This book catapults General Robert Caslen and Professor Michael Matthews into the front rank of the legion of people now working on good character across the world.
Part of the reason for the success of this book is the character and hugely different experiences of the two people who wrote this gem. I want tell you about each of them.
I first met General Caslen when he was the brigadier general who had just taken his new assignment as commandant of West Point. I was a visitor lecturing to the cadets about resilience and post-traumatic growth. We met to discuss the future of his counseling service. General Caslen was concerned that the counseling service was exclusively occupied with bad stuff: drug abuse, low-level criminality, and sexual harassment.
“Couldn’t counseling do better than just this, by giving advice and measuring the good stuff as well,” he asked, “like how to become an exemplary soldier or how to make academic choices based on one’s strengths, not just how to be less bad?” I could see that we were on the same wavelength. His interest was military excellence and academic excellence and so was mine. My specific interest there was in transforming counseling services in psychology generally into being about what makes life worth living as opposed to just about how to deal with the negative stuff and with the bad apples. So he and I talked about the possibility that the counseling center could be a place where cadets find out about the best things about themselves. I left the meeting thinking, “This guy is a visionary.”
Fast-forward a few years later: General Caslen has now become the superintendent of West Point, the officer in charge of the whole shebang. As you will read, the theme of his tenure was the building of character. His many years of experience in the field at every level of command had taught him that building character is the cornerstone of military leadership. And this is what he brings to this book: thousands of hours of actual leadership ranging from in extremis on the battlefield to the more pastoral setting of West Point.
His partner in this book is Professor Michael Matthews, a scholar, researcher, and teacher of long experience. I first met Mike more than fifteen years ago when I was organizing the future of positive psychology. We invited Mike to become a senior fellow for several months at the University of Pennsylvania under a grant from the John Templeton Foundation and Atlantic Philanthropies. Angela Duckworth and I had just begun to work on grit, and Mike and Angela began a collaboration with West Point to study who quits the academy after Beast Barracks, the grueling summer program that new cadets face as their first introduction to the Army. Grit proved to be a significant predictor of not quitting, and this expanded into Mike’s work on character as a predictor of military success and also launched Angela’s remarkable career. So what Mike brings to this book are serious behavioral science, rigor, and many years of experience teaching and measuring the minds and behavior of cadets.
As you will see, this results in a unique, unprecedented collaboration between a member of the highest ranks of military leadership with a lifetime of extensive experience in instilling character in soldiers in the field with a senior behavioral scientist, experienced in measurement and experimental design. So, you have in front of you the first book on character resulting from a partnership between long experience with the reality of the battlefield combined with long experience in behavioral science.
Joining two good heads together is only a potential, but the actuality is a book on character that they and the entire field can be proud of.
I am going to avoid spoilers in this foreword, but I want to tell you what I liked the most:
Duty, Honor, Country is the traditional motto of West Point. But merely mouthing that motto over and over does not translate it into the actions of its graduates. It is Caslen and Matthews’s insight that the molding of character during a cadet’s four years at West Point transforms the words of the motto into a lifetime of noble deeds. How this is achieved, how this is measured, and how it applies to the world beyond the Army is the treat that awaits you now.
—MARTIN E. P. SELIGMAN
PROFESSOR OF PSYCHOLOGY
DIRECTOR, POSITIVE PSYCHOLOGY CENTER
UNIVERSITY OF PENNSYLVANIA