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Life is hard enough. Why make it harder? 

That was the question Andrew Abela, dean of the Busch School of Business, posed in an on-campus Q&A to launch his new book, “Superhabits: The Universal System for a Successful Life.” The book launch was held on Oct. 22 in a full auditorium at the Busch School and .

Noting that modern research shows that habits can greatly influence our physical, mental, and emotional health — for good and for bad — Abela uses stories, science, data, and the wisdom of St. Thomas Aquinas to lay out a practical and comprehensive guide to a better life in his book. Superhabits work together to ease decision-making, interpersonal interactions, and manage emotions.

“The real thrust of the book is that most people have more difficult lives than they need to have. Life is harder than it needs to be…The reason it is harder is that there are certain aspects of being human that could almost be on autopilot,” Abela told interviewer Kathryn Lopez, B.A. 1997, who is director of the Center for Religion, Culture, and Civil Society at the National Review Institute. 

He defined a superhabit as a special kind of habit, or virtue. The challenge with using the word “virtue” is people associate the word only with moral or religious right or wrong, but a habit is something anyone can acquire through practice across different parts of life.

“If we understand the virtues as habits, then they become automatic. The more you grow in virtues, the happier you are. It gets easier to be the kind of person you want to be,” Abela told the audience, referencing both Aristotle and modern research.

In his book, he writes that developing any one of these virtues, which he calls “superpowers accessible to anyone,” helps a person become “calmer, more productive, more joyful, and healthier.” The key is to start small until the habit gets easier and becomes routine, like flossing your teeth at night or exercising a muscle, he told the audience at the book launch. 

In his research, Abela found that both ancient philosophers and modern social scientists had developed lists of virtues, each with a different number of virtues. St. Thomas Aquinas, however, took a different approach. He developed not a list but a system of virtues that provided a superhabit for each aspect of life and showed how these superhabits worked together. 

Aquinas’s “Treatise on the Virtues” is the basis of the “superhabits system” Abela developed to help individuals implement superhabits into their daily lives. In the system and the book, four super superhabits – self-discipline, courage, practical wisdom, and justice – are broken down into smaller superhabits. The most effective way to grow in the superhabit of self-discipline is to start by working on one of these smaller superhabits first before moving onto the next, Abela said.

Along with the , Abela has a  and a  that uses a series of questions to help a person identify areas of strength and growth, and includes an AI “coach.” Abela also is the lead on a $1 million grant from the Educating Character Initiative to expand programs and initiatives designed to cultivate virtue among all undergraduate students at ����ɫ�� University.