It was something new to apply this degree of attention to his material self. His sense of where he was migrated from his head to his body, from perception to proprioception. There was a daily round of meals, exercises and readings to work on. The perfectibility of habit, and the habit of perfection.
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...he’s tapping into his ability to provide wise counsel to inspire others as they scale new peaks and remake themselves. He summarizes his approach to change in this simple phrase (inspired by Aristotle’s “We are what we repeatedly do. Excellence, then, is not an act, but a habit.”): ‘We are what we practice and we’re always practicing something. Thus, to make changes we need to practice something new and different.
In order to see our son differently, Sandra and I had to be differently. Our new paradigm was created as we invested in the growth and development of our own character. Paradigms are inseparable from character. Being is seeing in the human dimension. And what we see is highly interrelated to what we are. We can’t go very far to change our seeing without simultaneously changing our being, and vice versa. Even in my apparently instantaneous paradigm-shifting experience that morning on the subway, my change of vision was a result of—and limited by—my basic character.
My attempts to mold him failed, and I felt increasingly frustrated. He thought I’d fire him. Fortunately, for him and me, I began to grasp that he had not failed me; rather, I had failed him by putting him in a role out of frame with his encodings. Furthermore, I felt somewhat responsible for his future; I did not want to see this wonderful young man start his professional life getting fired. So, I began making a series of iterative steps, testing him with different tasks that drew upon what I sensed to be his intellectual gifts, and he showed signs of flourishing.
And he insisted with every tool of his personality that they see the situation as he saw it, that they feel as he felt or as he convinced himself he did. As he worked on them, they began to tentatively sense – not as with James, that they were led by a man of admirable vision and ability – but that they were in this together, and that they wanted themselves to succeed.
Alice’s attitude, which he was comprehending piecemeal by observing her, was that your job was merely one element in a well-lived life. To be doing it right, you also had to go on great holidays, wear clothes that suited you, have fun at parties and many things more. Maybe she was right: maybe there were levels of sophistication higher than single-mindedness. Maybe you could rise above your own ambitions. It was an idea that had never occurred to him.