Category: Toughness
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Contest 1: Withstanding. Toughness Training
Suppose there were a first contest in toughness and it was called “withstanding” or “wise endurance.” A tough person is someone who withstands or wisely endures certain things. Forgo the puzzling matter of which things should be endured and which should not. (Here see Plato’s Laches.) Simply suppose that this is something that needs to be withstood…
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The Logical Order of Contests of Toughness
Suppose you wanted to become tougher and suppose too that you believed that you could only do so by training. Suppose, thirdly, that such training would consist of “tests of characters”–events that, putting pressure on you, come your way and require your right response–and of contests. Not quite a game and not quite battle but resembling both in different respects,…
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Toughness Trained Through Harder and Harder Contests
Our Predicament We are forever holding back. We are always backing down. Every day we stand aside, give in, crumple up, let fall. Has panic settled in? This is meekness. Look around you and you will find it–so dour, so damp, so commonplace–almost everywhere. The Desirability of Toughness Suppose, like me, you say, ‘Enough is enough.’ Then…
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Endowment Effect and Wrenching Toughness
In behavioral economics, the ‘endowment effect’ states that individuals ascribe higher value to the objects they possess than to the objects they could secure. If this is true, then we are ‘loss averse’ creatures that prefer to keep what we have and are more disheartened by the loss of our possessions than by the gain of some other, perhaps…
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Toughness Training: Four Questions
Suppose someone were to ask you, ‘Are you tough?,’ with the question situated in our historical context. He would not be asking whether you can fight someone to the death, beat someone up, endure weeks of physical torture, or climb Everest. The context would make it clear that he is asking you about a physical-mental nexus…
Andrew Taggart, Ph.D. 