Super Habits: The Ancient System for Achieving an Easier, Happier, and More Powerful Life

For too many of us, life is harder than it needs to be. The reason: we have lost an ancient system of habits that made life easier, more productive, healthier, and happier. Here's how important these habits are. Have you ever watched a child learn to walk? He walks carefully, intently takes each step, concentrating so hard that his tongue is sticking out between his teeth. He has the muscles, and the balance, but he really has to concentrate to take each step, because he doesn't yet have the habit of walking.

There is another set of habits, quite as essential as walking, that we have all but lost as a society - habits for managing our thoughts, our actions, and our feelings. These were a set of habits that earlier civilizations knew well, valued, and practiced.

The good news is that in various fields these ancient habits, such as restraint, humility, courage, and practical wisdom, are being rediscovered with superb results. These and others are specific habits of excellence, classically called "virtues." They are far older than Machu Picchu, and even more solid. What is exciting about these habits, as the Positive Psychology research shows abundantly, is that each of them in its own way is like a superpower: as you develop any one of these habits, your life becomes calmer, more productive, more joyful, and healthier. They are "superhabits."

That's the good news. The bad news is that what is most important about of these superhabits is being missed. To really grasp what superhabits can do for us, we have to recover the insights of a brilliant 13th century Italian philosopher, Thomas Aquinas, who arranged this foundational set of habits into its most highly developed form. All but lost in the succeeding centuries, Aquinas's framework organizes and makes sense of these rediscoveries, and shows how central they are to human life.

Aquinas catalogued more than 50 superhabits. In this book I am highlighting several in some depth and the rest in brief, to set you on a path to address every challenge that could come your way, with greater ease, effectiveness, happiness, and health.