The Moral Bucket List

Brooks uses this term in the phrase “call within the call,” one of the moral achievements on his bucket list. A call is a strong internal drive to do something, and the word is often used in association with a profession or devotion to an ideal. Although the word refers to internal motivation, it also suggests that an individual is being called, or beckoned, by a source outside of or higher than themselves. For example, people often refer to the priesthood as a calling. Brooks uses this term to discuss the internal drive that people feel to devote themselves to causes larger than themselves. He provides the example of Frances Perkins who spent her life fighting for workers’ rights.

A eulogy is a funeral speech focusing on the character of the person who has passed away. As a literary genre, eulogies involve praise, a list of the person’s accomplishments, and often short anecdotes demonstrating the person’s good qualities. Brooks uses this term to characterize the virtues that define moral accomplishment. He contrasts inner character defined by the eulogy virtues with external achievement defined by the resume virtues.

This term means lacking in arrogance, pride, or focus on the self. When Brooks uses this term, he deepens its meaning to include “an intense self-awareness from a position of other-centeredness” (Paragraph 11). He argues that someone is humble if they understand themselves as situated in relation to other people and ideas in the world. Humility thus entails someone’s accurate evaluation of their importance, or relative smallness, in the rest of the world.

A resume is a professional document listing someone’s education and career achievements. Resumes are often no longer than two pages, and they comprise short entries describing only what someone has done or achieved. People write resumes to submit with job or award applications. Brooks uses this term to define the skills valued in the pursuit of external achievement, or career success. He contrasts these external resume virtues against the depth of character defined by the eulogy virtues.

Conventionally, this term refers to the act of thwarting one’s own ambitions or goals. Often somebody engages in self-defeating behavior out of an unconscious fear or unrecognized trauma. Brooks, however, uses the term to mean the opposite, to denote a successful confrontation with one’s limits and weaknesses. Whereas the conventional meaning of self-defeat suggests an inadvertent failure, Brooks uses the term to refer to a successful conquest of the self.