A Round of Golf with My Father

The New Psychology of Exploring Your Past to Make Peace with Your Present
by William Damon | Templeton Press © 2021 · 224 pages

This is our fourth note on one of William Damon's books. Professor Damon is one of the world’s leading scholars on human development across the lifespan. He’s also an incredibly good human being. In this book, William Damon helps us create a “coherent narrative” for our lives by, as per the sub-title, “Exploring Your Past to Make Peace with Your Present.” It’s FANTASTIC. We'll explore the three primary aspects of a 'life review' and a ton of other Big Ideas. Let’s jump straight in!

I was embarking on a serious quest, and I knew I would not get very far if I approached it casually or haphazardly.
William Damon

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Big Ideas

“The explorations in this book take place in a zone where psychological science, personal experience, and philosophical reflection meet. This is not the first time I’ve ventured into such territory. When I began the research that led to The Path to Purpose, the best-known treatments of purpose were found in philosophical and theological contemplations (such as Rick Warren’s The Purpose-Driven Life) or self-help books (such as Richard Leider’s Power of Purpose). By now, it’s fair to say, purpose has become a well-established subject of study and practice in fields such as education, business, medicine, and psychology. I believe that the feelings that prompted me to write the present book are ones people everywhere will recognize: a quest to better understand my past and present self, my sense of loss for a key family member who went missing from my life, my confusion over long-ago childhood mysteries, my need to heal past wounds and regrets, and my wish to reaffirm the life I’ve been given.

Everyone searches for life meaning in a unique and personal way. But the search itself is universal. For those who choose to join me on the journeys contained in these pages, I hope that my research, my reflections, and my discoveries provide useful insights about this most personal, and most universal, human quest.”

~ William Damon from A Round of Golf with My Father

William Damon is a professor at Stanford University. He is one of the world’s leading scholars on human development across the lifespan. He’s also an incredibly good human being.

We’ve created Notes on a number of his other books including The Power of Ideals, The Path to Purpose, and Noble Purpose. I have been blessed to have private conversations with Professor Damon and the wisdom he shared with me when I reached out for guidance after creating Heroic has deeply impacted me.

So, when I got back into creating PhilosophersNotes, I immediately got this book (and found another one we’ll be featuring soon called The Moral Advantage: How to Succeed in Business by Doing the Right Thing). As I read this book I was struck by his wisdom and goodness.

Michael Murphy (the cofounder of Esalen) captures the essence of the book perfectly in his review. The book is “[A] gripping detective story, a deeply touching personal memoir, a critique of developmental psychology, a compendium of life-giving maxims, and a celebration of a disciplined life review.”

Practically speaking, the book helps us create a “coherent narrative” for our lives by, as per the sub-title, “Exploring Your Past to Make Peace with Your Present.”

It’s FANTASTIC. I highly recommend it. Get a copy here.

Of course, it’s also packed with Big Ideas. Let’s jump straight in!

A Life Review

“I could do none of this without some method of self-examination. I was embarking on a serious quest, and I knew that I would not get very far if I approached it casually or haphazardly. Part of the quest—the reconstruction of my father’s life—was historical, which required digging through old archives and interviewing his still-living friends and relatives. I am not a historian by training so my efforts on this were dedicated by amateurish. The other part of the quest, which I saw as essential, was psychological: using what I found to construct a transformed view of my own life, one that could provide me with renewed purpose and direction. In this endeavor, I was able to draw on my professional knowledge as a life-span developmental psychologist who has explored purpose and identity in his research and writings.

But my own previous work in psychology was not in itself sufficient for the quest I was now embarking on. For the self-examination I was undertaking, I found a promising approach that has been emerging in clinical and autobiographical studies over the past two decades, called ‘the life review.’ A life review is a deliberate procedure for reconstructing our pasts in a manner that can provide three personal benefits that many of us desire as we grow older:

  1. acceptance of the events and choices that have shaped our lives, reflecting gratitude for the life we’ve been given rather than self-doubt and regret
  2. a more authentic (and thus more robust) understanding of who we are and how we got to be that way, reflecting the well-grounded, reassuring sense of self that the great psychologist Erik Erikson called ‘ego integrity’
  3. a clarity in the directions we wish to take our lives going forward, reflecting what we have learned from the experiences and purposes that have given our lives meaning in the past”

That passage is from the Prologue, entitled: “A Call of Consequence.”

Imagine this...

You were born in 1945. Your young father married your mom right before returning to the front lines of World War II. You are born shortly after your father left and...

You never met him.

You grew up thinking he went “missing in World II.”

It wasn’t until college that you learned that your father didn’t actually *die* in World War II. He just decided not to come home to be with you and your mom.

Then...

Decades later, you get “A Call of Consequence” from your adult daughter who tells you that she did some research and discovered some fascinating facts about the grandfather she never met. As it turns out, your father led a fascinating life—playing an important role in international diplomacy while creating a new family abroad.

How would you respond?

Our wise Professor Damon shares the story of how HE responded—dedicating over a decade of his life to the process of learning more about and integrating his past into a coherent narrative while adding insights to the promising approach of doing what’s known as “a life review.”

The process has three primary aspects and benefits. In short,

  1. We look back to the past to learn more about the circumstances and choices that to led where we are today so we can
  2. Create a healthier, more integrated sense of who we are today so we can
  3. Look forward to the future with more clarity and hope and joy

Damon walks us through his process of creating his Life Story while sharing the truly remarkable life of his father and his truly remarkable integration of the lessons learned in his process.

Reading the book helped me integrate my own autobiographical story with MY father (who, as I’ve discussed many times, struggled with alcohol which presented its own challenges) while also shining a light on how to use this approach to ALL the big and little “stories” of our lives.

As Damon says in the second chapter: “A thoughtful story can help us find meaning in events that otherwise may seem random or disconnected. It can weave our life events into a coherent narrative about who we’ve been and who we hope to become. It can help us connect the past with the present and prepare us for the future we’d like to have. In this way, stories about who we’ve been and who we are can help us deal with the inevitable challenges life throws at us. They give us agency in determining who we shall become. Storytelling is a fundamental human capacity, and life stories are a prime way that humans bring coherence and positivity to their life experiences. Any life story, whether lengthy or brief, offers us a chance to review some portion of our lives and, with that, a chance to reflect on who we are.”

P.S. Fun fact: If I had to pick just ONE line in this whole book that I found MOST striking it would be this one: “I was embarking on a serious quest, and I knew that I would not get very far if I approached it casually or haphazardly.”

Are you embarking on a serious quest in YOUR life?

Let’s remember that we are not going to get very far if we approach it casually or haphazardly.

(How can you step up your game and take your Heroic quest just a little more seriously? Seriously. What’s ONE thing you could do to show us just how committed you are? Today a good day to get on that? Awesome. Go get it, Hero.)

A deliberate and intentional approach to life stories... offers a way to affirm our life experiences rather than rue or despair them.
William Damon
Like everyone else in the world, I am a complex individual. ... Consequently, I am not destined to be affected by any particular trend found in the general population.
William Damon
The theory of narrative identity posits that identity formation can be promoted by creating a life story that integrates past and present experiences with future aspirations.
William Damon

Nevertheless say yes to Life

“In the field of psychology, the groundbreaking promoter of an affirmative approach was Victor Frankl, a major influence on the views I present in this book. Frankl wrote his landmark Man’s Search for Meaning while imprisoned in a concentration camp during World War II. His book ushered in a new perspective on how to promote psychological well-being that emphasizes purpose, meaning, and other elevated human capacities. Frankl’s insights became the foundation of now-prevalent trends in psychology that focus on the value of positive mental states.

It’s worth noting that Frankl gave his book a different title from the one eventually crafted by its English-language translator. Frankl’s original title was Nevertheless Say Yes to Life—capturing, in a short phrase, what affirming our past experiences means. Affirmation of past choices and events that have shaped our lives means saying yes rather no to them. It means looking for lessons in mistakes. It means finding opportunities in hardships and redemption in regrets. Frankl showed how this could be done under the bleakest of circumstances.

As you know if you’ve been following along, Victor Frankl is one of my heroes.

His Heroic portrait is gazing at my wall behind me in my office right now. He’s right between Aristotle and Abraham Maslow—two of my other favorite intellectual heroes representing the integration of ancient wisdom and modern science.

His tragic yet Heroic story of playing his role well (as a therapist in a concentration camp) is deeply inspiring. My Note on Man’s Search for Meaning was among the very first I created.

Yet...

I never knew the *actual* title of his book wasn’t Man’s Search for Meaning. It was Nevertheless Say Yes to Life.

This is one of the most important themes of the book. If we want to create an empowering, coherent narrative for our lives, we MUST (emphasis on MUST!) find a way to say YES to it all. Some of the horrific tragedies must be mourned and integrated while other mistakes must be learned from and integrated but... In all scenarios, we’d be wise to remember to say YES to it all.

When I read that passage, I thought of another Hero on my wall: Joseph Campbell.

In The Power of Myth, he tells us: “There is an important idea in Nietzsche, of Amor fati, the ‘love of your fate,’ which is in fact your life. As he says, if you say no to a single factor in your life, you have unraveled the whole thing. Furthermore, the more challenging or threatening the situation or context to be assimilated and affirmed, the greater the stature of the person who can achieve it. The demon that you can swallow gives you its power, and the greater life’s pain, the greater life’s reply.”

I also thought of our Notes on What Doesn’t Kill Us, in which Stephen Joseph tells us about “The New Psychology of Posttraumatic Growth.” Check out those Notes for more on what science says about the power of alchemizing challenges into an empowering, coherent narrative.

For now: “Thus we each need to learn to lead our lives knowing that adversity is always around the corner. When trauma strikes, we must be ready and resilient, prepared to confront stark realities, open to change, and oriented toward using our suffering wisely.”

Stated differently: Nevertheless, say yes to life.

The world breaks everyone, but many are stronger at the broken places.
Ernest Hemingway
Our past can be both a burden and a resource. The emotional baggage and the scars we carry can sap our energy and reduce our sense of well-being. ... But the vast reservoir of memories can also serve as a reservoir of wisdom, meaning, and solace.
Paul Wong
Our ability to learn relies on open-mindedness, curiosity, humility, and the willingness to take the risk of finding out something that may upset our emotional balance, at least temporarily.
William Damon

Rising to the occasion in a morally heroic way

“My research into the Lichfield Trials and my father’s part in them transformed my view of his character. Against all expectations, I discovered that my father displayed moral conviction in a tense and consequential historic situation. He was a courageous truth-teller. He demonstrated compassion for soldiers who were suffering unheard and acted on this compassion in the face of warnings from powerful higher-ups who gave him the message that they wanted him to remain silent. His refusal to do so benefited our country and its code of military justice. At this time in his young adulthood, my father found his purpose in service to his country.

He also developed a hardiness of character that we nowadays call ‘grit.’ This was evident from the newspaper photograph of him as a hardened soldier at the time when he wrote home to report the prisoner abuse he witnessed, braving the stern directives from army censors. ... In the midst of threats emanating from the officers he would testify against, my father was resolute in his opposition to the inhumane acts. Unlike several of his peers, he never backed off his testimony. He never gave indications of being intimidated. He had become, to cite a highly valued trait of the time, tough.

At Andover and Harvard, toughness was seen as a crucial quality in a boy. This was still true by the time I was a student (my recommendation letter from Andover for college admissions made a point of noting that I was ‘tough enough’; this must have been all the more expected in my father’s day). My father was not tough as a school boy; that was one of the focal points of his counselors’ many criticisms of his character. It took a war to elicit toughness from him. He rose to the occasion in a morally heroic way.”

That’s from a chapter called “National Service and Moral Maturity,” sub-section “Character Development in Adulthood.”

Recall that Damon is one of the world’s leading scholars on moral development. Imagine how fascinating it would be as a professional with that specialty to study the moral development of your own father who abandoned you and your mom—then integrating that wisdom into your OWN moral development.

Again, Damon does a brilliant job of weaving this together while helping us do it for ourselves.

He assumed his father was a deadbeat. Yet... The same man who abandoned him found the moral courage to stand up for abused soldiers in a historically significant military trial.

Two points come to mind for me here.

First, the fact that creative actualizers are, as Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi puts it in Creativity: COMPLEX. They “contain contradictory extremes.”

Second, I thought of the fact that it often takes a significant challenge to elicit the best qualities within us. Orison Swett Marden puts it beautifully in He Can Who Thinks He Can.

He tells us (in early 20th century prose): “There is enough latent force in a Maximite torpedo shell to tear a warship to pieces. But the amount of force or explosive power in one of these terrific engines of destruction could never be ascertained by any ordinary concussion.

Children could play with it for years, pound it, roll it about, and do all sorts of things with it; the shell might be shot through the walls of an ordinary building, without arousing its terrible dynamic energy. It must be fired from a cannon, with terrific force, through a foot or so of steel plate armor, before it meets with resistance great enough to evoke its mighty explosive power.

Every man is a stranger to his greatest strength, his mightiest power, until the test of a great responsibility, a critical emergency, or a supreme crisis in his life, calls it out.”

He also tells us: “They are giants because they have been great conquerors of difficulties, supreme masters of difficult situations. They have acquired the strength of the obstacles which they have overcome.”

Marden’s exemplar was Abraham Lincoln. No Civil War, no Lincoln.

Here’s to acquiring the strength of the obstacles we overcome.

Remember: The demon we can swallow gives us its power.

Life can only be understood backwards, but it must be lived forwards.
Søren Kierkegaard
You can’t connect the dots looking forward; you can only connect them looking backward. So you have to trust that the dots will somehow connect in your future.
Steve Jobs
The master concept driving my professional work over the past two decades is purpose. ... Finding purpose bestows energy, motivation, resilience, and commitment to causes beyond the self. It can turn aimless, drifting, adolescents into focused and high-achieving adults.
William Damon

Character and moral development

“Character and moral development rarely occur overnight. Of course, there have been some famous sudden conversions to the path of righteousness in human history. In a moment on the road to Damascus, Saint Paul was transformed from a zealous prosecutor of the oppressed to a devoted advocate of compassion and justice. Developmental science has documented similarly dramatic conversion cases. But these are highly atypical. Most major changes in character and commitment come about slowly, over the course of many years.

People can change for the better. They can become more responsible when (and if) they mature. People can become committed to serious moral causes, even at significant personal cost. When this occurs, it almost always takes place step-by-step, gradually, over an extended period of time. The movement is often imperceptible at first. There is hesitation and resistance; there may be backsliding. Only after repeated actions and trials do lasting transformations take place. In my writings on moral development, I’ve described this uneven process as a ‘gradual transformation of goals,’ because over time it affects the person’s most motivating aims in life.”

Good news: People can change for the better. AND... It’s an uneven process.

George Leonard comes to mind. In Mastery he tells us: “Be willing to negotiate with your resistance to change... The fine art of playing the edge in this case involves a willingness to take one step back for every two forward, sometimes vice versa.”

Note: I always get a kick out of that “and sometimes vice versa.”

Buddha also comes to mind. In The Dhammapada, he tells us: “Little by little a person becomes good, as a water pot is filled by drops of water.”

Purpose is an active commitment to accomplish aims that are both meaningful to the self and of consequence to the world beyond the self.
William Damon

A Fulfilling Self-Identity

“Finally, my life review revealed four paradoxes in the quest to develop a fulfilling self-identity with integrity and purpose:

  1. The capacity for looking forward in a positive way requires looking backward in an open and frank way, acknowledging and coming to terms with regrets and negative occurrences.
  2. Autobiographical discovery deepens a person’s understanding of self; but at the same time it relies on the person’s knowledge of others who have influenced the formation of self, often in previously unknown ways.
  3. Identity with integrity requires taking seriously what we have done, what we are doing, and what we will choose to do (‘everything matters’); but taking ourselves too seriously can lead to exaggerated self-importance and detrimental self-absorption: humility is essential in reviewing the course of any individual life.
  4. Purpose is beneficial for the self because it demands a commitment to accomplish aims that are beneficial for the world beyond the self: this is how purpose fosters resilience and energy while deterring lethargy and self-absorption.

Every choice we make in life flows in some way from our sense of who we are and who we want to be. This is why self-identity is such a powerful force in our everyday lives. It shapes every risk we take, every aspiration we aim to achieve, and every mundane or noble purpose we pursue. Self-identity is not given to us at birth. We can intentionally work on revising our self-identities, out of a sense that we can (and should) determine the kinds of people we become. When we do this, we play an active role in inventing our own futures.”

Those are the final words of the book.

Ultimately, doing the hard work to integrate our past with our present as we look forward to a purpose-driven future leads to a more authentic, fully-integrated sense of self.

Here’s to doing that hard work and remembering that it’s best to not approach such important quests as striving to be the best, most Heroic version of ourselves casually or haphazardly.

I’m honored to be on the path with you and committed to doing my best as we show up and give the world all we’ve got.

Day 1. Let’s go, Hero.

Among other things, it’s confirmed for me the adaptability of the human spirit. Each of us can find a way, a unique and individual way. In some instances, we start by dealing the hand ourselves; in others, we play whatever cards we’ve been dealt. In all cases, the choices we make define our destinies.
William Damon

About the author

Authors

William Damon

One of the world’s leading scholars of human development.
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