Your soul is a scout.

It can guide you through the wilderness of persuasion. Especially self-persuasion.

Think of your soul as the you your daily you rarely lives up to. It’s the higher you, the one that restrains itself from finishing a quart of Cherry Garcia ice cream before bed. This admirable soul of yours does not have to be sweet-smelling and beautiful. Even Aristotle, who set very high soul standards, described the best kind of soul as a sort of ancient Boy Scout. (So much for sweet-smelling.)

So how does that work? My new book shows how you can use your own Aristotelian soul as an audience to practice the tools of rhetoric while gaining better habits and reaching big goals. They worked for me in a yearlong experiment on myself.

Here’s an excerpt: read it in my Substack post. And please consider subscribing!

Our dad took this photo in 1960, when I was four and my brother John was two, long before we learned the term “cultural appropriation.”