How to Be Perfect

if we don’t practice mildness, learn how to fine-tune it, and regularly check in with ourselves about whether what we are doing is appropriately mild, we might someday end up drooling while other kids get bullied or punching our friends in the face.

an excess of dutifulness can negatively impact the people around me: I am constantly killing everyone’s buzz.

we have to practice generosity, temperance, courageousness, and all the other virtues, just like annoying Rob practiced his annoying bagpipes. Aristotle’s plan requires constant study, maintenance, and vigilance. We may have been born with those starter kits, but if we don’t develop them through habituation—if we just kick back and rely on them as

If we really work at finding the means of our virtues—learning their ins and outs, their vicissitudes and pitfalls, their pros and cons—we become flexible, inquisitive, adaptable, and better people.

flourishing, to me, is a sort of “runner’s high” for the totality of our existence—it’s a sense of completeness that flows through us when we are nailing every aspect of being human. So in Aristotle’s view, the very purpose of living is to flourish—just like the purpose of a flute is to produce beautiful music, and the purpose of a knife is to cut

We can all probably identify some starter kit we had as kids. From a very early age I was an extreme rule follower—or maybe let’s say I was “inclined toward the virtue of dutifulness,” so I don’t sound like such a suck-up.

flourishing, you see, doesn’t just require us to identify and then acquire all of these virtues—it requires that we have every one in the exact right amount.

Cruelty, she says, is often way out of proportion to the behavior that prompted it.

The best thing about Aristotle’s “constant learning, constant trying, constant searching” is what results from it: a mature yet still pliable person, brimming with experiences both old and new, who doesn’t rely solely on familiar routines or dated information about how the world works.