MIDDOT · MEASURES
On working a single thing while naming the four you are setting aside — and on what trait language does to a person.
The list went up in January and had five things on it. By the third week of February two have quietly disappeared, one has become a vaguer version of itself, and the other two are being done sporadically in a way that generates guilt without generating change.
Nothing on the list was wrong. There were five of them, and attention is finite.
The mussar method is exactly one at a time, and it holds that position firmly enough to be irritating. Not one as a starting point. One, worked for a period, before the next.
The word for a character trait is middah, which is the word for a measure. Not whether you have the trait — everyone has every trait — but how much, which makes it a quantity that can be adjusted rather than a fact about who you are.
One failure spreads too thin. The other lets the vocabulary turn into a description of you.
Five things attended to is five things not attended to. It feels more serious than picking one, which is why people do it, and it is the reliable way to change nothing while working hard.
“I am impatient.” The word for a trait is the word for a measure precisely to stop this, and English loses it. A measure is adjustable; a description of your character is a sentence you now have to live up to or down to.
That reframing does most of the work in this collection. It removes the binary — am I a patient person or not — which is unanswerable, and replaces it with a question that has a number attached.
It also removes the moral weight from the diagnosis. Finding that you are far along one measure is a finding about a quantity, not a confession.
Salanter’s method was not original in its content and was very original in its delivery.
The traits themselves come from the earlier literature — from Bahya, from Luzzatto, from a tradition of ethical writing several centuries deep. Anyone could read them, and for centuries people did, and the reading did not much change what they did.
What Salanter added was the insistence that this material be practised rather than studied: aloud, in groups, at set times, repetitively, with a chant, and with one trait as the focus of a period. The content was old. The conversion of it into a training method is his.
The goal-setting literature supports the narrowing directly. Locke and Latham established that specific, difficult goals outperform vague ones and outperform “do your best”, and that performance degrades when attention is divided across multiple concurrent goals.4
The relevant mechanism is straightforward: competing goals draw on the same limited attention, and a person pursuing several simultaneously allocates less to each and switches between them at a cost.
What this does not support is the specific list. There is no evidence for thirteen traits, for these thirteen, or for the ordering in which the tradition arranges them. The scheme is a scheme, arrived at by reflection rather than by measurement, and its value is that it gives you somewhere to start rather than that it is correct.
One is about the scheme; the other is about what happens to a person who acquires a trait vocabulary.
The case against
Learn a set of names for your own dispositions and you acquire an efficient way of describing yourself as fixed. “I am not a patient person” is now available, it feels like self-knowledge, and it functions as an excuse and a prediction at once.
The situationist evidence makes this worse rather than better. Behaviour is more situation-dependent than trait talk assumes, which means a trait vocabulary will systematically over-attribute to the person and under-attribute to the arrangement they are in.
The defence is the Hebrew itself, and it has to be used deliberately because the English will not do it for you. A middah is a measure. The question is always how much, in what situations, this month — never whether you are the kind of person who.
Pick one trait for a period — a month is the traditional sort of unit and it is about right.
Then write down the ones you are setting aside, by name. Naming them is what stops them leaking back in, because an unnamed intention does not feel like it has been set aside; it feels like it is still running.
Phrase it as a quantity. Not “be more patient” but “how many times this week did I interrupt someone.” A number can move. An adjective cannot.
And keep the situation in view. If the count is high only in one setting, that is a fact about the setting, and it is usually cheaper to change than you are.
Most people find the first two days harder than the rest.
The word for a trait is the word for a measure, and a measure is a quantity that can be adjusted rather than a fact about a person. English does not carry that, so it has to be done on purpose.
The one-at-a-time rule is the unglamorous part and it is the part with evidence behind it. Five things is five things not done.
And the four you crossed out are not gone. They are written down, waiting, which is a different thing from being abandoned and feels different to carry.
Pick one trait for a month. Write down the ones you are setting aside, by name.
Phrase it as something countable. If you cannot say what you would tally, it is not yet a measure.
Hebrew terms are transliterated without diacritics. Classical sources are cited by work and location; where a formulation is modern it is named as modern. Modern research is cited by author and publication.