Plutarch: character is revealed by deeds
You describe yourself in adjectives — responsible, proactive. You judge other people by what they actually did. The second method works on you too.
Character shows in a jest, not in a siege. Plutarch deliberately chose small episodes, because great events only show circumstances: who a person is shows up when nobody is watching.
- Speaking from the stage at the flagship eventWhether they stayed to stack the chairs
- The numbers in the annual reportWhether they answered a first-year who brings the club nothing
- How a person describes themselvesWhether they said 'I got that wrong' when nobody would have found out
Next time you write about your own work, replace every adjective about yourself with a fact: what you did and when. And in the same meeting, name one small thing somebody else did well — by name, in one sentence.
The full biography is on the public version →
17th-century portrait engraving — an imagined likeness. PD-old — anonymous 17th-century engraving
These screens carry out this specific work. Every published work in the library also has at least an exercise — it is at the foot of this page.
Loading…
These works are related to the one you just read — and not by accident:
shared competencies: Self-command, Brand and value
shared competencies: Self-command, Continuity
shared competencies: Continuity, Brand and value
shared competencies: Self-command, Continuity
Opens in the member workspace — you need to be signed in.
The same work written at length: what it claims and what its evidence is worth.
This text is freely available, so the links go straight to it rather than to a summary of it.
Links open in a new window.