Virtue scores
Review
SECTION ONE Admiral William H. McRaven delivered the 2014 commencement address at the University of Texas at Austin, and the ten lessons he drew from Basic Underwater Demolition/SEAL training circulated so widely that he expanded them into a short book. The premise is disarmingly simple: if you want to change the world, start by making your bed. Each chapter pairs a specific episode from McRaven's career — a failed rope climb, a midnight swim past sharks, a teammate held underwater by an instructor — with a portable principle about discipline, resilience, teamwork, and the willingness to accept risk. The intended reader is anyone facing a task that seems too large and a self that seems too small. McRaven is not writing a leadership manual for executives; he is writing a manual for ordinary people at ordinary moments of discouragement. The book is brief by design, each chapter close to an anecdote with a moral, and the cumulative argument is that durable character is built not in grand gestures but in the smallest repeated choices — the ones that happen before breakfast. SECTION TWO - **Created**: McRaven's insistence that every person — regardless of size, background, or prior failure — can complete the training encodes a genuine affirmation of human dignity. The body matters throughout: cold water, physical exhaustion, and the weight of another person on a stretcher are the media through which character is formed. This is consistent with the CCMMP's account of the unity of body and soul (Vitz, Nordling, and Titus): the person is not a mind that happens to inhabit a body, and moral formation is not merely cognitive. - **Fallen**: The book is unusually honest about failure. McRaven describes his own poor performance, his mistakes under pressure, and the moments when instructors humiliated him deliberately. The Fallen-state realism here is practical rather than theological: the person arrives broken, disordered, and prone to quitting, and the training exists precisely because that is the baseline condition, not an exception to it. This matches the CCMMP's premise that concupiscence — the disordering of appetite away from the good — is the starting point of formation, not an anomaly within it. - **Redeemed**: The arc of each chapter moves from disorder or defeat toward restored capacity. The person who rings the bell and quits is contrasted, without contempt, with the person who stays. What McRaven describes as 'grit' functions structurally like what Aquinas identifies as fortitude: the stable disposition to hold a course through fear and pain. The redemptive logic is secular — there is no grace in the book — but the shape of the transformation, from disordered passion to ordered perseverance, is recognizable within a Catholic anthropological account. - **Prudence (foresight)**: Several chapters ask the reader to accept present discomfort for a future that cannot yet be seen — to trust that the swimmer who goes past the sharks at night is building something that will matter later. This is prudence-foresight in practice: the agent acts now on a judgment about consequences that have not yet arrived. - **Justice (obedience and commitment)**: The book treats obedience to institutional authority not as weakness but as apprenticeship. The SEAL instructor who pushes McRaven's head underwater is not a villain; the submission is what makes the subsequent competence possible. This maps onto the Thomistic account of justice-obedience — proper submission to legitimate authority as itself a form of moral seriousness.
✓ Strengths
- ✓McRaven grounds each lesson in a concrete, embodied action — the made bed, the cold water, the rope climb — affirming the unity of body and soul: what the body does habitually shapes the person's whole moral orientation, a claim that runs through Thomistic accounts of habit formation.
- ✓The book's insistence on beginning each day with a small, completed act encodes prudence-preparedness: the person who governs small things reliably is rehearsing the dispositions necessary for governing larger ones.
- ✓McRaven's accounts of carrying wounded teammates under fire and refusing to abandon the injured illustrate justice-sacrifice in a way that is experiential rather than merely propositional, making the virtue legible to readers who would tune out abstract moral exhortation.
- ✓The chapters on embracing failure and 'getting back up' map well onto the CCMMP's Fallen-state realism: the book does not pretend the person is undamaged, and it locates growth specifically in the moment of defeat rather than in the absence of it.
- ✓The sustained emphasis on obedience to tradition and to those who have earned authority — the SEAL instructors, the chain of command — treats legitimate authority not as an obstacle to personal development but as its necessary structure, consistent with the justice-obedience account in Aquinas.
⚠ Considerations
- ⚠The book's anthropology is fundamentally stoic and voluntarist: the self improves by exerting will over circumstance. There is no account of grace, no recognition that some wounds exceed the reach of disciplined effort, and no mechanism for the kind of passive purification John of the Cross describes as indispensable to genuine transformation.
- ⚠McRaven's framework treats suffering almost entirely as an instrument of character — pain that builds. This instrumental reading can occlude the more complex Catholic truth that some suffering is simply to be borne, accompanied, and handed over, not leveraged.
- ⚠The ten lessons, presented as universally applicable, are drawn from an extremely selective institutional experience (elite military selection). Readers who cannot 'start swimming' or 'get over being a sugar cookie' may internalize a misapplied template rather than genuine practical wisdom calibrated to their actual circumstances.