Practice as Habit Formation: Emulating Exemplars

Strengths of character result from habit …. We acquire them just as we acquire skills … we become builders, for instance, by building, and we become harpists by playing the harp. So too we become just by doing just actions, temperate by doing temperate actions, brave by doing brave actions.

—ARISTOTLE, Nicomachean Ethics, Book 2, Chapter 1

It’s not enough just to pick exemplars and assemble a personal board of directors. You also have to follow their example—not just once or twice, but again and again. Only then will you internalize the standards they embody, and become the kind of person you want to be.

Imitating Exemplars

Imitating your exemplars involves creating space in the moment to exercise reason and evaluate your thoughts, feelings, and possible courses of action. Doing this retrains past patterns of behavior so they align more closely with the patterns of your exemplars.

One way of creating space for reason in your thinking is to ask yourself what your exemplars would do if they were in your position. It’s the natural next step. Once you imagine them watching, you make decisions and put them into action. If, for instance, you’re making an investment decision, ask yourself, “What would Warren Buffett do?” Likewise, ask yourself, “How would I pitch this idea to my personal board of directors? What kinds of factors would they care about? What kinds of factors would they dismiss as irrelevant?”

If you imagine your exemplars watching you, you’d tend to do all the things you know they’d want you to do and avoid the things you know would get in the way.

Practice as Second Nature

It’s important to engage in this thoughtful exercise often. You have to keep doing it until you acquire a new pattern of thinking, feeling, and acting. Keep practicing until the pattern becomes second nature: an element of who you are, rather than just who you want to be.

Sandbox Practice

One strategy for building strength is to practice in a sandbox. As you may have guessed, the sandbox is metaphorical—a situation in which any mistakes you make are relatively inconsequential and easily reversed. A sandbox allows you to make and learn from mistakes while containing their cost. Practicing in a sandbox increases the likelihood that you’ll be successful when the stakes are higher and the outcomes more consequential and less reversible.

One reason why you usually start out managing just one other person or a small team, rather than an entire organization, is that your failures are contained. Starting with a small-scale management role is one example of a sandbox. When you’re running a whole organization, mistakes are costlier and harder to contain than when you’re managing a team.

There’s no substitute for practicing with the real thing, yet sandboxes can limit the downside of mistakes made during practice. At the intelligence agency, we’d always practice and rehearse before an operation in an environment in which it was safe to fail. We treated the practice as if it were the operation itself; we’d do all the things we planned on doing during the operation, and tried to predict and respond to all the things that could conceivably happen. If something didn’t go as planned, we would adapt. And sometimes we’d fail. Failing in that sandbox, though, provided a learning opportunity with few real-world consequences, whereas failing in a real operation could cost people their lives.