Lex Academic®

Our Founding Director Constantine Sandis in conversation with leading public philosopher and pioneering business thinker Tom Morris.

Lex Academic

Thank you so much for taking the time to talk with me, Tom. Given that you are a philosopher who helps businesses and Lex is a business that helps philosophers, I thought it would be fun to get together and talk about the intertwining of the two, perhaps with a special focus on the various ways in which one can have a successful life and career as a philosopher.

Readers will know you from your impressive range of popular books, from 1997’s If Aristotle Ran General Motors all the way to this year’s Stoicism for Dummies. We’ll get a chance to talk about some of their insights in a moment, but I wanted to begin a little further back in your life as a philosopher. When and how did you first encounter philosophy?

Tom Morris

It’s great to be with you for Lex, Constantine. Thanks for all the great work you do. As to the question, I think I was born curious, always asking questions, wondering about things. I don’t think I was introduced to the concept of philosophy as an ancient and contemporary human endeavour until I got to college. I was the first person in my family ever to go to college and my mother had just told me there was no money for a university education, when a letter came from my high school that I’d been nominated for a Morehead Scholarship, now the Morehead-Cain, to the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, which would pay for everything imaginable, including a spending money stipend. Amazing. Three or four interviews later, I was on my way. I took my first philosophy course Freshman Year, and the famous professor would come into the room in his tennis shirt and rumpled khakis and say something like: “The world was created five minutes ago. Prove me wrong.” And the fireworks would begin. Then it might be: “While you slept last night everything that was blue turned green and everything green turned blue, but your neurons changed so that everything looks the same. Prove me wrong.” Another day he might declare that a painting is great if and only if it contains a blue dot. And it was our job, we knew by then, to try with courageous futility to prove him wrong. It was like the lobs and slams of a tennis game, and as a long-time tennis player, I was hooked. I later took a course with a Hungarian philosopher of science who was also an Orthodox Rabbi, focusing on the philosophy of science and religion, and got hooked in new ways. He and I became racket ball partners. So having a ball was a part of it all, in the classroom and the gym. I took five or six courses with the Rabbi, and with an older professor in the religious studies department who was so mesmerizing as a lecturer I’d forget to take notes. That sent me to Yale to do philosophy of religion, eventually getting the PhD degree in their two departments of philosophy and religious studies. I was fascinated by the relation of theories to evidence, and the nature of rational argument, fine-tuned, and made invulnerable to loopholes and counterexamples.

Lex Academic

What a wild ride! You eventually became a philosophy professor at Notre Dame University, a period during which you wrote numerous technical treatises such as Understanding Identity Statements (1984), The Logic of God Incarnate (1986), Anselmian Explorations (1987), and Divine and Human Action: Essays in the Metaphysics of Theism (1988). You even turned your Introduction to Philosophy class at Notre Dame into the well-known and ubiquitous book Philosophy for Dummies (1999) often seen at college campuses before final exams. I believe you had even written a fairly technical book as an undergraduate that was a surprise semi-bestseller, entitled Francis Schaeffer’s Apologetics: A Critique (1975). Was there something specific that led you to swap academia for the adventure of a public philosopher who writes and speaks on business and life?

Tom Morris

In the mid to late 80s, an executive at the local South Bend Chamber of Commerce came to my house one day and invited me to give a public talk to the young businesspeople in the community deemed to be future leaders in their fields. She said: “When I was a university student, we used to sit up late at night in the dorm and talk about important things, like love and destiny, right and wrong, happiness and success, and the meaning of it all. Now, when I get together with friends, all we talk about is what’s on sale at the mall, how the kids are doing, and who Notre Dame is going to play next weekend. We never talk about the big issues anymore. Would you come and give a session and provide us with a great excuse to start talking about the big questions again?” Wow. That was amazing. How could I say no? They asked me to speak on ethics and, rather than saying that’s not my area, you need to call someone else, I said: “Sure, I’ll come up with something.” When I gave my little talk on the ethics of decision-making, nearly everyone in the room invited me to their Rotary Club, or their Kiwanis Club, or their real estate company, bank, or church to give the same talk. Suddenly, I had a parallel career, though this one was all pro-bono, all for free, just to do some good in the world, maybe building bridges between the university and the broader culture. Then a car dealer asked me to speak to his Midwest Oldsmobile Dealers’ Association. He said: “We always have motivational speakers that say the same thing, year after year – Set Goals, Aim High, Believe in Yourself! There’s got to be something deeper. Did the great philosophers say anything about success?” I said: “Well, that’s not the sort of thing I studied at UNC or Yale, but if you want, I’ll look into it.” I quickly discovered what was then the forgotten side of philosophy, the practical side, the wisdom traditions where philosophy wasn’t just a way of thinking but a way of life. I brought my analytic training to the task and began to analyse things nobody was teaching or studying in the 1980s and came up with seven universal conditions for success in any challenging endeavour, gave my talk, and follow-up invitations began to come in by the truckload and, on this topic, people offered something I’d never heard of: speaking fees. I saw people getting actually excited about ancient wisdom and I heard from people weeks and months later how the ideas had changed their work and their lives. And again, I was hooked in a new way. Before I realized what was happening, I was in Europe speaking to 250 corporation presidents, and then shortly afterward I was standing in front of the top 750 executives at Merrill Lynch, giving my rousing wisdom talk to a standing ovation that seemed like it would never end. As a result, that one company had me speak over 43 times in three years, each time offering me my annual starting salary at Notre Dame. Imagine my surprise. As any young philosopher knows, especially one like me with a family, any extra income is wonderful. But my motivation for continuing on was just seeing the difference the ideas of the great thinkers could make, translated into the concerns of the present day. This went on for several years before I began to feel a sense of calling to do it full-time. My thought was that there are lots of great philosophers in classrooms around America and the world, but very few seem to stray out beyond the borders of their campuses and bring ideas to people where they live and work. Ralph Waldo Emerson had been a public philosopher, and it worked out well for him. I thought I’d give it a try. I had no one to ask how it could be done, so I just had to make my own way.

Lex Academic

I think you were one of the philosophical pioneers of the twentieth century, in this respect. Now there are many more philosophers working outside of academia, whether in residence at museums or consulting for AI firms. Of course, historically, before the nineteenth century most philosophers did not earn their living from university employment. Aside from those with inherited wealth (like Descartes), Spinoza was a lens grinder; Hume was a diplomat and historian; Rousseau worked as an engraver, music teacher, secretary, and lackey. The difference with many of today’s philosophers working outside of the academy – like yourself – is that the “day job” involves philosophy. Indeed, arguably much more philosophy than those in academic positions with increasingly administrative roles find time for. Having left my own academic job one year ago to focus on Lex full-time, I’m aware of both what is lost and what is gained when one makes such a radical change. Did you find yourself in any way transformed by the decision or experiences that followed, or are you the same Tom but simply applying your thoughts to a different audience?

Tom Morris

I’ve always been passionate about ideas and had tended to go off on my own to explore them in new ways. I was very fortunate to have been able to pioneer some new subject areas in my academic work, so I was accustomed to working on things alone, before anyone else got excited about them, rather than in a collaborative group setting, and that made the transition easier. But in my original academic, technical specialty we had some of the best senior people and grad students in the world, so it was a big deal to leave. And yet, I was so absorbed in the new work and kept so busy traveling that I had no time to miss what I’d left. I loved my students and loved teaching. I always tried to do wild, innovating things for the big classes, where I often had one eighth of the student body in a year. Those big classes were memorialized in the Viking Press book Domers, by journalist Kevin Coyne, and if you ever come across it and read about any of my lecture sessions in that book, you can see how much I loved the classroom experience. One of my former students told me she’d gone home for break after I’d made the decision to leave academia and told her father: “Professor Morris is leaving the life of the classroom!” She said her dad responded: “No, his new classroom is just going to be America.” I loved that reaction. Notre Dame was very gracious about my decision and even contributed to starting up the Morris Institute for Human Values as a base for my work as well as bringing together other philosophers who wanted to reach out beyond the walls of their classrooms. I could now follow my nose and my heart into any research I thought would be useful, without any of the constraints of what was academically acceptable, or “hot” in the profession. I could do my own thing, play my own song, even more than ever before.

Lex Academic

That’s really impressive behaviour from Notre Dame! I think you say somewhere that you don’t so much shed new light on old problems as shed old light on new problems. That is to say, you show how ideas dating back to ancient philosophers such as Laozi and Plato can help to solve problems that they would not have themselves encountered as we do, for example relating to the rise of technology within the workplace. Could you say a little bit more about this, perhaps illustrating with an example?

Tom Morris

Sure. One problem in society now, in business, and in technology, is the phenomenon of smart and talented people doing stupid things, aiming at and attaining forms of success that end up bringing great trouble to the world. I read Mary Shelley’s novel Frankenstein many years ago, and more recently her next book, one about a pandemic in the twenty-first century that kills everyone, called The Last Man. In that prescient story, she hits on some of the same themes as in her Frankenstein book. Victor Frankenstein was a very smart and talented young man, who was imbued with a grandiose desire to be famous forever. He set a clear goal, did almost everything our success advisors tell us to do, and attained his goal, thereby launching into the world a monster he couldn’t control. That’s a great metaphor for not only modern politics and the great recession of a decade ago, but for nanotechnology, biological engineering, and especially the development of Artificial Intelligence in our day. I’ve used Shelley’s ideas to go back to Gilgamesh, the Iliad and Odyssey, the plays of Sophocles, Plato, Aristotle, Xenophon, the Aeneid, Beowulf, Don Quixote, Moby Dick, and through the novels of the early twentieth century to find just the right old ideas we need to solve the most modern problems we now face, and I’ve just written them all up into a new book that we’re showing around to publishers right now. Most modern wisdom literature has been in the form of guidance, but some classic wisdom writing is about guardrails for our ambitions and actions. I love to search the past for diagnoses of human nature that are applicable right now and desperately needed.

Lex Academic

One thing I really liked in If Aristotle Ran General Motors was the focus on the beauty in providing creative solutions for clients that help them to solve their problems. People don’t typically associate business with beauty. Could you explain the connection for the uninitiated?

Tom Morris

I’m glad you asked about it. My idea in that book was that from the moment we wake up in the morning until the second we fall asleep at night we all experience the world through four dimensions. There is an intellectual dimension of our experience that needs Truth, an aesthetic dimension that looks for Beauty, a moral dimension hankering after Goodness, and a spiritual dimension that needs for us to find, create, and experience healthy forms of Unity. So the book has four parts: Truth, Beauty, Goodness, and Unity. It may be my best-known book among CEOs and other top corporate leaders. And you’re right: they got the truth, goodness, and unity stuff right away; but the beauty element was all new to the thinking of many. And yet, it’s hard for people to feel great about their work and do their best if they’re not experiencing some form of beauty in it. And it’s not just the beauty we perceive that can matter—like a clean and pleasant workplace, with soothing colours and perhaps green plants around—but also what I like to call performance beauty: the beauty felt by a basketball player making a beautiful move to the basket or as felt by a ballet dancer on stage, as distinct from what we feel in the audience. Performance beauty is about people being empowered to create a beautiful new solution to a client’s problem, or a beautiful new process for doing things. There are many forgotten forms of beauty in our time, and I’m trying to expand the hearts and minds of corporate leaders to understand how much aesthetics can mean to business productivity and excellence. I love getting reports from companies that have tried more beauty in the workplace and have seen great results. I even have a young philosophy friend who has just written a new book called Is Your Business Beautiful?

Lex Academic

Oh, wow! I’ll definitely be reading that when it comes out. Perhaps we might even interview them for this blog. I find that there’s a genuine aesthetic reward when the team works together to create a beautiful solution to a challenge and everything comes together. It’s an amazing feeling, yet this crucial aspect of success is ignored in most books about business, which tend to focus on things like revenue streams and profit margins.

At Lex Academic we are focused on helping academics achieve greater success in their publications, research grants, and careers more generally. People often associate success with fame and fortune. But in The Art of Achievement (which was recently revised and reprinted in a silver anniversary edition) you paint a far more sophisticated picture of what success looks like within a virtuous life, be it the life of a an individual, a team, or a company. Do you have any words of advice for aspiring academics?

Tom Morris

Yes! Go read that book ASAP! I’m only half kidding, because it’s been my own immersion in lots of ancient wisdom about proper human success that has guided me powerfully to avoid false trails and concentrate on what matters most, then get it done! Over thirty books later, I’m still using the advice of the great philosophers to blaze some new trails and work on new topics. I used to talk to my Notre Dame students about what I called “3-D Success”, and I’d advise: (1) Discover your talents; (2) Develop those talents; and (3) Deploy them into the world for the good of others as well as yourself. Then I began to speak to my students about the seven universally facilitating conditions for goal attainment I first outlined in the book True Success: A New Philosophy of Excellence (1994) and develop in more detail in The Art of Achievement, whose new edition, extensively re-written for our time, has just come out. Anyone interested can go to my website www.TomVMorris.com and click on BOOKS to see what the new and updated edition looks like, with its wild multicolour modern art cover. I’ve long been convinced that the externals of money, power, status, and fame are never at the heart of success, never at its essence, and are only the sometime side effects of certain forms of success. There’s nothing wrong with money or power, or those other externals, if they’re used as resources for great good, but they can become distractions from what matters most. In my books, like True Success, The Art of Achievement, and in the short novel The Oasis Within (2015), as well as in the book The Stoic Art of Living (2002), written and published long ago, before the current wave of interest in Stoicism, I try to pass on what I’ve learned about proper, virtuous, and powerful achievement in our work.

Lex Academic

This brings us to the heart of the philosophy of excellence and the question of what counts as success in the first place. In True Success you outline seven conditions of success: clarity of conception, confidence, concentration, consistency, character, and a capacity to enjoy the process. And do the seven “Cs” of success stand in any kind of hierarchy or are they all of equal value? And do you have a personal favourite?

Tom Morris

A quick recap: For nearly a quarter of a century, I’ve been reflecting on the ideas of the wisest people who have ever thought about success and excellence in changing times. And I’ve boiled it all down to a framework of seven universal conditions for success. My claim is that, in any challenge, we need:

(1) A clear CONCEPTION of what we want, a vivid vision, a goal clearly imagined.

(2) A strong CONFIDENCE that we can attain that goal.

(3) A focused CONCENTRATION on what it takes to reach our goal.

(4) A stubborn CONSISTENCY in pursuing our vision.

(5) An emotional COMMITMENT to the importance of what we’re doing.

(6) A good CHARACTER to guide us and keep us on a proper course.

(7) A CAPACITY TO ENJOY the process along the way.

Number one should be rooted in healthy self-knowledge, proper situational awareness, and in a sense of meaning and purpose tied to our ancient conception of virtue. When people have offered me additional conditions, like Collaboration or Creativity, they end up being either not universally required for achievement in difficult challenges, or else turn out to be particular applications of the seven universals in specific circumstances. These seven I take to be the most comprehensive universal set of nonredundant conditions for deeply satisfying and, in principle, sustainable success. Of course, we use the word “success” in application to particular goals, or in specific roles, and of course in reference to the broader horizon of a career of life. I explore many of these subtleties in the books. I do think of the conditions as standing in a bit of a logical sequence. The confidence and concentration conditions, as well as the consistency and commitment concerns, can’t even kick in until there is a clear conception of a goal that’s been adopted. The character condition reminds us not to cut corners with the others, to take the high road at all times, and the capacity to enjoy guidance reminds us crucially that the best people tend to love what they’re doing, and not just gut it out, suffering for the IPO or whatever they’re chasing.

This framework can be used in three ways: (1) as a test for a potential goal. Can I be clear on this? Can I put my imagination to work on it and be confident in pursuing it? Can I focus my concentration on it and work toward it consistently, given my other commitments? And so on. If the answers aren’t yes, then you need a different goal. Once you’ve set a goal, then (2) these become a toolkit for attaining the goal, to be reviewed and renewed on a regular basis. Then, (3) if something isn’t going well, they become a diagnostic checklist for what’s going wrong. It’s amazing how effective the framework can be in all three ways.

Lex Academic

That’s incredibly helpful advice for all walks of life. I’d like to ask you about a “C” that is conspicuous by its absence: competitiveness. In the world of business economics, one reads and hears a lot about “competitive” prices, or outsmarting the competition, or having “market aggression”. Am I right to think that you think of all this more as a vice than a virtue? And is there such a thing as virtuous competitiveness, or is it an oxymoron?

Tom Morris

I address this in the book If Aristotle Ran General Motors, at the outset where I examine three models of excellence that I call The Competitive Model of the West, The Comparative Growth Model of the East, and the Collaborative Model of the Midwest (as a joke, since it was developed in South Bend, Indiana). The problem about emphasizing competition and beating your competitors is that if you are in a soft market with poor competition, you can easily be the best without being your best and that’s always a dangerous position to be in. Second, when you’re vying to stand out in a crowded marketplace, focusing on competitiveness itself can be a major distraction. “What are THEY doing now?” can take your eye off the ball of what you ought to be doing. There’s even some business advice that says: “Don’t try to be the best, try to be the only.” Find a niche where you’re unique and you won’t be looking over your shoulder all the time. That’s been my approach.

Lex Academic

One problem I have with at least a certain kind of competitiveness is that it can be a race to the bottom. In times of inflation, people often have no choice but to shop at the cheapest stores. But these are often places that monopolize economies and kill of local family businesses. Moreover, they often use cheap or even slave labour to produce poor quality goods. Regardless of whether you are a buyer or a seller, this kind of competitiveness devalues everything. By paying a little more for our goods and services, we actually help to create better jobs and sustain smaller economies. In return, we receive a much better product or service. So everybody wins: the customer, the business, and its employees. Would you agree?

Tom Morris

I agree wholeheartedly. When business is done in that mode, the world ends up being a worse place in so many different ways. There’s environmental degradation, human degradation, quality and community degradation. We become worse people in working this way. Now, it’s not a bad thing to make goods and services more affordable. But it’s a bad thing to do that at the expense of human misery elsewhere. Does the CEO really have to make $20 million a year? And the other top C-Suite players coming in close behind? Really? I think of business not as a money machine but as an engine for human good. That changes a lot. Profit is still important, but it won’t justify anything and everything.

Lex Academic

I couldn’t agree more. There is also an increasing competitiveness within academic philosophy and the humanities more generally. More and more people competing for ever-shrinking amounts of research funding, reduced university positions, and publication acceptance in journals with incredibly high rejection percentages. Academic philosophy has become incredibly competitive. But while, like you, I still write books, one thing I really like about being on the other side of academia is that Lex are in the business of helping academics and independent researchers to publish better, have a greater outreach and income, and make wiser career choices more generally. So not only am I no longer competing with anyone, I’m now actively rooting for everyone. It’s a wonderful feeling! But the people we help are ultimately still competing for the same pots of gold. How does one achieve excellence without lapsing into a kind of toxic competitivism?

Tom Morris

I’m always thinking of the pie not as being cut into smaller and smaller pieces but instead I’m thinking of baking a bigger pie. One of the reasons I’m out in the broader culture is to convince people that important, exciting, and useful things can be done in philosophy and in the humanities more broadly and that we’re worth their investments. I want to create more support for our endeavours and want more of us out there doing the same. That’s how we avoid the problems.

Lex Academic

I’m all here for the super-sized pie! Unfortunately, the powers that be seem to want to shrink the arts and humanities rather than grow them. The inevitably high levels of rejection can sometimes give rise to a sense of failure and depression. One reads a lot these days about “failing better”, which I see as a kind of delayed understanding of Bob Dylan’s line “there’s no success like failure”. One thing we advise our clients at Lex is that problems are not necessarily bad things to be eliminated. When we hit an obstacle as researchers (e.g., we discover that our “original new idea” had in fact already been thought by someone else twenty years ago, or we suddenly spot a gaping hole in our argument that had somehow eluded us until now), it is tempting to either abandon our work or simply ignore the problem or patch it up in some quick way so that we can move on with whatever it was we were doing. But if, instead, we stop and change gears by putting the problem into the work, this can bring clarity and lead to a more radical breakthrough and a re-imagining of our wider work that is much more fruitful and rewarding. You discuss more tumultuous versions of change at a higher level in Plato’s Lemonade Stand: Stirring Change into Something Great (2019).

This all seems to tap into several the conditions that you outline in your framework for success. I’ve already mentioned clarity. But such constraint also affords continuous learning and it takes concentration, creativity, and competence to make it through. All of which can only emerge if one has the courage to not give in to the immediate fear and panic that may hit you. Am I getting this right?

Tom Morris

Yes. I’ve recently come into a deeper understanding of the role of partnership in great work. But wise people have understood this for a long time. The Iliad is about the power of partnership. The Odyssey is about the power of purpose. When you read Aristotle’s later book the Politics, you can extract a general condition for the highest human achievements, in the simple formula: People in Partnership for a shared Purpose. I’ve recently come to extend this to our problems. We need to avoid running from our problems but partner up with them to see what they have to tell us. Then we can be transformative, as I suggest in detail in Plato’s Lemonade Stand. When life hands us lemons, we’re told to make lemonade, but nobody says how. Great philosophers of the past have offered great advice on how to do this. My first book was rejected 36 times. The Lemonade Stand book was turned down 44 times. I used the challenges as opportunities to make it better.

Lex Academic

This brings us to resilience, which some people associate with Stoicism. Could you elaborate on the relation between the two?

Tom Morris

My book The Stoic Art of Living is subtitled “Inner Resilience and Outer Results.” The Stoic philosophers of Greece and Rome believed that what happens to us is not nearly as important as what happens in us. And resilience at its best isn’t just about bouncing back to where you were before an adverse event. It can be about bouncing forth in a new arc or direction to attain what you need. The Stoics saw that anything can be used by us with the right mindset. It’s a very liberating philosophy from which I draw liberally. When I was recently asked to write Stoicism for Dummies, I teamed up with another philosopher I really like and together we wrote what many are now saying is the best overall book on the Stoics and their powerful philosophy. It’s just been published and I’m glad I’ve had the chance to help bring their best ideas into modern life.

Lex Academic

There’s been a bit of a backlash against appeals to resilience recently. In particular, some people object that, far from being a virtuous state of mind, resilience has become a neoliberal ideology used by capitalists to justify hardship and long working hours of employees. One common response to this has been “quiet quitting” (viz., doing the minimum requirements of one’s job). But another has been a more critical form of resilience, one that perceives the causes of instability and responds with care, creativity, and community. I was wondering whether you thought this was a version of Stoicism that we can embrace.

Tom Morris

Yes. Almost anything that can be used well can be used badly. I’ve long talked about what I call The Double Power Principle: nearly anything with power for good has equal and opposite power for ill; it’s up to us how we use it. We should resist the use of any recommendation meant to disempower or enslave people. We should take resilience as a quality we can use for our own personal good and impact in the world.

Lex Academic

I’d like to end with a question that all researchers and philosophers ask one another: what are you working on now?

Tom Morris

I’m working on the most radical book ever written on how to navigate uncertainty. Stay tuned!

Lex Academic

I can’t imagine a better time for such a book! Having worked on this topic a little myself (co-authoring with Nassim Taleb), I can’t wait to read it. Thank you once again for taking the time to talk with me Tom.

Tom Morris

It’s been a great pleasure, and real fun. It’s an honour to have the opportunity to speak with you and your great community.

Tom Morris is one of the world’s top public philosophers and pioneering business thinkers. He was a Professor of Philosophy at the University of Notre Dame and is the author of over thirty ground-breaking books and a legendary speaker whose electrifying talks re-engage people around their deepest values and re-ignite their passion for work and life. He also offers consulting and advising services to a few executive clients. His newest book is Stoicism for Dummies, co-authored with Greg Bassham.