working together and taking care to serve the food appropriately onto the plate rather than to the lap and similar things which I learned sometimes from trial and error, learn from both. I think that's something which is really important in developing who we are, is thinking about the context, going through life, taking these learning experiences reflectively and making mistakes, learn, developing, growing.

David Gardner: Much agreed. Ed, here in the United States of America, as I know you're aware, you've traveled widely. You've been to our country before. We tip, typically for our waiters, and we're being asked to tip in lots of different ways. Often I'll just buy something at the five and dime store and they'll flip around the monitor and give me an opportunity to tip 10% just for the candy bar that I just bought. There are lots of opportunities to tip. Were you tipped as a waiter back in that day or is it still the same today? What could one expect waiting tables?

Ed Brooks: So I used to serve with a lot of functions, weddings and so on, and spare so much of a tipping culture. But in any case, I think certainly we don't have the same generosity toward hospitality staff in the UK as I think you do over on your side of the Atlantic.

David Gardner: Well, it's kind to called that generosity. It almost feels like compulsion in some ways that's at its worst. But I do think that a tipping culture is generally probably a kinder culture as long as they're tips, not bribes, which happens a lot across this world. Let me ask you one more thing about your childhood. What was it like having your father working at IBM, this big behemoth company started in America? Did that open up your eyes to either business or the world at large?

Ed Brooks: It opened up my eyes to these amazing things called computers, so my father was right there working with mainframe computers and could bring bits of tech home with him, which was so exciting and going and seeing him in the office. But he left IBM actually when I was still fairly young, to take some technology which you have been developing and to develop that in a tech start up, which is still running these days. That was mostly as my father was growing his own company and I admire him for doing that.

David Gardner: That's wonderful. Yes, you did mention he translated that into entrepreneurship, which continues. Ed Brooks, what is the Oxford Character Project?

Ed Brooks: The Oxford Character Project is a research project at the University of Oxford that focuses on the human dynamics of leadership and the qualities of character that enable leaders to build trust, to think with clarity, to remain open to opportunity, to contribute to society, to persevere through difficult times. These qualities of intellectual and moral character that enable us to become wise thinkers and good leaders. We have researchers focusing on different aspects of character and leadership and designing and delivering programs, educational programs for students at Oxford, in other universities around the world, and for executives from a range of companies and sectors.

David Gardner: Hearing you describe that, I'm left to wonder, shouldn't this be at every school? Or are we expecting families to do this? Maybe things are happening at every school. I think of you as working within one of the fantastic institutions of higher learning in the world today. A lot of character formation starts when we're young kids so it's interesting to me even that you're working on people's characters, they come in as adults because I thought our character was already fixed let's say when I show up on campus at Oxford University. How many peer institutions do you have? Is it quite common what you're doing or is it uncommon? What can we learn from that?

Ed Brooks: Great question. Historically, it was very common. So roll back 100 or 150 years and character was right at the heart of what university education was intended to be about. Liberal arts education was really focused on this idea of formation. Through the 20th century for various reasons, that focus turned to more technical skills, which are very important as well. In this technical education, scientific education developed in a focus on universities more closely attached to direct aspects of the economy perhaps. The idea of character development in universities became less prevalent. I think the aspiration was never entirely left behind. But it certainly became more difficult through the 20th century to think about what it might look like, especially with this focus on universities needing to be training schools for science and technology and for economic progress. But also because the underlying traditions maybe that had held up character education in universities fell away and we became more plural as societies in the West.

The idea of developing character perhaps became more difficult. We're really picking up this story now in the 21st century, when there's been a revival of character education in earlier years, there was a turn in moral philosophy toward an idea of ethics called virtue ethics which is an ethics that focuses on character and virtue. We can come back to that in a bit perhaps. But that came into education to schools increasingly, and you rightly say much character is developed in those earlier years, in family contexts, in junior and high school. But character is always developing. We're always growing. We're shaped by the people around us, by the places we inhabit, by the stories that we tell. I dare say that in every company, maybe even the Motley Fool people are shaped by the way things are done and by the people that they spend the most time with. We're thinking about what that means intentionally then for university education. Universities are coming back to this idea it's been very interesting this last week the Times Higher Education University rankings went out. I went through the top 15 universities there looking at their educational mission statements. It was interesting to see where character is mentioned and profiled, and it's profiled in several of these educational mission statements at Princeton. MIT really interesting where there's a real emphasis on character. They talk about technical education, yes, but also liberal education to develop character, and that's important in a world of complexity where things are changing all the time to develop the personal qualities which can enable you to navigate this world really well.

David Gardner: It occurs to me that we're banding about back and forth the word character, and perhaps because many of us come from different cultures, many listening are not United States citizens but citizens of the world, maybe not everybody has the same thought or definition of the word character. I don't know if this is a little bit too nakedly bold of me, Ed, but could you define character, please?

Ed Brooks: I'd love to, David, and of course with any of these big concepts hard to define, they're so multi-faceted. But character is actually an old idea and a very old word. The etymology comes from Ancient Greece where character meant mark or imprint. You might think of the imprint of a profile of a ruler on a coin. We still have this idea of character as imprint of course, think of the 280 characters that you imprint in your X or Twitter post. What we're talking about there is personal character. Here we're talking about then the moral and intellectual marks or qualities that are deeply imprinted on a person. We can think about character in this way then, as a constellation of disposition or habits that shape the way that we characteristically think, feel, and act. Character is stable across context. If you think of someone as having a certain character we expect them to shop consistently in a certain way. But it's not static, and this is really important. Character can be developed and it is developed certainly at some times of life more than others. But it's developed across the whole life course.

David Gardner: That was a beautiful definition. Thank you, Ed Brooks. Coming from you that means a lot. I earlier asked you what is the Oxford Character Project. We're going to talk more about it a little bit more of the dynamics when you started it. Why a little bit of that. But before I ask those things, what is the Oxford Character Project not?

Ed Brooks: The Oxford Character Project is not about turning the clock back to some period of history when people where these ideal types, these people of good character who used to walk around always and everything was all good in the world that never existed. It's not about telling people who they should be or placing burdens on individual, students, or any others. What it is about is helping people to become the best versions of themselves in all of the different domains of their life and to contribute to the good of society wherever they find themselves in the world.

David Gardner: That sounds like something I'd like to sign up for. I enjoyed my university education and I esteem my university, which at a national level was a public institution, the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill has a pretty good reputation. But I will say I missed that, I missed that focus. I don't think most of us going through education at any level today frankly expects or gets that, although some of the best schools do provide it. Yours is obviously one through the Oxford Character Project. Ed, could you describe for me a little bit the dynamics of the project today? When did you start it? Why did you start it? Who are you working with? Love to learn a little bit more there.

Ed Brooks: We're now going into our 10th year, which is exciting to think about from my perspective. We started in 2014 as a group of professors. We're thinking about the changing nature of the university, with growing numbers of students, particularly taking Master's courses and going wonderfully right around the world. Think about what the Oxford offer was when it came to education. This university like many other universities, talks proudly of developing leaders for the future and there was a particular professor called Donald Hay, who was the founding head of the Social Sciences division here at Oxford. He said, yes, of course, well Oxford produces thinkers and leaders, we all know that, but does the University of Oxford produce wise thinkers and good leaders, and what are we doing to make sure that that is the case?

David Gardner: That is a beautiful question. I'm so glad that you-all thought to ask that. Ed, were you bringing that question? Did it arise naturally from the state of Oxford in 2014? I'm just fascinated that that question would be asked.

Ed Brooks: The back story was more broadly around the world, post-financial crash and certainly in UK society, really emerging questions around the leadership crisis which were prevalent at the time. In many ways these questions have continued since. But certainly here in the UK there was a lot of visibility here what are the leaders doing in financial services. But then what are the leaders doing in politics? There was an expensive scandal. What are the leaders doing in the military and there was a scandal around treatment of prisoners. You could pretty much go across every sector and there was a sense that maybe the people who are leading the way in these sectors aren't perhaps leading in ways that we might like, will certainly increase visibility on that. Whether there was a marked decline in reality or not, there was certainly a lot more focus on that question in the wake of a few prominent events and scandals, and this we then turned the question to, well, many of these students are coming through top universities. Many of them come from this university in the political world certainly here in the UK and beyond. What is our education doing here then to contribute positively to the vision of good leadership which can enable work in these various different areas of society to go forward well for everyone's benefit.

David Gardner: Ten years in, Ed, what are some of the partnerships that you have today? What are some of the dynamics of running the project?

Ed Brooks: Partnership has been at the heart of our work wonderfully, David. We started with a very small team and started to work with students to explore some of these questions in partnership with them. What were the aspirations of these wonderful graduate students that we have here and we focus particularly on the graduate student population coming from around the world. How did they understand what good leadership was and the character qualities they wanted to develop to fulfill their aspiration, to affect change, to lead well in different places and in different sectors of society. We started to work with these students and we went far there thinking, well let's work together and think about a vision of good leadership and how that might be possible to develop during your time at university, clarify and grow. We worked with others as well from across other universities and around the world as some wonderful work at Wake Forest University and Professor Christian Miller is a philosopher there at Wake Forest University. He had been doing some brilliant work when it came to the philosophical components of character. We drew heavily on his work there.

That work has wonderfully expanded at Wake Forest [inaudible] a fellow here who's a great friend called Michael Lamb then went across to Wake Forest and now leads the program for Leadership and Character at that wonderful university in Winston-Salem. There, their work has expanded rapidly and we've learned a lot from the work that they're doing. We've established partnerships with other universities, the University of Hong Kong. I'm heading there next week actually to work with them and their character and leadership program at the LLC here in the UK, and many others also. Then partnerships with others in different sectors. We were aware after the first focus on higher education, that we really needed to be thinking beyond the walls of the university in a much more intentional way, and that's where the business focus came from. Of course, it's great to think about how students can develop their time at university, but what are they developing for while careers and lives that are lived well beyond the walls of the university, what was happening there when it came to character development, leadership development, how did that relate to organizational cultures in different sectors. So we established partnerships. I think we've worked with 51 different businesses in the sectors of finance, law, and technology, in particular, over the last three years. In order to try to understand, what's the picture there and how does it relate to our understandings of character and character development we've been seeking about in higher education. How might that be transposed to organizational context?

David Gardner: Ed, it occurs to me you've developed and delivered character and leadership development programs for universities and businesses around the world, as you just said. That means to me, you're a designer. I'm fascinated by design, by the makers. What are a few thoughts or techniques that you work into your programs that can help us learn more about design from you?

Ed Brooks: I love this focus on design and I've thought about it a little bit as well in relation to character. I was prompted to do so by a meeting with a chap called Dave Evans, who's a professor at Stanford University, along with Bill Burnett, who leads the design school in the School of Engineering at Stanford. I think Bill Burnett and Dave Evans applied design principles to character with a program and then a book called Designing Your Life: How to Build a Well Lived, Joyful Life, what a great title. I met Dave, and he started talking about how they were using design principles to help students at Stanford think about what it meant to live well and to grow personally and had some great advice, particularly as stuck with me is the idea of prototyping, rather than getting hung up on identifying one perfect path, the idea of embracing prototyping, taking action, and learning and growing. That's stuck with me strongly. But as we've focused here, I think there are three ways we've tried to design or think about design principles when it comes to our work.

The first is to focus on what, and especially who we're designing for, so design is about utility in some way, thinking about the people we're designing for and what the program is trying to do in effect, and to consider people holistically, not just in terms of the intellectual content we might pass onto them, but what are their stories, their experience, their emotions? How are they engaging with what we're doing, so designing very much with the students in mind. Secondly, remaining open to surprise in educational programs that we deliver. Yes, having a plan and the idea of program suggest something maybe the program can seem maybe at times as well to package, to box who always being open to surprise, even if we've done something a lot of times, every time is going to be different. All of this what's this group going to bring with them and having that openness to adapt and thinking about design here is intention, yes, but iteration and that's the prototyping idea, perhaps. That's the second remain open to surprise, and the third has been to keep learning because design is never done. It's amazing I find it be thinking about designs which were once cutting edge. You look back at them 10 years later and you can't imagine when you see it at the time thinking that they could be anything more up to date and then you look back after 10 years and it looks 10 years old, design is never done.

David Gardner: Well, I really appreciate all three of those and design thinking and remain open to surprise is probably my favorite of the three. What a wonderful thing every human being should do and be ready for over the course of our lives. It's great to hear you exemplifying that in your design principles and as you run the project and work with, yes, your answer number 1 work with, in this case I would call it your customer or your student, the person that you're working with, your client and being client focused. Let's move on to three big questions. This is really how we've organized our conversation. I don't even know how this is going to ensue. I just know what we purpose at the beginning, like any good adventure. We talked about this in the weeks leading up to this interview and you suggested these three topics. We're going to cover each of them in this order. The first is, does character always win? The second is, how do we keep score in and around character? The third is, how can I, you, we up our game? How can we grow in character? I consider each of these a conversation. Each of these three could easily spin a full hour of rich discussion. Perhaps we'll have an opportunity in future to go deeper. But let's keep it medium to light.

Let's not spend too long on any of these. But let's give a good 10 minutes or so focused thought with your help, Ed Brooks, for speaking to these three topics. The first one is does character always win? Now I read a wickedly good small book called Integrity. It was written in 2009 by Henry Cloud, a US writer who operates out of California. You may have seen this stuff before, and I thought I remembered this line, so I went back, I repurchased the E-book, Kindle version of this book. I'd only had it in hard copy, but I misplaced it. So I searched back to see if in fact he wrote this phrase in the book, ''Character always wins.'' I checked, and he did, and I've always remembered it 15 years later. I've lived my life by this belief that you always win with character. Now, did you win the game? Maybe not. Did you win the contract? Maybe not. But you win, you don't lose with character. This might be the throwback to the previous centuries, this chivalric thing that never actually existed, that I think that character always wins. But I've been persuaded by that. That's the compelling question I wanted to lead off with. Ed, without short circuiting the conversation, because please don't give a blunt answer to this, does character always win?

Ed Brooks: Well, academics don't like giving blunt answers. We love to caveat. [laughs] I will say up front that I think it does in the long term. Yes, character wins and it's the most important key to winning in life. But we need to spend a bit of time going a bit deeper to get beyond the superficial answer here I think. I think first, perhaps, to clarify that we're talking about good character, which is important to clarify, good character qualities like justice, courage, integrity, you mentioned, but of course character is not all good talking about the dispositions that shape how we think and act, those are positive. Positive character qualities are called virtues. Negative character qualities exist as well, and they're called vices. There's a way, I guess, to think about winning by being selfish, greedy, arrogant, these vices, and we're not talking about winning by those means, we're thinking about good character and these good character; justice, courage, integrity, and so forth always win. I think the answer here comes down to how we define the win and the time horizon that we have in mind. Winning anything really worthwhile in a sense, relies on qualities of character. We might pursue that line a bit more, but at the end of the day, actually, the qualities of character transform the meaning of the win in the long term. That's why we can say that character always wins. Because once that transformation of the idea of winning has taken place, horizon's extended and there's a future to go after, which is all about what Aristotle talked about as happiness which is attained by actions in accord with virtue.

David Gardner: I really appreciate that definition. I think I missed that. I may have skipped that class on Aristotle at the university, but I love the line and it makes a lot of sense to me. I appreciate the distinction you're making between good character and bad character because it's a little bit too blithe, a little bit too glib to just say character always wins. We're already getting into some nuance here. You're already deepening our thinking. Ed, when you think about character and how it relates to performance, why are you persuaded that in the long term character wins? What is the difference between short term performance and long term performance as we think about good character?

Ed Brooks: I think the thing about short and long term performance is that character isn't developed in an instant and it's not developed for the moment either. The development of character points us beyond the instantaneous and the short term success, the quick win, and it points us toward the long term gain. Now, quick wins are important. They're important in life and we live for the moments when we feel good and we sip our coffee and get the shot of caffeine, which enlivens us. This is a quick win. Quick wins are important in business as well. Of course, they are, we need to keep moving forward. If we don't do that, and we think, it's all about the long run, and ignore the quick wins sometimes, then we won't get very far. But of course you can do the opposite as well. Maybe that's been a move in culture to think more about the short-term gains than the long run. Here we are having to perhaps rebalance, and character can enable us to do that. Character can help for the quick win, and here, we might think about character qualities like resilience or hard work or passion, energy, these character qualities that enable us to get things done that we need to get done now and to do that to a good standard. But we might think as well about character qualities which can deliver over the longer term. Maybe relational character qualities, generosity, justice, wisdom, of course. I think that's important certainly as we think over the long term to bring balance and good judgment. I hope is going to be important too. These can then take us beyond the short-term horizon. Both of these are important, the short-term performance in the long run. But if we just focus on the short, we miss out on actually where is this all going, hence character can help to refocus our horizons to a bigger and more beautiful picture, perhaps.

David Gardner: Virtues, such as they are, as opposed to vices, virtues, the focus of our conversation, I'm curious, have you enumerated the virtues? Do you have a list? Is there a number? Maybe even more importantly, because it's probably infinite, if we just keep thinking about forever, I'm not sure, but have you rated and ranked them at all? Now, I'm not trying to get into our scoring section yet, that's going to come a little bit later, but I'm just curious whether you've enumerated and/or rated ranked?

Ed Brooks: This is a great question. It's a really controversial one in philosophy and virtue ethics. The enumeration of the virtues is there one list? Are there many as it's related to different aspects of life and existence? In the classical world, famously there were four virtues; prudence, justice, fortitude, and temperance. In the Western tradition, those then were supplemented by three more virtues of faith, hope, and love, as Christian theology met classical philosophy, and there became seven. But while these have been prominent, many philosophers have many bigger list. Aristotle has many more virtues than that, and many since as well have said no, it's not possible to restrict the list, and there are different virtues needed for different aspects of life. One of the papers I'm working on at the moment actually, is to do a review of people who are working on character and leadership and reviewing the models which people have developed, saying, these are the virtues which are really important for leadership. There are various approaches here, and to see what we make of that and see if there's a way to think about the virtues that we can say, actually these virtues are important for leadership. I do wonder whether it's more about understanding the kind of aspects of the task at hand aspect of the situation, and then the function needed.

Then using wisdom to discern actually one of the most important virtues here, rather than having an absolute list. This perhaps comes back to what virtues are. Virtues are excellences of function, which really is to say they're actually all about perform. Virtues are about performance. Good performance of the thing that you are in accord with your function. A classic example is steak knife, example. The function of a steak knife is to cut through your 12 ounce sirloin state. Its sharpness, it's sharper than a standard table knife. Its weight, it's heavier than a standard table knife. These are virtues. It's certain sharpness, it's certain weight. These are excellence that enable it to be the best of performing its function. The vices are the things that might prevent it from performing its function. A steak knife that's blunt or a bit flexible or really light isn't going to be able to perform very well. What we're thinking about as we think about character and virtues, are, are there particular aspects here relating to human performance that we can list? What does it mean to perform well as a human being, either overall or in some specific domain, such as investing or sport, or in leadership in politics?

David Gardner: Ed, you sent me over a white paper that the project has produced in the last month or so. It's entitled Good Leadership in UK Business. Now, the wag would immediately want to ask, is there good leadership in UK business? Not trying to be too American, too blunt, but I'm curious as to what you discovered when you conducted your survey of good leadership in UK business. But I also just want to share a quick tidbit that I picked up from the paper itself. I'm going to quote "Kindness, creativity, and humility are widely considered important for good leadership, but were rated by participants among the five least central features". Talk broadly about the report, talk more specifically about what that insight conveys.

Ed Brooks: The report was a piece of descriptive research. That is to say, we ask people about their perceptions of what good leadership looks like in UK business using a method called prototype analysis, which tries to identify the central prototype, if you like, the key idea of good leadership that is held by people across business sectors. We here involved over 1,100 participants of surveying following this method, and they came back with 84 different features which were generated by these participants. Then other participants then ranked according to their centras in order to help us understand what are people saying, good leadership looks like. There were some interesting findings from this research. The first one, and it plays into what we're talking about, about character, was that most of the features that were listed by employees in UK firms related to character, I think some 52% were personal character qualities. The other categories we looked at, interpersonal skills, they're important as well. Leadership is interpersonal, and 35% relates to that.

Thirteen percent were related to professional competence, aspects such as risk awareness, or strategy or technical expertise. But this focus on character came through and this was generated by the participants, so striking. Striking may have particularly, given that much leadership development focuses on competence, maybe focuses on interpersonal skills, maybe it doesn't focus as much on character development. I think certainly there's something to be taken away there, but there were also surprises, like you say, in terms of what wasn't rated very highly. Yes, there's some good research talking about the importance of humility in leadership. Certainly, I'm surprised by kindness featuring low down, because it seems to me that this is essential, and certainly there's good examples of people who are held up for their kindness in leadership in different domains. You might think about the importance of creating a positive corporate culture. If the people who are leading in the organization aren't kind, don't take account of the humanity of those around them, know names of others, seek to encourage them, find out about them, go out of their way to support them in different ways. Then the culture of the company is not going to be built in a way which is particularly robust or effective. I would say, it was surprising that some of these features which are considered quite highly in research that's been done were there lower down and certainly something perhaps to play back to companies as we're talking now to them and saying, well, how does this reflect the way that you see leadership in your firm?

David Gardner: In some senses, maybe it could be table steaks. Maybe the expectation these days is that operating at a high level, you would be bringing kindness for your fellow human being, you would be bringing some measure of humility, not arrogance. So maybe they're less interesting because they're more expected. I don't actually know, I didn't do the descriptive research.

Ed Brooks: I think that's true. This is one of the challenges of the descriptive method we use, is that we were surveying people rather than interviewing them here. It was more quantitative than qualitative, and we need to go back and ask people a little bit more to get the story there. Personally, I think that even if it is something which is assumed, there's a danger in that, because if we start to assume what's really very important, then I guess we're not putting the effort and energy into developing or ongoing cultivating it in an ongoing way. Character qualities are like muscles, that they develop as they are practiced and they can atrophy if they're not practiced and not used as well.

David Gardner: Agreed. Kindness, creativity and humility. Not ranking as high. What did rank high? Of course a lot of business people are listening right now. A lot of investors, people who work in and around, well, really all of the professions, but we think a lot about investing in finance here. What does rank higher for respondents when they think about good leadership?

Ed Brooks: Integrity, hard work, responsibility, commitment, resilience, trustworthiness, and these were all very high along with some key interpersonal skills. Communication unsurprisingly was high up there, and a measure of competence was identified very highly across sectors. That was sometimes simply stated in terms of competence. In some sectors such as financial services, there was a real emphasis on risk awareness and that came in at the very top there. There was some measure of competence, interpersonal skills, and character across all of them. But the character domain came up particularly highly.

David Gardner: We're about to shift to Section 2, question number 2, can one keep score? How should one, how may one keep score? But before we get there, let's just dive a little bit deeper into the implications here for business. Let's pretend I'm the CEO of my own small company. Well, let's take your dad, an entrepreneur of vintage. Somebody who's working hard doing something they love, hoping that someone will buy their product or a service. What advice would you have for, let's go with the average business owner across the world? In terms of what they could do to deploy some of your learnings within their own framework. We're all operating from many different contexts, Ed Brooks, but what can I learn as an entrepreneur that I could or should be doing better, either for myself or for my people or enterprise?

Ed Brooks: Excellent. I think I'll go straight to role modeling and this is what you can do for yourself and for your enterprise, so repeatedly in our qualitative research. Role modeling has come up very highly in terms of the impact of leaders on others in the organization and on the culture as a whole. If you're concerned to advance and see the value of advancing good character in your organization, and I think there's really important reason to do that. Some of our researchers measured the impact, or looked at reviewed research on the impact of character in organizational life and leadership and it's clear. Then thinking about what example is being set to others around. As human beings, we learn by example, and we follow examples, we look up to others as models. What's that example that's being set and how can others follow it?

David Gardner: Excellent and completely persuasive, thank you. Role modeling, we're all doing it all the time. Whether or not we realize it, being conscious of what we show to other people. Being conscious of how they will react to the things that they see that we say and do is profoundly important. I do appreciate some of your earlier points going back to rugby, about deliberate practice, about an earlier theme in our conversation today. In a sense, virtue or good character is about performance. It's a performance art. It's not a high minded ethereal thing that sits up in our gray matter somewhere. It's about what you're about to say or do and how it affects the world around your role modeling. Thank you, Ed Brooks. Let's move on then to our next section keeping score now. I let off the previous section by saying Henry Cloud says, or I say, character always wins, does it? I'm going to go with a similar approach here. I'm going to go with a classic line that I know you've heard before, I'm not sure who said it, but man does this drive a lot of leadership and evaluation and appraisal in our world today. If you can't measure it, you can't manage it. Now that's an entire school of thinking, I'm sure there's a counter school of different thinking, but let's stick with that straight up aphorism. If you can't measure it, you can't manage it. First of all, Ed Brooks, do you agree with that sentiment, are you within that school or do you identify with a different school?

Ed Brooks: I think that school presupposes certain things about measuring, and the reason for measuring related to the idea that that management is in. Here, character operates on a different logic perhaps to the idea of management that we're talking about in a technical sense. But coming back to can character be measured and what I do like in that aphorism, is that if things are important, we should expect them to show up and we should look for them and try to encourage and cultivate them. I think character can be measured, yes, but not in the same way as say, the value of a stock. We need to think about the measurement that fits the idea of the thing that we're looking to measure. This is controversial in this space and some people might say, no character is part of the set of things which are just absolutely beyond measurement. Trying to measure character will necessarily corrupt it. We instrumentalize character by focusing on the effect of the impact of character. It brings it into some pseudo scientific paradigm that's at odds with what character is really about. Well, I think a certain focus on measurement can detract from the idea that character is importantly internal. It's about our motivations as well as our actions and that character is its own reward, it's not for the sake of something else. But maybe we can think about character measurement differently. This is actually, I think, where the idea of keeping score is quite a useful analogy when it comes to character development. Keeping score suggests the idea of tracking progress toward a goal. Scores what you're looking at when you're in the game itself. I know there's been some golf on over the last few days and Europe, we're playing against the USA in the Ryder Cup. 

David Gardner: Yes, I do believe Europe won yet again.

Ed Brooks: As they went through each of those matches, there was a score within the match, and that would have been very important that they were keeping as they were going through the match. But as soon as each match ends, then that score is tallied up into the overall score of the matches. As soon as those matches have ended, that result is what stands and we just said Europe will beat the USA on this occasion. At the final whistle, I think at the last analysis. The keeping score is what you're doing as you're going along in order to measure your progress toward the ultimate goal which is winning the game. We do need to do that I think, the idea of tracking progress is very relevant when it comes to character because character isn't binary. Character isn't about you have good character or you don't have good character, it's not about win or loss. It's about the developmental journey, it's about growing as a human being. These important qualities of justice, courage, patience, generosity, love, humility. We can keep going over our lifetime so that we live well in ourselves. That we are the best versions of ourselves and that we contribute to those others around us in our communities, our organizations, and in the world at large.

David Gardner: We are living in an age of measurement. We almost cannot be doing so. A lot of us are counting our caloric intake or retracting the number of website clicks we got. How many downloads did I get for this podcast? The amount of data in our world today is no doubt at an all time high. I suppose you could say, it's always existed. It's only just that we started to care, notice and track it, and toward progress. Most of the time we're only looking at data when we care, when we see some purpose toward capturing those numbers and then seeing what plays out over time. I was reminded by a friend that a few centuries ago, it was very alien to have this mentality. Very little was being counted in the way that we almost take for granted today. So I'm curious whether you think artificial intelligence might in some way enable us or whether present data tracking systems might already be in some senses enabling human character. I posit, I don't think anybody has done this or this would be hard to track, but I posit that if I could look over 100 individuals and look at a rolling five year period, the last five years of how many lies each one has told. I bet if I found my top decile of non-liars, I bet that they would be more successful, happier, and more productive citizens than the bottom decile. The problem is, nobody's tracking that. So far as I can tell. We can track ourselves which is important. But is this fair? Is this too simple-minded, Ed Brooks, that if you count the number of virtues, vices, great things, transgressions, and we use that data and started to incorporate it into the decisions that we make and the actions that we take. In my mind, that's a better world. But so far as I can tell, no one's really keeping score when it comes to virtue performance, am I right?

Ed Brooks: I think people are starting to keep score in the way that you're talking about at a macro level. But I think there are different reasons for different people to keep score here. We might think there's a personal reason to keep score. If your character is really important to you, then I guess is important to reflect on your experience, to keep account for yourself. How are you doing, how are you growing? What's your own score? There are some wonderful examples of that. Benjamin Franklin has this brilliant example of his own practice of keeping track or keeping score of 12 virtues which he defined for himself. It's there in his autobiography as he went through and would put a star in each day when he hadn't quite lived up to his expectations when it came to that particular virtue and he did this over.

David Gardner: Isn't that wonderful? Self-scoring, I love it.

Ed Brooks: Self-scoring and this is important. Something is important to us. We should be seeking to grow. How do you know if you're growing unless you're taking seriously some practice of introspection evaluation. There's a personal reason. You can bring others into that as well. There's the interpersonal ways of bringing others in, recruiting others for your project. Companies even do this with the 360 degree feedback sometimes. Sometimes this relates to just technical aspects of performance, but it can relate to aspects of character as well. This doesn't always work so well, but at its best, it can give some useful ideas of the ways I'm thinking I am showing up, the ways that others are seeing me and receiving the contribution I'm making. I think in the bigger picture that we're talking about and systematic and more scientific process of measurement and using AI and large language models. I think this is something that we just start to explore and has some interesting possibilities. Certainly some colleagues just put out an article from Munich looking at Glassdoor data and trying to look for evidence of intellectual vice. That is to say, ways of thinking which are detrimental to the identification of truth. Then think of correlating that perhaps to organizational performance would be a step you might take. I think there are ways to start to think now we have the kind of data available to us as to how we might go about looking and identifying the fruits of character is it's expressed in different ways and different datasets. Then thinking about how that relates to some of the things that are important to us in one domain or another. It's just at a beginning, there's lots of possibility here, but there are dangers as well. Certainly, you can jump too quickly from looking for the fruit of a certain virtue or vice to thinking that we understand perhaps more than we do from the data that we have. But there's all kinds of possibility emerging with large amounts of data with AI.

David Gardner: Another danger of perhaps too quickly jumping to a conclusion, scoring inadequately, not watching enough of the game, having a small sample size, and having a knee jerk reaction. A lot of people, at least on this side of the pond, I won't speak to yours, you can, have talked about cancel culture in the last five or 10 years. This idea that somebody who's done something wrong is publicly shamed, social media, a big weapon, in this regard being turned into a weapon. It can also be a weapon for good, but bad in this case. I'm curious any views you might have on so called cancel culture, why it occurs, whether it's always been there and we're just giving it a name right now and it's enjoying a brief faddish focus, or whether there's something real here that we should learn from.

Ed Brooks: I think this area is very complicated and it's certainly something which is central to debate in universities, which have historically been places where people weren't canceled and ideas were considered openly and analyzed in terms of the best evidence available in support of them. That evidence was then presented publicly disputed, and so we could find out the truth of the matter. The idea of canceling people. I've found there's no another is something we should be perhaps cautious about. University certainly in the UK have been very cautious about. I think there is a wider social phenomenon here and there are certainly ways in which ideas of human identity being cultivators and self identifiers, we're thinking about them today, do make different ideas and interpretations very challenging. We need to think about how we can navigate that and how we can continue to engage well with people who have radically different views. I have to say we have some experience here of helping students to identify views on controversial points, and then speaking to their colleagues and peers about the views they disagree with, and when we've done that in programs, it's been incredibly effective and students have really, really welcomed the opportunity for discussion with people that they are already working with on shared projects. Then find out they actually have very different views on one thing or another.

David Gardner: Well, Ed, we're about to move on to discussing how we can grow in character, how can I up my game? But before we do that, it occurs to me you're sitting there at Oxford University, and I end up asking myself rapscallion questions like, how do we know if a university is succeeding? I can't imagine Oxford is not. It's one of the foremost educational institutions in the world today, and in world history too, I should say. But as someone who focuses on leadership and on human flourishing, are there measures that you can apply to your university or that I could apply to mine?

Ed Brooks: I think there are ways of focusing our attention and measurement approaches here can help us to do that really well. Even if they're not absolute. There's an important point to be made in the measure what you treasure idea that I think you mentioned earlier on. If we start to focus some measurement on this domain of this area of character, perhaps will then be focused a bit more intentionally on the cultivation of it. Of course, it's hard to measure the impact of any educational institution. It's measured ultimately in the people who come through it, and the ideas that are developed within it, and the value of those ideas and what's produced by them. We're always thinking of different proxies I think to attach to some of these outcomes. We might measure the number of companies that were spun out of a university. Or the investment from people outside the university into the university as a value in society of the research than the ideas that are there or the careers that students go on to occupy and the ways in which they make a difference in the world. We can look at all of these things. We can look at character using mixed methods approaches. Character has this important motivational component. We need to ask people about their motivations in order to try to assess that well. There are good psychometric measures which are self report measures, focusing on particular character qualities or on character as a whole. There's a brilliant work going on at Harvard University and the human flourishing program led there by Tyler One Thunder Wheel. They've got a human flourishing scale which has character as one of the components.

They've got one question which is just brilliant, and it's a character question which is predictive of many other domains of human flourishing. The question is this, I always act to promote good in all circumstances, even in difficult and challenging situations. There's a question you could ask yourself, ask to others, and rank yourself over time reflectively. You could have some idea of what growth going on. Me personally, in a population more broadly. Of course the more people you have, you can start to evaluate some trends. We can apply these measures in educational context as well along with qualitative measures, talking to people, asking what they value from their experiences in the educational institution or in the development program in the company. Seeing if that relates to our intention in the beginning. Maybe aspects of there are surprising, they're saying something they value which wasn't actually front and center in the design. Maybe that's something which you might then think about making more of. Or maybe they're not getting as much out of it as we might think as instructors from our perspective as important to do as well. I think we can focus here on different domains. We focus on intellectual growth, qualitative development. But we can also focus on dispositional outcomes and character development. I think we should do, we ought to.

David Gardner: How do you score the Oxford Character Project? One way to score it is it's still going. You started this ten years ago. That's how I think about this podcast. I'm still going every week into my ninth year. That's one way of scoring, but how do you score your own work?

Ed Brooks: That's a great question. I think part of it is we adding value to the personally the programs that we run and to their work through the research that we're doing. We're looking for others. I think in the responses we receive actually look, that piece of research is helping us in this way. What we've done with it is this, and we've developed it in some direction and taking it further. We try to look out for that. We will keep track when organizations outside of the university are using and relying on our research and work they're doing with it. We will keep in touch with our students and ask about their experience they finished, but their ongoing experience as well we are able to do with them here at the university has set them up. We try to do that. I don't know how about you, but here we, critical of our work, we think there's more that could be doing. But it is amazing to have this opportunity to be here over the last ten years and still be here with this great opportunity each year, new groups of incredible people coming through.

David Gardner: Congratulations. I first met you in person at our mutual friends House Grace and Peter Bond. But my daughter Kate, as I mentioned at the top, had just a fantastic time with you just a few days in Oxford a few years ago. I can clearly report that my friends and family, all of whom have been in and around you and your project, have all felt well served. I do trust that the time we're spending this week is reaching many. Let's move on now Ed to our final section. Actually headline. It's not our final section, because Ed has consented to playing buy seller hold at the end of this conversation. But let's go into this final main topic. Upping your game. How can we grow in character? Now, Ed, I do believe you might be working on a book. I think you might be. I don't know if you're one of those authors who likes to talk about his book ahead of time or not at all. But I tend to latch on to numbers. A lot of us do this, so I think the number seven seems relevant to your coming book. Would you describe briefly how you think we can grow in character in seven steps or less?

Ed Brooks: I'd love to. I'll give you seven very quickly. Three maybe with a little bit more of a focus, because seven is quite a lot and we haven't got much time. But I am working on a book, Seven Ways to Grow in Character with a great friend and colleague, Michael Lamb, who leads the program for leadership and character at Wake Forest. The seven strategies which we've used and applied in our own work over the last decade are these. One, habituation through practice. Two, reflection on experience. Three, engagement with virtuous exemplars or role models. Four, virtue literacy, learning the language of character and virtues. Five, awareness of situation variable. How we squeeze pressure shaped by different aspects of the world around us for better and sometimes for worse. Six more reminders that remind us of our commitments to ourselves and to others, and friendships of mutual accountability. The three I might emphasize, particularly these habituation, role models and friendship. Maybe we could spend a tiny bit more time on these three. That sounds good to you.

David Gardner: Please do. Give us the short course in those three, one at a time.

Ed Brooks: Habituation through practice. Here the key idea is that we become what we repeatedly do. Virtues are habits, and they're developed in a way which is analogous to skills. This is an insight from Julia Annas, a prominent philosopher with a brilliant book called Intelligence Virtue and describes how we could think about virtues. Like you might think about the intentional and expert practice needed to develop say, reliable tennis swing backhand, forehand, as you like. We need to think about what the virtue is. Say the virtue is of integrity, well, how are we applying that virtue being true to our deep commitments in different ways, and what does that mean and look like? There's some reflection needed there and then some intentional practice. I will speak in the call with my deepest commitments in the meetings that I go to an analysis that I'm doing that even when I don't necessarily feel that that's an easy thing to do. By continually practicing that over the time, identifying what the particular way of practicing looks like in your context by repeated practice, there's a way to grow become what we repeatedly do. I think this is something that the Benjamin Franklin was onto in that approach we looked at earlier. Identifying the 12 virtues, identifying what that meant for him, and he did that very specifically for each one, and then practicing that every day. Others have taken it further to Ben Horowitz is a leading venture capitalist and co founder of this amazing firm, Andres and Horowitz as you know. He's also a best selling management author. He takes this approach in the book What You Do Is Who You Are and How to Create Your Business Culture, which draws on in his work The Samurai Approach, which is all about the same idea of habituation. He draws a distinction between values which are important commitments and virtues which are practiced, developed over time. That's the first one, habituation through practice.

David Gardner: Thank you.

Ed Brooks: The second is role models. Here the idea is of engaging with virtuous exemplars and doing that intentionally. Thinking about the people we look up to. What is it that makes them admirable? How can we relate to them? Where is there an overlap between their world and my world? Such follow after them in my own way, in my own style, but still look up to them and follow them in the way in which they exhibit good character. There's the overlap of experience. But also important to think about role models, not as people we put on pedestals, but as attainable. Again, here there's some good research showing that it's these features of admiration and relevance attainability, which make for the most powerful role models in terms of our moral development. Rather than looking up to people from a distance, actually trying to get close to them and thinking closely about their failures as well as their victories and strengths. The ways that they were developing, the way they overcame difficulties and challenges, and still try to do that. That's role models, engaging with virtuous exemplars and doing actively, we can do that so easily with the amazing biographies that we have around us or by talking to people and asking them that we look up to about how they do things, what they do, why they do them, and we can learn and grow.

David Gardner: I've watched a lot of sport in my life, and part of the justification I've given myself for having indulged as much as I have as a spectator of usually popular American sports, is that often I had a child near me, maybe sitting on my lap at home, watching on TV, maybe sitting next to me at the stadium. As one thing or another happened and people cheered or booed, it occurred to me that these are each little opportunities to teach. Why did that happen, why are we reacting this way? Almost anything it seems like can be picked up and played with as a toy to encourage virtue and discourage vice. There's a justification for all my fellow sports fans as well.

Ed Brooks: Absolutely. It's the intentionality that you talk about that's absolutely key there. Yeah.

David Gardner: Your third one.

Ed Brooks: The third one is friendship. Here there's a beautiful way in the classical world in which friendship was passed into three types, trends of pleasure, utility, and virtue. It's the third type that's going to be most important for us. But then the other two are important as well. It's about discerning what type of friend here and how friends then can help us to grow in character. The first friendship that the classical world discerned was friends of pleasure. There might be friends, we enjoy a shared pastime with going to the football match or the concert. Friends of utility in the second in these may be linked in connections or network connections in business. There's a reciprocity that goes on here in these friendships. This is good, this is helpful, and this is important. But the deepest kinds of friendship that was talked about in the classical world was a friendship of virtue. Here is a friendship for the sake of the other. Not just for the sake of the other in the material domain, but for the sake of the others best interests in terms of who they are as a human being.

Of course, in order to have friends of virtue, we can't have so many of them because you need to know each other really well. It's costly too, because sometimes it'll take you into places and saying things which might be maybe more difficult to say in terms of challenging someone to live up to themselves and their best lives. There's a brilliant example here, in a letter from Clementine Churchill to Winston Churchill, which we always share with students in our programs. It's a lovely letter. It was in June 1940, France had been lost to German forces. The Brits had evacuated and Winston Churchill was taking strain. His wife, Clementine, writes to him and says, one of the men in your entourage has noticed Winston, and has had a word to me that you're becoming a rough, he says, sarcastic and overbearing in your manner. Clementine says, I've noticed that you're not as kind as you used to be.

She writes this out and she writes a letter to him saying she had written it several times before and ripped it up that she was writing to him because she knew he needed to know. She called him to live by his best lights and she referenced this saying in French, regner sur le coeur par le calme, which rule over heart by calmness. This is something that Winston Churchill held very dear. She reminded him of this. This is what you say you're about. This is deeply important to you and it's important that you live up to that. Then she drew off the letter at the end, and with signing it. Then this picture of a cat, which was a joke between the two of them. But also a sign of affection, love, devotion that enables, I guess, the medicine to go down well. If you challenge to someone you don't know so well or in the wrong way, in this way, and it's not going to help them to grow in a character that could have an adverse reaction of course. Friends of virtue, how can we cultivate those kinds of friendship in order to help us grow? Those are the three ways perhaps, to up your character game work on habituation, role models, and cultivate friendships of virtue.

David Gardner: Well, I'm looking forward to the book that you and Michael will produce. Thank you. In the meantime, for appraisee and a focus on a few of the things that each of us can take away from this conversation this week. I especially appreciate those three types of friendship and just being intentional and thinking about how we're interacting with those around us and who really means something to us and what are the implications of recognizing deeper relationship with others. Well, we're about to close the buy seller hold Ed. But it occurs to me that I should ask, how could somebody get in touch with you if they would like to learn more about the project, how can we reach you? Do you have an e mail, the website? If I listen this week and I really would love to go deeper with you, maybe you could partner with me at some point, my organization here or abroad. How do we get in touch with Ed Brooks?

Ed Brooks: Thanks, David. Like many academics, I'm quite easy to get in touch with, so you can find me straight in the Oxford University website, or our oxfordcharacter.org website, or via LinkedIn and I'd be delighted to hear from many of the listeners out there and to be in contact.

David Gardner: Ed Brooks, let's play, buy, sell, or hold. I'll be throwing out things to you and asking you, these are not stocks, but if they were, would you be buying today, selling, or holding and why?. Let's start off with the human race. The human race, don't tell me, I'm not ambitious with this game, the human race, Ed Brooks, buy, sell, or hold?

Ed Brooks: Buy. Big time buy. I am firmly committed to the idea of human goodness. A deep human goodness, of human dignity. Of that being something which is very precious and needs to be cultivated by individuals and then by societies. I think that's something which is very, very important. Always buy, and don't just buy and hold, but buy and grow.

David Gardner: Love it. One of the things that I've done as a small practice myself for more than 10 years is I randomize from a list of virtues that I've just built up over the years. I was inspired as a young person by Benjamin Franklin and what he did, so I'm so glad you made light of that. I have my 36 virtues, and each day I wake up and I randomize one of them. I think about it throughout the day. I try to act on it, and then at the end of the day, I try to reflect on it. The one that came to me today of our conversation happens to be empathy. I want to briefly interrupt this game by asking you a little bit more about empathy. There have been books written in recent times, Jeremy Rifkin's book The Empathic Civilization that advocate and they're actually trying to measure empathy, they're actually trying to score this. Rifkin asserts that we actually have more empathy today than at any point in human history. He tracks it like a stock graph from lower left to upper right. Empathy is my virtue of the day, but any quick thoughts about empathy for our fellow human beings?

Ed Brooks: Empathy is so important today because we come into contact with so many people who are so different from us. The world is smaller than it's ever been. We are always meeting people from different backgrounds, different places with different stories and life experiences, and empathy is the virtue of character which takes a pause and helps us to see things through their eyes and that is going to be very, very important in order for us to get on well in our communities and society.

David Gardner: In particular these days, we often think that it's on the decline or is it even there at all. We hear about the political divisions, we hear about the use of contempt in public spheres and space to minimize others that don't agree with us. I recognize that all those things are happening in our society. But what is also happening in our society is much more accord and respect for women, far more than it existed at many points in history. It's not true of every country and every neighborhood today, but it sure is far more so than a century ago when women had barely even gotten the vote in many cases. The way we treat animals. Pets are often members of our family these days. I probably was kicking my dog when I was five, but I love my dog today. There are lots of signs and I do believe it's that globalizing force of bumping into people different from us at a rate far more common than I think, again, at any other point in history. We can think about transportation, all kinds of reasons. But what am I doing, ranting briefly during buy, sell, or hold. Let's go back to it. Ed Brooks, buy, sell, or hold. Well, he's funded your project, so you better be at least a little bit bullish. I'm having fun with this. He seems to have been a most honorable man. Buy, sell, or hold the legacy of John Templeton.

Ed Brooks: I've got to buy here. Like you say, the John Templeton Foundation, the Templeton World Charity Foundation have been such generous supporters. Our work would not exist without them. I never knew the founder and philanthropist of this amazing legacy. What I do know is of the legacy that has been built on his philanthropy and the work that's being supported around the world, and the group of Templeton Foundations have been amazing supporters of character, education, development, as well as many other areas as well. But this one in particular, and we're really grateful for their support of us.

David Gardner: I thought you'd be bullish, but it's good to hear a little bit more about what was, I think, a truly great man. A man who was not only successful in business and as an investor, but as I've often said, I think some of the most successful investors are people of real character like Warren Buffett, another quick example comes to mind. I think to really, truly be excellent at recognizing in others what will grow and rise over time and recognizing what the world needs, you need to have some inner eye yourself, which can discern and recognize goodness around you. I think John Templeton is certainly one example. What in particular, I know you never knew the man, but, Ed, what in particular has come to you as a strength, a character strength that John Templeton exemplified?

Ed Brooks: I think I'm impressed by the entrepreneurial nature of his work, and maybe it's we started with his commitment to human goodness and wanting to see that flourish across different areas of life. To that, the commitment to truth. He was never afraid of big questions. In fact, still, the John Templeton Foundation works around this idea of big questions which can try to get to the heart of the truth of the matter, of reality, and of human experience. How we might do that and using the best scientific methods in different ways in order to understand who we are, how our world works, and how it works in all kinds of different levels. A material level through scientific inquiry, through spiritual inquiry as well, and he applies that across the different domains. I think that comes out of this man's entrepreneurial instincts and his appetite for knowledge across domains out of this wonder and appreciation of what it means to be human.

David Gardner: Buy, sell, or hold punctuality as a meaningful and important aspect of human character. In so many words, Ed, is punctuality a virtue? Buy, sell, or hold punctuality being on the Mount Rushmore or near it of human virtue.

Ed Brooks: I'm going to hold.

David Gardner: You do have some German listeners, by the way.

Ed Brooks: I'm going to hold. We may have also some listeners from Latin America or from other parts of the world where ideas of punctuality is quite different. So I think this is a relevant and domain-specific punctuality in certain ways. Yes, sometimes, not always. So I'm going to hold here. [laughs]

David Gardner: It is a reminder that what we call character, or as you pointed out earlier, good character, what we count as virtues, can be very cultural and it's hard in the end to say that there's an objective Plato's wall of his cave view of what human character or good character or virtue is. I do know some people who hold up punctuality as a virtue that everyone should be practicing and others who don't even think twice about it, and I like both of these people. They think differently.

Ed Brooks: Absolutely.

David Gardner: Ed, is there another semi-ambiguous virtue that you can think of, something that some people seem to care a whole lot about it and others are barely aware of?

Ed Brooks: Yes. Living with children and teenagers, I think we could think about cleanliness, which [laughs] in the old saying, it is held next to godliness I think as a virtue. Yet, this doesn't always seem to translate in the application. Maybe there's an example there. I think there are quite a few examples of where virtues are specific to one culture or another, and I think this is where there are interesting conversations between generations, between different cultural contexts as well.

David Gardner: I agree. We don't have time for it this week, but I think it's quite interesting to think what are the virtues that are clearly and strongly upheld by some in some contexts and not in others, and that list of virtues deserves its own book or research project at some point because that strikes me as very interesting. It's one thing to say integrity, of course. Courage, yes. Why not? It's another to say punctuality, cleanliness, and I'm sure a laundry list of other nayers do well. Let's go to my last one. Ed Brooks, buy, sell, or hold, how could I not ask you this? You may not have a developed sense, but how could I not ask you, buy, sell, or hold the Oxford comma. [laughs]

Ed Brooks: I think it's overdone. We really don't need it so often. But if you do need the comma in order to make the clarification that that is referring to or something else, then fine, put it in. But is it going in everywhere? I think it looks a little bit scruffy to me, so I'm going to sell on the Oxford comma.

David Gardner: Oh my gosh, the only thing we disagreed on the entire hour, Ed Brooks. This is heresy that you've just visited upon this podcast and from Oxford University no less. But this is why I had you on, Ed, because we need to hear sometimes the counterpoint and you're never afraid to speak your mind. Ed Brooks, you've been full of insight and are a bright beacon of hope and promise. Fools everywhere I know, join me in thanking you for your work and wishing you the best.

Ed Brooks: Thank you very much, David. It's been such a joy and pleasure to be with you and all of the listeners.

David Gardner: At close, I'm thinking back to Shirzad Chamine, past guest on the show, author of the book Positive Intelligence, who has a great little speech somewhere about character. He comes at it from a different angle. In a sense, he says, as humans, we will never have perfect character. It is indeed our flaws. It is our fallibility that makes us human. Can you imagine, he asks, if you were perfect, can you imagine how insufferable this would be for your children? How they would measure themselves up against you? Always feel like they're failing, all your loved ones and peers, too. In fact, were you perfect, you might be in some ways fundamentally unlovable. It is in our fallibility, in my many weaknesses, in yours, that we are human to each other. It's what causes us to empathize, love, and relate. But in no way does this beauty in a sense of human fallibility suggest that we should not endeavor to become better to strive to be more virtuous. That, too, is admirable and in Ed Brooks' words, that is role modeling and helpful. Or in Arthur Brook's words, channeling Oprah a few weeks ago on this podcast, another Brooks, too many Brooks? In Arthur's and Oprah's words, in the same way, we will never be perfect, we will never be happy. There is no finished perfect state of happiness. We should seek happiness progression toward more happy, toward more virtue, with a concomitant effort as well to reduce unhappiness and reduce vice. We are left with the Motley Fool's credo then, too, which all interrelates toward smarter, happier, and richer. We celebrate the Er, we celebrate the Er, which also happens to be the last two letters of the word we focused on this week. Character, Er, the mark, the imprint that you leave on others and this world as Ed gave us the etymology character. Fool on.