Dr. Tom V Morris is the author of several titles such as If Aristotle Ran General Motors, The Everyday Patriot, and Philosophy for Dummies. His latest work is coauthoring yet another installment for the ever popular ‘For Dummies’ series: Stoicism For Dummies. As the first person in his family to attend college, Tom expresses the he was very fortunate to have that opportunity thanks to a Morehead-Cain Scholarship to the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill where he majored in Religion. He went on to Yale for a double PhD in Philosophy and Religious Studies, taught at Notre Dame for 15 years, and left in 1995 to become a public philosopher, giving over 1,200 talks and publishing over 30 books so far. His work has been featured on most of the major television networks, on NPR, and in most of the major national newspapers and magazines.
How did you first become interested in this area?
I was trained at first in conceptual analysis and logic, along with philosophy of science. My early books were on fairly technical, esoteric topics and were geared to the scholarly world, working with university presses like Oxford, Cornell, and Notre Dame. It was only when business leaders began asking me whether the great philosophers ever dealt with practical questions that I was inspired to go back into the history of philosophy and rediscover the great wisdom from our past on things like success, excellence, change, uncertainty, character, culture, and how a development of virtue can be the best preparation for a good life well lived.
It even gives us an acrostic, the great “I AM.” I am an intellectual, aesthetic, and moral being living a spiritual existence in a physical universe.
What are the most important concepts or ideas that you teach others?
My first popular book was called True Success: A New Philosophy of Excellence. It was published in 1994 and launched on the top morning television show of the day, “Live! With Regis and Kathie Lee.” Suddenly, everyone wanted to hear what the philosophers had to say about deeply satisfying, sustainable success in life and work. For more than thirty years, I've been reflecting on the ideas of the wisest people who have ever thought about healthy success changing times. And I've boiled it all down to a framework of 7 universal conditions for success. I call them “The 7 Cs of Success.” My claim is that, in any opportunity or 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.
Then, in the next book, If Aristotle Ran General Motors: The New Soul of Business, I suggested that we can’t be our best or do our best together in any context unless we respect and nurture the four dimensions of human experience and their respective targets:
The Intellectual Dimension that aims at Truth
The Aesthetic Dimension that aims at Beauty
The Moral Dimension that aims at Goodness
The Spiritual Dimension that aims at Unity
When I understand who I am and what I need, along with all other people, I can live and move better through the world.
My claim was that from the moment we wake up in the morning till the second we fall asleep, we experience the world in these four ways and need truth, beauty, goodness, and unity to be and do our best. It even gives us an acrostic, the great “I AM.” I am an intellectual, aesthetic, and moral being living a spiritual existence in a physical universe. When I understand who I am and what I need, along with all other people, I can live and move better through the world. These four foundations of greatness need to be implemented using the 7 Cs, and any use of the 7 Cs should be governed by these four foundations.
I take these ideas to a new level in the recently published silver anniversary edition of my book The Art of Achievement, where I show how each condition of success is associated with an art, or skilled behavior. The exciting thing about this realization is that where there is a skill or art, we can get better at it. To steer you away from the old edition and to the new, here’s a link: http://tinyurl.com/y6w5x7r4
In another recent book on dealing with difficult change and any sort of adversity, Plato’s Lemonade Stand: Stirring Change into Something Great, I take on the old adage, “When life hands you lemons, make lemonade” which has been said for many decades by many people, but nobody says how. It turns out the great philosophers had a lot to say about this transformative approach to difficulty. In this book, about three arts of change, I bring a lot of new wisdom from the past, but also give a new context for the 7 Cs and the 4 Foundations.
In the recent short punchy book, The Everyday Patriot: How to be a Great American Now, I take readers with me back to the values behind the Declaration of Independence and how they should guide us now. Early readers have told me they think every family in America should read the book aloud and discuss it. But one letter I love is a young man in Bucharest who said he read it and it’s made him a better Romanian already. We are citizens of the world, and in the book I show how an early Roman Stoic philosopher explained that fact in ways we can use.
Finally, my newest book is a collaboration with a former grad student who helped teach my most popular Notre Dame course and became a well known writer and teacher in his own right, the book Stoicism for Dummies, which the publisher asked me to do, and I found it to be a great joy. It’s just now out and early reactions are great. The true novice can enjoy it, but there’s a lot of new stuff for the practiced Stoic to enjoy as well, and even the true scholar.
Do you have a favorite quote that you use?
“Life is supposed to be a series of adventures. The ones you’ve already been on have prepared you for the next one, and often in ways you can’t even imagine.” - My father, Hugh Thomas Morris. He lived this perspective and taught it to me as a child. He was a farm boy and high school graduate who owned and read books of philosophy all the time.
What advice would you give someone who wanted to learn more about what you do?
I’d love to have people visit me at www.TomVMorris.com and to learn about my novels at www.TheOasisWithin.com. The novels are, I think, the best philosophy I’ve ever written, and were the most unexpected project of my life, simply coming to me as a mental movie in February of 2011 and it was a movie I enjoyed for 5 years, while writing down everything I saw and heard, resulting in 8 novels of over a million words. If those were my only books, I’d be a happy author and pleased philosopher.
Suppose you were able to give a talk or workshop at the original location of Plato’s Academy, in Athens.
When I left the academic world in 1995 to serve the broader culture, I found myself on 400-500 airplanes a year for many years. I’ve cut back on travel a lot these days at the age of 71, though I think I’m at my peak as a philosopher and presenter. I’ve given more than 1,200 public talks on the wisdom of the ancients and its insights for our time, and would consider such a talk to be a rare treasure. From 12 people in a room to 5,000 to 10,000, I always enjoy sharing what I’m learning with people who can use the ideas to do great good in the world.
What question would you like to leave us to think about?
I’d love to have lots of friends thinking with me now about how we can spread more wisdom in this often dark world, and especially to young people, even pre school children, habituating the young to wisdom and virtue so that as adults, their perspectives might be deeper and their aspirations higher than we too commonly see around us now.
Great interview! We need to bring Stoicism into the real world, not just academic ivory towers.