David Brooks: Should you live for your résumé ... or your eulogy?

So I've been thinking about the difference between

the résumé virtues and the eulogy virtues.

The résumé virtues are the ones you put on your résumé,

which are the skills you bring to the marketplace.

The eulogy virtues are the ones

that get mentioned in the eulogy,

which are deeper: who are you, in your depth,

what is the nature of your relationships,

are you bold, loving, dependable, consistency?

And most of us, including me, would say

that the eulogy virtues are the more important of the virtues.

But at least in my case, are they the ones that

I think about the most? And the answer is no.

So I've been thinking about that problem,

and a thinker who has helped me think about it

is a guy named Joseph Soloveitchik, who was a rabbi

who wrote a book called "The Lonely Man Of Faith" in 1965.

Soloveitchik said there are two sides of our natures,

which he called Adam I and Adam II.

Adam I is the worldly, ambitious,

external side of our nature.

He wants to build, create, create companies,

create innovation.

Adam II is the humble side of our nature.

Adam II wants not only to do good but to be good,

to live in a way internally

that honors God, creation and our possibilities.

Adam I wants to conquer the world.

Adam II wants to hear a calling and obey the world.

Adam I savors accomplishment.

Adam II savors inner consistency and strength.

Adam I asks how things work.

Adam II asks why we're here.

Adam I's motto is "success."

Adam II's motto is "love, redemption and return."

And Soloveitchik argued that these two sides

of our nature are at war with each other.

We live in perpetual self-confrontation

between the external success and the internal value.

And the tricky thing, I'd say, about these

two sides of our nature is they work

by different logics.

The external logic is an economic logic:

input leads to output, risk leads to reward.

The internal side of our nature

is a moral logic and often an inverse logic.

You have to give to receive.

You have to surrender to something outside yourself

to gain strength within yourself.

You have to conquer the desire to get what you want.

In order to fulfill yourself, you have to forget yourself.

In order to find yourself, you have to lose yourself.

We happen to live in a society that favors Adam I,

and often neglects Adam II.

And the problem is, that turns you into a shrewd animal

who treats life as a game,

and you become a cold, calculating creature

who slips into a sort of mediocrity

where you realize there's a difference

between your desired self and your actual self.

You're not earning the sort of eulogy you want,

you hope someone will give to you.

You don't have the depth of conviction.

You don't have an emotional sonorousness.

You don't have commitment to tasks

that would take more than a lifetime to commit.

I was reminded of a common response through history

of how you build a solid Adam II,

how you build a depth of character.

Through history, people have gone back

into their own pasts,

sometimes to a precious time in their life,

to their childhood,

and often, the mind gravitates in the past

to a moment of shame,

some sin committed, some act of selfishness,

an act of omission, of shallowness,

the sin of anger, the sin of self-pity,

trying to be a people-pleaser, a lack of courage.

Adam I is built by building on your strengths.

Adam II is built by fighting your weaknesses.

You go into yourself, you find the sin

which you've committed over and again through your life,

your signature sin

out of which the others emerge,

and you fight that sin and you wrestle with that sin,

and out of that wrestling, that suffering,

then a depth of character is constructed.

And we're often not taught to recognize

the sin in ourselves,

in that we're not taught in this culture

how to wrestle with it,

how to confront it, and how to combat it.

We live in a culture with an Adam I mentality

where we're inarticulate about Adam II.

Finally, Reinhold Niebuhr

summed up the confrontation, the fully lived

Adam I and Adam II life, this way:

"Nothing that is worth doing can be achieved in our lifetime;

therefore we must be saved by hope.

Nothing which is true or beautiful or good makes

complete sense in any immediate context of history;

therefore we must be saved by faith.

Nothing we do, however virtuous, can be accomplished alone;

therefore we must be saved by love.

No virtuous act is quite as virtuous

from the standpoint of our friend or foe as from our own standpoint.

Therefore we must be saved by that final form of love,

which is forgiveness.”

Thanks.

(Applause)