Embed your virtues in a practice community

The virtues needed for excellence in any serious practice (craft, sport, relationship) are real virtues — find the practice that calls them out.

Why it works

MacIntyre argues that virtues are best developed within "practices" — coherent, complex forms of activity with internal standards of excellence, like medicine, chess, farming, or parenthood. A practice confronts you with standards you did not invent, that resist your shortcuts, and that require the virtues to meet. Virtues developed inside a practice are genuine — not performed for social approval but tested against real resistance.

How to do it

1. Identify one serious practice in your life with real internal standards of excellence — one where quality is not defined by you.
2. Name the virtues the practice demands (honesty, patience, precision, courage).
3. Deliberately engage with the hardest parts of the practice — the parts that require the virtues — rather than staying in comfortable competence.
4. Let the practice give you feedback about your character you would not invent for yourself.

Evidence

This is a philosophical framework (MacIntyre) rather than an empirically tested intervention; research on deliberate practice and expert development supports the idea that serious practice with real standards builds more robust skills and dispositions than practice without standards. (mechanistic)

Ericsson’s deliberate practice is about skill, not virtue; the transfer to character development is a Macintyrean extrapolation, not a directly tested claim.

Sources

• Ericsson, K.A. et al. (1993), The role of deliberate practice in the acquisition of expert performance, Psychological Review

Common mistake

Engaging in a practice only where you are already competent, which provides no resistance and therefore no character development.