To become more virtuous in general, it is crucial to develop the specific virtue of prudence. And to become more prudent means getting better at the three “acts of prudence” as identified by Thomas Aquinas:
Counsel: Inquiring into relevant circumstances.
Judgment: Evaluating those circumstances and deciding upon a course of action.
Command: Carrying out that decision by taking that course of action.
Becoming more prudent means becoming more considerate, judicious, and resolute in our actions.
But how exactly do we do that? As far as I can find, Aquinas did not recommend any specific techniques for becoming more prudent. For that, we can turn to Dale Carnegie, author of the 1936 self-help classic How to Win Friends and Influence People.
In his 1948 book How to Stop Worrying and Start Living, Carnegie laid out what he called the “three basic steps of problem analysis”:
Get the facts.
Analyze the facts.
Arrive at a decision—and then act on that decision.
Carnegie’s tripartite analysis of prudent action is very similar to Aquinas’s. Indeed, both Aquinas and Carnegie reference Aristotle as a primary source for their models. With a slight modification of Carnegie’s, we can merge the two as follows:
Counsel: Get the facts.
Judgment: Analyze the facts and arrive at a decision.
Command: Act on that decision.
Here is a summary of Carnegie’s advice regarding each of these three steps.
Counsel: Get the facts.
Carnegie pointed out that finding the facts relevant to a problem is prerequisite to solving that problem intelligently:
Without the facts, all we can do is stew around in confusion. My idea? No, that was the idea of the late Herbert E. Hawkes, Dean of Columbia College, Columbia University, for twenty-two years. He had helped two hundred thousand students solve their worry problems; and he told me that “confusion is the chief cause of worry.” He put it this way—he said: “Half the worry in the world is caused by people trying to make decisions before they have sufficient knowledge on which to base a decision.
Hawkes said that, when faced with a problem, he first concentrates “on getting all the facts that bear on the problem.” Once he has all the facts, “the problem usually solves itself!”
In other words, once we are fully cognizant of all the facts relevant to a problem, our minds naturally and almost automatically segue into evaluating those facts and coming up with a solution to that problem. Thorough fact-finding can make a judgment call a no-brainer. Counsel, if done well, can make judgment a piece of cake.
As Hawke said and Carnegie emphasized:
If a man will devote his time to securing facts in an impartial, objective way, his worries will usually evaporate in the light of knowledge.
Judgment: Analyze the facts and arrive at a decision.
Carnegie then proceeded to his step two:
However, getting all the facts in the world won’t do us any good until we analyze them and interpret them. I have found from costly experience that it is much easier to analyze the facts after writing them down. In fact, merely writing the facts on a piece of paper and stating our problem clearly goes a long way toward helping us to reach a sensible decision. Charles Kettering puts it: “A problem well stated is a problem half solved.”
To illustrate, Carnegie related a story told to him by Galen Litchfield, an American businessman who “was in China in 1942, when the Japanese invaded Shanghai.”
Shortly after the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor… they came swarming into Shanghai. I was the manager of the Asia Life Insurance Company in Shanghai. They sent us an ‘army liquidator’—he was really an admiral—and gave me orders to assist this man in liquidating our assets. I didn’t have any choice in the matter. I could cooperate—or else. And the ‘or ‘else’ was certain death.
At one point, Litchfield realized to his horror that he made a potentially fatal mistake by omitting a large set of assets from his accounting.
I wasn’t in the office when the discovery was made, but my head accountant was there. He told me that the Japanese admiral flew into a rage, and stamped and swore, and called me a thief and a traitor! I had defied the Japanese army! I knew what that meant. I would be thrown into the Bridgehouse!
The Bridgehouse! The torture chamber of the Japanese Gestapo! I had had personal friends who had killed themselves rather than be taken to that prison. I had had other friends who had died in that place after ten days of questioning and torture. Now I was slated for the Bridgehouse myself!
Yet, even in this predicament, Litchfield was able to overcome paralyzing terror by enumerating the facts and evaluating his options in writing:
I suppose I should have been terrified. And I would have been terrified if I hadn’t had a definite technique for solving my problems. For years, whenever I was worried I had always gone to my typewriter and written down two questions—and the answers to these questions:
What am I worrying about?
What can I do about it?
I used to try to answer those questions without writing them down. But I stopped those years ago. I found that writing down both the questions and the answers clarifies my thinking.
Litchfield used this technique to come up with four potential courses of action for dealing with his conundrum. Once he articulated his options along with their pros and cons, he was able to decisively settle on one as clearly the best.
As soon as I thought it all out and decided to accept the fourth plan—to go down to the office as usual on Monday morning—I felt immensely relieved.
When I entered the office the next morning, the Japanese admiral sat there with a cigarette dangling from his mouth. He glared at me as he always did; and said nothing. Six weeks later—thank God—he went back to Tokyo and my worries were ended.
As I have already said, I probably saved my life by sitting down that Sunday afternoon and writing out all the various steps I could take and then writing down the probable consequence of each step and calmly coming to a decision. If I hadn’t done that, I might have floundered and hesitated and done the wrong thing on the spur of the moment. If I hadn’t thought out my problem and come to a decision, I would have been frantic with worry all Sunday afternoon. I wouldn’t have slept that night. I would have gone down to the office Monday morning with a harassed and worried look; and that alone might have aroused the suspicion of the Japanese admiral and spurred him to act.
Experience has proved to me, time after time, the enormous value of arriving at a decision. It is the failure to arrive at a fixed purpose, the inability to stop going round and round in maddening circles, that drives men to nervous breakdowns and living hells. I find that fifty per cent of my worries vanishes once I arrive at a clear, definite decision another forty per cent usually vanishes once I start to carry out that decision.
So I banish about ninety per cent of my worries by taking these four steps:
Writing down precisely what I am worrying about.
Writing down what I can do about it.
Deciding what I can do about it.
Starting immediately how to carry out that decision.
Litchfield’s four steps walk us through the three parts of prudence. Step one is counsel. Steps two and three are judgment. And step four is command.
Just as thorough fact-finding facilitates decision-making, clear and definite decision-making facilitates action. Good counsel leads to good judgment which leads to good command.
Litchfield got the facts, which helped him come to a resolution, which empowered him to act boldly even in the face of peril and fear.
Command: Act on that decision.
As Carnegie noted, that last step is key:
Unless we carry out our action, all our fact-finding and analysis is whistling upwind—it’s a sheer waste of energy. William James said this: “When once a decision is reached and execution is the order of the day, dismiss absolutely all responsibility and care about the outcome.” (In this case, William James undoubtedly used the word “care” as a synonym for “anxiety.”) He meant, once you have made a careful decision based on facts, go into action. Don’t stop to reconsider. Don’t begin to hesitate, worry and retrace your steps. Don’t lose yourself in self-doubting which begets other doubts. Don’t keep looking back over your shoulder. I once asked Waite Phillips, one of Oklahoma’s most prominent oil men, how he carried out decisions. He replied: “I find that to keep thinking about our problems beyond a certain point is bound to create confusion and worry. There comes a time when any more investigation and thinking are harmful. There comes a time when we must decide and act and never look back.”
Thomas Aquinas’s philosophy of virtue can help us understand prudence, and Dale Carnegie’s methodology of virtue can help us practice it.