(Transcribed by TurboScribe. Go Unlimited to remove this message.) Hello, everybody.
Welcome back to another episode of The Way
the World Works.
You know, we do a lot of, there's
a big spread of topics we do for
this show.
And I love that, right?
Because the name of it is The Way
the World Works, and it's because we're talking
about the way the world works, whether that's
American history, whether that's economics, whether that's what
I'm going to talk about today, which is
about character and founders who exhibited good character.
And so we talk a lot about personal
responsibility and, and, you know, I've talked about
how to make yourself feel more grateful and
how that can impact, you know, your life
and those around you.
And I think sometimes people might wonder, why
in the heck are we talking about that
on a show where we just talked about
the founding fathers last, last week?
And it's because living in a free society,
individualism means personal responsibility.
It means you have to make yourself in
a good state as an individual so that
you are, you are ready to live in
a society without, you know, all these government
restrictions so that you can, you can have
something to, I don't want to say something
to offer to your community because I don't
think necessarily you, you owe things to others.
I'm sounding like Ayn Rand here, but, but
you, you do owe, you do owe others
mutual respect.
You do, you know, we should be creating
value for other people.
And how do we do that?
How do we learn personal responsibility?
I think it starts with building good character.
What does that mean?
We all know what character means when we
talk about storybooks, right?
That's going to be the person who this,
the story is about the people, the players,
that's what they call them in plays.
That's what Shakespeare called them.
But that's not what we're talking about when
we talk about building character.
When we talk about building character, we're talking
about building morals, building, building virtues.
So, and it's not just like, oh, I
should be a nicer person.
Oh, I should do this.
I should do that.
It's about building self-control.
It's about building integrity.
Some might say civil virtue, moral independence.
These are some things that, that come to
mind and we'll go into those in a
minute.
Self-control is probably a self-explanatory, but
the cool thing about this, this episode in
particular is easier to tie back to, again,
the history lessons we talk about because our
country was actually founded by men who very
strongly believed in the importance of building character,
especially if they were going to be leaders
of the first truly free country or, or
mostly free country.
So that's what we're going to talk about
today.
So at its core, you know, good, good
character is kind of the, the essence of
self-government.
You need to have the ability to restrain
your, you know, your own appetite, your impulses,
your passions, and even, you know, your ambition
and to, to make sure that you are
a person people are going to want to
live in a free society.
You don't want somebody to see you and
be like, this is why we need laws.
This person right here is why I think
we need a government, right?
You don't want people to say that.
So as I mentioned, self-control is a
big one.
I kind of already explained that that's, that's
being able to control your, your emotions.
We've talked about that many times, being able
to control your, um, again, your vices, uh,
vices is like a vice would be maybe
eating too much junk food could be a
vice or, you know, for, for adults, when
you think about laws built on vices, it's
like smoking would be a vice, right?
It's something that isn't great, but shouldn't be
regulated by the government, right?
It should be regulated by you.
You should be able to control those vices.
And then you have integrity.
And when I think of integrity, the first
thing that comes to mind is keeping your
word, doing everything you promise to do.
And that's honestly the heart of like contract
law, which was a lot of, um, consent,
uh, you know, rule by consent or living
in a community by consent.
And it all kind of starts with that.
Do what you promise to do.
If you are somebody who says you're going
to do something and doesn't do it, you're
not going to be somebody people want to
live in a free society with.
They're just not.
And you can go to the mountains and
live by yourself, but I will tell you
this, it's probably going to get a little
lonely.
I think you might get a little lonely
after time.
I'd be great for the first little bit,
but after a while it's like home alone
where it was fun for a day when
he was left home alone.
And then he's like, wait a second, robbers
are after me and I'm kind of lonely.
And then another big one is moral independence.
And that's the courage to do what is
right.
Even if that means standing alone.
One thing that I think makes our founders
and even, you know, the courageous heroes that,
that are mentioned in the title twins book,
that's what makes them so extraordinary is their
ability to say, this is morally wrong.
I'm going to stand up to it.
And that may mean I'm risking my reputation
that may mean I'm going to lose all
my friends or worse.
That may mean that me, that might mean
I'm going to risk my life.
That might mean that I lose my life
for this.
So that, that to me is honestly one
of the most important things, billing, being willing
to stand on principle.
Now my favorite founding father is John Adams
and he was really big on character.
And you know, it's funny.
I don't always agree with John Adams philosophically.
I agree with Thomas Jefferson far more.
The reason that I relate to John Adams
so much, the reason I love him so
much is because he did have a good,
strong moral character.
For example, at a time when the founders
like George Washington, Thomas Jefferson knew that slavery
was incompatible with individual liberty.
They knew it, but they couldn't give it
up.
They were men of their time.
They were, they were men who understood, but
couldn't live out what they knew was right.
John Adams, his wife, they never owned slaves
because they understood that that was incompatible.
So I, I, I look at that as
it's, that's standing on moral character.
That's just, it's, it was an incredible thing
to do at the time.
And I like that we have them as
examples.
John Adams believed that the law should be
kind of a last line of defense because
if people lacked virtue, if they lacked character,
then no piece of paper with the law
was going to save anybody.
It wasn't going to restrain them.
So you had to have people who had
some sort of moral grounding.
Now in this day, a lot of people
associated that with religion because that was, that
was where they got their virtues or got
their morals, but it doesn't have to be,
you know, you can have this belief, you
know, don't hurt people, don't take their stuff
with or without that.
The next founder I want to talk about
is George Washington.
And let's look, when we talk about him
and, and character, let's think about it in
terms of leadership.
Now, there was one thing I'm reading a
biography about him right now that is just
terribly interesting.
But one thing that I was learning about
him is he was not a particularly well
-educated man.
And so for him, building character and, and
seeking knowledge was very important because he felt
he had something to prove.
And that's not a bad thing.
That's, you know, ambition in the best possible
way, because he was taking on positions of
leadership, you know, mostly in the military and
then later the first president of our country.
And so he understood that for him to
be a truly great leader, he needed to
be armed with the, the skills, the education,
the knowledge to do that and the, uh,
the routine, the discipline.
And so he was famous for constantly wanting
to self-improve for constantly implementing these new
areas of self-discipline.
He was also famously known for trying to
instill those, uh, you know, strict disciplinary rules
to other people, but he was also a
general.
So that makes sense.
When you think of a military, you think,
Oh, they kind of have to be disciplined.
That's their whole thing.
So he was very big on that.
Sometimes I think people didn't love it so
much because he was very strict.
He ran his house very strictly, but it
was because, because of that, because he wanted
to improve himself.
He knew discipline was a way to do
that, a way to show you had this
strong character.
And so George Washington is going to become
an amazing leader because of this.
And also he had this, this desire for
individual liberty above all.
And so he did eventually become president, but
he didn't want to be, he didn't want
to be, he didn't want to run for
office.
He didn't do that, but the people asked
him to.
And so he did what he thought his
country needed.
I'm careful when I talk about that because
I don't like that's portrayed sometime as, Oh,
the common good.
And I don't ever like saying the common
good.
Cause usually when you hear that it's lumped
in with communism and socialism and we know
that that's not great.
But in this incident, he wanted to be
a good leader for his brand new country.
And so he stepped forward because that's what
he thought the people needed and wanted.
But here's the difference between common good and
communism and this kind of common good.
He did it voluntarily.
And that's the, that's the key there.
Ben Franklin was also really big on, on
this enlightenment idea of building strong character.
And he actually famously had these 13 virtues
and that included temperance, that included silence, that
included frugality.
And it's funny when I hear the silence
part because Ben Franklin was notoriously kind of
loud and boisterous and kind of a, kind
of a, um, he was the life of
the party.
We'll say that.
So I'm like silence.
Well, you were not silent all the time,
but okay.
And these are good things to live by,
I guess.
And this thing I love, I will, I
have mixed feelings about it, but I think
I love it.
He used to track his daily failings in
a journal.
Like this is what I failed at today.
Now we've talked about failure being great.
Many, many episodes, especially if you're an entrepreneur.
Do I think we need to hone in
on failure constantly and be like, Oh, I'm
so bad.
I'm terrible at this.
Blah, blah, blah.
No.
But I love that he did it daily
to just be like, okay, this is where
I fell short today.
I'm going to try to make that better.
And I think that is so great.
So he did that because he believed in
this discipline and he didn't, he didn't believe
that the goal was being this like morally
perfect, better than everyone, you know, kind of
mentality.
But he just thought, I'm going to try
better.
I'm going to try better tomorrow and the
next day and the next day to be
the best possible version of myself that I
can be that day.
And so Ben Franklin was real big on
that.
Thomas Jefferson believed that character was built through
education and moral reasoning, which is if you've
ever read anything about Thomas Jefferson, that is
so just spot on for him.
You know, Thomas Jefferson and a lot of
the other founders believed in this concept of
like a natural aristocracy and an intellectual aristocracy.
And what I mean by that is that
people who were who studied and who gained
a sense of moral reasoning were going to
rise to a position where they were able
to be leaders or they were able to
be, you know, even just philosophical leaders, they
were able to put forth these writings that
would help shape minds and hearts as well.
And so that's what Thomas Jefferson did.
And when I say education, I do not
mean public schools.
Those didn't really even exist at the time.
There were some colonies of Massachusetts earlier on
actually had compulsory schooling, but that's not what
he means.
He means education in the sense that we
here at Tuttleton's believe in gaining knowledge, gaining
practical knowledge, moral reasoning, things like that.
And so Thomas Jefferson was just, you know,
a bookworm.
He was constantly reading.
He studied Locke.
He studied Blackstone.
And he was trying to build his character
through making sure that he understood these these
kind of dense concepts at a time and
that he could instill those to others.
But all of these men, if you look
at everything, it's all the sense of discipline.
It's all the sense of I'm actually going
to spend time to do something that I
think is going to make me a better
person.
And by being a better person, however that
may be, they all had a little bit
of different areas.
By doing that, I'm going to be able
to create value for other people, which is,
again, the staples of a free community.
And so I love that.
You know, we've talked about before Jordan Peterson,
who talked about that you need to clean
your own room before you can take on
bigger projects or even think you can give
input on how to change the world.
And that's so true.
And we have, you know, Tuttle Twins, 12
rules boot camp based off Jordan Peterson's 12
rules for life book, which is really good.
I think this is so good if we're
talking about character building and and becoming better
people.
So maybe as a family, maybe sit together
at dinner.
Maybe I don't know if you guys do
like a family night, whatever it is you
do, maybe think of ways that you can
help build character.
And you're not saying you all have to
point out each other's moral failings, daily failings
like Benjamin Franklin did.
But talk about how to keep yourselves accountable,
how to really put that discipline forth.
Also remembering that the best form of discipline
is going to be self-discipline.
Because if you're constantly doing something just because
you don't want to be punished or looked
down on by other people, that works.
Incentives work.
But there is something really truly magical and
very important that happens when you find that
that power of self-discipline within yourself and
you're able to make those changes.
So character matters.
Character is important to the founding.
It's important to everything you will do in
your life.
And people do not forget people who have
a strong character.
They remember that.
So keep this lesson with you and discuss
it as a family.
As always, don't forget to like and subscribe
to the podcast.
And until next time, I will talk to
you later.