Virtue
The Ultimate Offense
Writing Life on Offense: Do HARD Things with my best friend, Jay Tiegs, has changed my life and created a new framework for intentional living. But as I kept researching and having conversations with friends about the book, I ran into a major problem:
The book says little about character. The HARD framework relies on the reader to define their unique purpose and values. Yet vague “values” only go so far, and finding one’s purpose is a continual struggle for many of us. We told readers, “Define your values and your purpose,” then patted them on the back: “Cool, go figure that out while raising kids and answering 87 emails a day.”
I stumbled upon a possible solution: virtue. Virtues are the specific habits that make your power useful and your life coherent under pressure. Leveraging these is what allows people to flourish.
Virtue is the next phase of Life on Offense. It will be the new focus of this newsletter and likely another book.
Why another book?
Jay and I wrote Life on Offense to solve a simple problem: most people live on defense. The book gives you a recipe to get clear on what you want, set a vision, pick a strategy, build lines of effort, and run tactics that move you down the field.
The goal of our book is to get you into the arena and playing offense. But I noticed something as I kept talking about the HARD framework:
You can have your health dialed (gym, macros, sleep) and still medicate stress with a bottle or your phone every night.
You might read every leadership and parenting book and still dodge the hard conversations that would save your marriage.
Your calendar screams “high performer,” but your browser history whispers “escapist.”
Grit and drive are not enough. Even the best strategy fails if the person running it is off by a few degrees. That gap is character. More specifically, it is virtue.
What is virtue?
The Greek philosophers (Socrates, Plato, Aristotle, the Stoics) wrote about virtue ad nauseam. Their word for virtue was arete, which means excellence. Examples of how they understood the word were along the lines of:
A knife is virtuous if it cuts well.
A person is virtuous when they function at peak capacity as a rational, social, creative being.
Baruch Spinoza sharpened the meaning even more. He wrote, “By virtue and power, I mean the same thing.” Virtue is power, directed in the correct way.
The philosopher Alasdair MacIntyre ties virtue to practices and the story of a life. Virtues are the qualities that:
Sustain the “goods” inside a practice (like medicine, soldiering, parenting, entrepreneurship)
Shape your character across time
Bind your life into a coherent narrative with standards of excellence
From a very different angle, Ayn Rand treated virtues as chosen principles that make life possible: independence, integrity, productivity, rationality. Her point is agency. You don’t have to agree with her on everything to admit she’s right about this: no one can do your living for you.
Put that together and you get a picture:
Power without virtue becomes abuse.
Tradition and practice without agency become conformity.
Agency without wisdom becomes selfish wreckage.
Virtue unifies power, practice, and agency into offense that lands with purpose.
Virtue beats values
Values are what you say you care about. Virtues are the habits that make those values real under pressure.
Values can be printed on a wall. Virtues show up in your calendar.
Values can drift with mood. Virtues are trained responses.
Values can conflict. Virtues help you choose which value gets priority, right now, for the right reason.
If you have to pick one to build first, build virtue. It will refine your values and expose the ones you only pretend to hold.
The Golden Mean
In the Socratic and Aristotelian tradition, virtue is the Golden Mean between two vices, one of deficiency and one of excess. It is not the mushy middle. It is the right balance; the precise aim:
Courage sits between cowardice and recklessness.
Generosity sits between stinginess and wastefulness.
Ambition sits between sloth and greed.
Most of us do not fail in one direction forever. Instead, we overcorrect. We go from “I never speak up” to “I bulldoze every room.” We swing from “I give nothing” to “I give everything and burn out.”
That is the core of this new project and the direction of this newsletter: offense with aim. Constant calibration to the mean for this moment, with this mission, for these people.
Virtues on Offense
Here is the plan:
New articles will focus on one virtue.
Every virtue is mapped as a Golden Mean between two vices: deficiency and excess.
Each article gives you:
A clear definition
A quick “self-diagnosis” to locate yourself on the spectrum
A story to relate
One actionable tactic
Behind the scenes, I am tracking about 15 categories of virtue: Character and Integrity, Personal Development, Leadership, Warrior Ethos, Relationships, Emotional Intelligence, Wisdom, Work, Prosperity, Civic Duty, Teamwork, Communication, Spirituality, Health, and Problem Solving.
That sounds like a lot. You will not get hit with all of it at once. Think of it as a playbook you pull from when it’s time to execute, not a syllabus for moral graduate school.
On this Substack, you will get the distilled version of the book I’m writing: one virtue at a time, a clear Golden Mean map, a concrete story, and a tactic to implement. My promise is to avoid fluff and the generic self-help blog tone.
How you can help shape this
I want this project to solve problems for you. If you are willing, hit reply or comment with:
1. The virtue you struggle with most right now
2. A situation where you felt “off” and are not sure if it was a lack of virtue, the wrong value, or just bad luck
I read every message. Your stories will influence which virtues I prioritize, which examples I use, and which tactics I sharpen first.
If you want to live on offense, you need more than hustle. You need a targeting system. That is what virtue is for; let’s build it.
James