What Kind of Person Will You Be?

Why It Matters

At seventeen or eighteen, you are not yet fully formed — but you are not a blank slate either. The person you are right now has specific gifts, specific tendencies toward virtue and vice, specific ways of relating to difficulty and beauty and other people. The question this lesson asks is: looking honestly at who you currently are, who do you want to become? And what will the path from here to there require?

The ancient virtue ethics tradition — Aristotle, the Stoics, the Christian moral tradition — understood character as the product of habit. You become courageous by doing courageous things. You become honest by telling the truth in the moments when it costs you. You become generous by giving before you feel like giving. The person who waits until they feel generous to give will almost never give. The person who gives before they feel it, over years, eventually becomes generous — the feeling follows the practice.

This means that the question of what kind of person you will be is not primarily a question about values or beliefs. It is a question about practices: what will you do, regularly, in the ordinary circumstances of your life? The answer to that question is the answer to the character question, because character is what those practices produce.

One of the most important decisions you will make in the next decade is who you will spend your time with. Character is profoundly social — we become like the people we are surrounded by, far more than most people realize or want to admit. The person who is trying to become honest and courageous and generous needs to be surrounded by people who are honest and courageous and generous. This is not snobbery — it is the recognition that formation is not primarily individual.

A Story

The Sculptor and the Marble

There is a story — probably apocryphal, but useful — about Michelangelo being asked how he carved his great statues. 'I simply removed everything that was not David,' he reportedly said.

The story is probably too neat to be true, but it captures something real about the work of character formation. You are, in a sense, both the sculptor and the marble. You are the material that is being worked on, and you are also — through your choices — the one doing the working.

The image is useful because it suggests that character formation is partly a process of subtraction. You do not build character by adding new qualities from scratch — you clarify who you are by gradually removing what is not you: the performances you have been putting on for other people, the compromises you have been making that you know are wrong, the habits of mind and behavior that you have inherited without choosing.

But the image has limits. Michelangelo worked alone, and character formation is irreducibly social. You are shaped by the people you love, the communities you inhabit, the practices you share. The marble cannot choose its sculptor, but you have some choice about who forms you — whose expectations you live inside, whose example you try to follow, whose voice you hear when you are deciding how to act in a difficult moment.

Augustine wrote: 'Our heart is restless until it rests in you' — meaning God, the source and end of all goods. His point was that the deepest formation question is not 'what kind of person will I be?' but 'toward what will I orient my life?' The answer to the second question determines the answer to the first. The person oriented toward love becomes loving. The person oriented toward truth becomes truthful. The person oriented toward comfort becomes comfortable — and nothing more.

The question this final module asks is not only about the person you will be. It is about the orientation that will produce that person. Not just 'what kind of person?' but 'toward what will you set your face?' That second question is, in the end, the more important one.

Vocabulary

Character

The stable pattern of virtues and vices — the settled dispositions to act in certain ways — that a person develops through repeated choice and practice over time. Character is not what you believe or intend; it is what you actually do when difficulty arrives and no one is watching. Aristotle held that character is formed by habituation: you become the kind of person you are by repeatedly acting in certain ways until the action becomes second nature.

Formation

The cumulative process by which a person is shaped — by choices, by community, by practice, by experience — into a certain kind of human being. Formation is not primarily conscious or deliberate; it happens through immersion in environments, relationships, and habits that silently shape who you are becoming. The examined life is the attempt to take some deliberate control of the formation process rather than leaving it entirely to circumstance.

Habituation

Aristotle's term for how character is formed: by repeatedly acting in a certain way until the action becomes a settled disposition. You do not first become courageous and then act courageously — you act courageously, even when you do not feel courageous, until the courageous action becomes part of who you are. This is both encouraging (you can choose who to become) and demanding (there is no shortcut).

Orientation

The fundamental direction in which a life is aimed — what it is ultimately moving toward, what it treats as the highest good, what organizes and gives meaning to all the other choices. Augustine's insight is that orientation determines formation: the person oriented toward love becomes loving. Asking 'what kind of person will I be?' is ultimately the same question as 'toward what will I orient my life?'

Virtue

A stable disposition to act in a way that is genuinely good — not just occasionally but reliably, in the face of difficulty and temptation. Courage, honesty, justice, generosity, temperance, practical wisdom — these are the classical virtues. Each one is not a feeling but a practiced capacity, built through habituation, that makes the person who has it capable of living well across a range of circumstances.

Guided Teaching

This lesson opens the final module, and it is the first of five reflection lessons before the capstone. Its purpose is to name the question that the rest of the module will explore from different angles: what kind of person will you be? Do not rush past it. Give it time to land. The student who can answer this question with genuine specificity — not platitudes but honest self-knowledge — is ready for the rest of the module.

Begin with an honest inventory. Ask your student: looking at who you actually are right now — your specific tendencies, your characteristic responses to difficulty and beauty and other people — what do you see? Not what you aspire to be. What is actually there? This requires the kind of honest self-knowledge that is uncomfortable but essential. A student who cannot describe their own tendencies with some accuracy cannot make a realistic plan for character formation.

Then ask the formation question: given who you actually are right now, what would it take to become the person you want to be? What practices? What communities? What habits to build, and what habits to break? The Aristotelian insight — that character is formed by habituation — is worth pressing here. You cannot become honest by deciding to be honest. You become honest by telling the truth in the uncomfortable moments, regularly, over years.

The social dimension of formation is crucial and often underestimated. Ask: who are the five people you spend the most time with? What kind of people are they? What character are you forming by being shaped by them? This is not a question about whether these people are good or bad people in the abstract — it is a question about who you become by being in their company.

The Augustine question — 'toward what will you orient your life?' — is the deepest question in the lesson and the hardest to answer. It is worth ending here, not with a clean answer but with the genuine question: what is the thing you are most ultimately aiming at? Not your career goal or your relational goal but your deepest orientation — the thing that everything else is in service of. The student who can answer this honestly, even partially, is holding the key question of the entire curriculum.

For Discussion

1. 1.Looking honestly at who you actually are right now — not who you want to be — what are your most characteristic virtues? And what are your most characteristic tendencies toward failure?
2. 2.Aristotle argued that you become courageous by doing courageous things, even before you feel courageous. Do you believe this? Can you think of an example from your own life where practice preceded the corresponding virtue?
3. 3.Who are the five people who most shape your character, and what kind of character are you forming by being in their company? Is what you are forming what you want to be forming?
4. 4.Augustine's question is 'toward what will you orient your life?' — not 'what career will you pursue' but what is your deepest aim, the thing that everything else is in service of. What is your best current answer to that question?
5. 5.The Michelangelo story suggests that character formation is partly a process of subtraction — removing what is not you. What are the things in your current life that you are doing or being that are not really you — that you have inherited or performed without fully choosing?
6. 6.What is one specific practice you could begin this week that would move you toward becoming the person you want to be? What would it require, and what habit would it need to displace?

Practice

The Character Inventory

1. 1.Write an honest character inventory. Not a list of your admirable qualities — an honest account of who you actually are. What do you do when things get hard? How do you respond when someone needs something from you that is inconvenient? What are the tendencies you most wish you could change? What are the qualities you most rely on?
2. 2.After writing the inventory, name three virtues you want to be marked by in ten years — specific virtues, not general goodness. Then name, for each one, the habit or practice that would build it, and the habit that currently works against it.
3. 3.Write one paragraph answering Augustine's question: toward what is your life oriented? What is the thing that, when you are thinking clearly and honestly, you most ultimately want your life to be about? This may be hard to answer. Write your best current answer anyway.
4. 4.Share the inventory with a parent. Ask them: is this accurate? What do you see in me that I might be missing?

Memory Questions

1. 1.What does Aristotle mean by habituation, and why does he say you become courageous by acting courageously before you feel courageous?
2. 2.What is the difference between character as a belief and character as a practice?
3. 3.What is Augustine's insight about orientation — and why does the lesson say that 'toward what will I orient my life?' is the deeper question than 'what kind of person will I be?'
4. 4.Why is the social dimension of formation so important — how do the people we spend time with shape our character?
5. 5.What is the difference between virtue as a feeling and virtue as a stable disposition built through practice?