The Road to Character
David Brooks · 2015
The Road to Character (2015) is a book by David Brooks on personal growth & mindset. David Brooks contrasts the résumé virtues we chase with the eulogy virtues we admire, and uses the lives of figures like Frances Perkins, Eisenhower, Dorothy Day and Augustine to map how deep character is actually built.
In a culture that has forgotten how to build inner life, Brooks resurrects the older, harder tradition that treats character as something you construct through struggle, not something you are born with.
Two of the ideas you’ll keep
The Clif summary of The Road to Character pulls out 7 insights. Here are the first two.
- Brooks splits human nature into **Adam I** and **Adam II** (borrowed from Rabbi Joseph Soloveitchik's *The Lonely Man of Faith*): Adam I is the ambitious, career-building, résumé self who asks *how*, while Adam II is the inner, moral self who asks *why*. Most of us feed Adam I and starve Adam II.
- There are two competing sets of values: the **résumé virtues** you list for the job market and the **eulogy virtues** people actually talk about at your funeral, kindness, honesty, courage. We say the eulogy virtues matter more, then organize our whole lives around the résumé ones.
The other 5 — and the full 11-minute summary — are in the app.
What’s inside: 9 chapters
The whole summary runs about 11 minutes, read or listened to.
- Adam I and Adam II
- The Shift to the Big Me
- Frances Perkins and the Summoned Self
- Eisenhower and Self-Conquest
- Dorothy Day and the Dignity of Struggle
- Marshall, Randolph, and the Power of Restraint
- George Eliot, Augustine, and Ordered Love
- Johnson, Montaigne, and Self-Examination
- The Humility Code
Finish The Road to Character tonight.
Read or listen to the full summary in about 11 minutes, then keep the ideas with a minute of review a day. Start with the 2-minute quiz — no card required.
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