You Can Be Brave and Disciplined and Still Have a Bad Temper

Think of a leader you respect. She pushes back on the CEO when a deadline is a fantasy. She is up before dawn, ships what she says she will ship, and tells you the truth about your work even when it stings. By any list of virtues you learned in school, she scores high.

Then her temper shows up. She leaves a code review comment that reads like a slap. Or she answers a question in the team channel with one sentence that makes a junior engineer stop asking questions for a month.

Ask her about it and she will file it in one of two boxes. Some people call it directness: “I don’t sugarcoat, and people know where they stand.” That puts the temper under courage, as if snapping at someone took bravery. Others call it a discipline problem: “I need to work on my self-control.” That puts it under moderation, as if anger were one more appetite to hold back, like sugar or sleep.

Both boxes miss. Aristotle would have told her that anger has its own subject, its own test, and its own excellence, and that being brave and disciplined says very little about whether she passes it.

The four boxes we inherited

Plato’s Republic names four virtues: wisdom, courage, moderation, and justice. The Stoics kept those four at the top and filed a long list of smaller virtues underneath, with endurance and confidence under courage, and orderliness and self-control under moderation. Christian writers later called them the cardinal virtues, from the Latin word for a hinge, and the four-heading map has run through Western moral teaching ever since. Plato himself gave anger more room than the headings suggest. In the Republic, spirit is its own part of the soul, meant to side with reason against appetite, and it gets its own training. The flattening came mostly with later summaries and checklists, and many company values decks look a lot like them: four or five words in a nice font, each meant to cover a large part of life.

The map is useful. Four words are easy to remember and hard to argue with. The trouble is what the filing does to the things underneath. Once temper sits under courage or under self-control, nobody looks at it directly anymore. You grade yourself on the heading, and the heading looks fine.

Aristotle’s map: one virtue for each subject

Aristotle drew a different map. In Book II of the Nicomachean Ethics he walks through the areas of life one at a time and names an excellence for each, sitting between a too-much and a too-little. Fear and confidence get courage, and bodily pleasures get temperance. Giving and taking money get generosity, with a separate virtue for spending large sums well. Honor gets two virtues of its own, and ordinary social life gets three: truthfulness about yourself, wit when people are joking, and friendliness in everyday company.

Anger gets its own as well. Aristotle calls it praotes, usually translated as good temper or mildness. His description in Book IV is worth reading slowly: “The man who is angry at the right things and with the right people, and, further, as he ought, when he ought, and as long as he ought, is praised.”

Count the tests in that sentence: the right thing, the right person, the right way, the right time, and the right length of time. Courage answers none of those questions, and neither does self-control in the sense of resisting an appetite. They are questions about anger itself, about what deserves it, who should receive it, how it should come out, and when it should end.

Aristotle separates anger from courage directly in Book III. Spirit, the hot drive that rises in a fight, can help courage, but he says that acting from anger or pain alone does not count as courage. Someone who charges because they are hurt is acting from the hurt. Courage needs a reason as well as heat, and spirit helps only when it follows the reason.

He was also candid that the virtue for anger has no proper name in Greek, and that praotes leans a little toward the side of too little. He did not treat too little as safe. People who are not angry at the things they should be angry at, he says, are thought foolish, and putting up with insults to yourself and your friends is slavish. A leader who watches a peer humiliate someone on their team and stays pleasant has failed the same test as the leader who explodes, from the other direction.

The dissent: Seneca would remove anger entirely

Not every ancient agreed. Seneca wrote a whole treatise, On Anger, arguing that anger should be removed instead of trained. He reports Aristotle’s view that anger is needed in a fight and should serve as a soldier instead of a commander, and he rejects it. Once you let anger in, Seneca says, it stops taking orders.

Seneca is right about most anger at work. The soldier in his image usually ends up running the camp. The code review comment written in heat, the reply sent at eleven at night, the sentence in a meeting that ended the discussion: none of these were anger under command. I wrote earlier about the anger people defend as righteous while it runs them, and that is the kind Seneca had in mind.

Where Seneca goes too far is the leader who feels nothing when someone on their team is treated unfairly, or who stays calm while a vendor lies to them for the third time. Removing anger altogether leaves no response to real wrongs, which is the failure Aristotle called slavish. The useful reading takes Seneca’s warning about how fast anger takes over and keeps Aristotle’s claim that the right amount, aimed at the right thing, belongs to good character.

The modern problem: how a bad temper survives other strengths

The four-box map lets a person grade themselves well and fail the exact subject their week keeps testing. On a team, it looks like this.

A director is generous with team dinners and conference budgets and stingy with raises. She files herself under justice because she treats everyone the same. Money has its own excellence in Aristotle’s map, and being even-handed does not tell you whether you are generous where it counts.

A founder is honest about the product and the numbers and cannot laugh at himself in a meeting. Aristotle gave humor its own place, between the buffoon who will say anything for a laugh and the boor who is offended by every joke, and a team knows which one its boss is within a week. I wrote about what it means when your team stops teasing you.

Then there is the leader from the top of this piece, brave and disciplined, with a temper her team schedules around. Each of these three has a strong heading and a weak subject, and each one believes the heading covers it.

Living it: grade yourself by subject

Aristotle did think the virtues connect. In Book VI he argues that practical wisdom brings them together. Look at what practical wisdom does in his account, though: it judges the particular case. It works one situation at a time. Good temper comes from practicing the right response to anger in the situations where anger shows up, until that response becomes how you are, and excellence in some other part of life does not substitute for the practice. Aristotle says as much in Book II, chapter 1: we become just by doing just acts, and good-tempered by acting with good temper, over and over. That is why the practice below is a daily log you keep for a week.

The practical shift is to grade yourself by subject. List the situations your life tests every week and score yourself on each one, instead of on four words. Anger belongs on almost every leader’s list, because it shows up weekly and because the people who work for you feel every miss.

1. Name the subjects your week tests. For most leaders the list includes anger, money, credit and praise, humor, and honesty about their own mistakes. Write down the last time each one came up and how you did.

2. Run the five tests on your anger for one week. The first flash often arrives before you choose anything. Everything after it is yours: the next sentence, the send button, and how long you hold on. After each flash, ask whether it was the right thing to be angry about, the right person to aim it at, the right way to say it, the right time, and the right length of time. The first test is a judgment you can question in the moment: was I really wronged, and by this person? A common pattern, worth checking in your own log, is passing the first test and failing the rest, where the anger was earned and then landed on the wrong person or hung around for three days.

3. Check the too-little side. Write down one thing from the last month you should have been angry about and let slide: a peer who took credit for your team’s work, a vendor who lied, a decision that hurt your people. If the list is empty, look harder.

4. Ask someone who sees you every week which subject you fail. Skip “am I a good leader?” because people will say yes. Ask “where do I get it wrong: anger, money, credit, or humor?” and wait through the pause.

5. Stop letting one strength cover for another. When you hear yourself say “I’m direct” or “I’m hard on myself too,” check whether you are filing a temper problem under a virtue you already have. The same goes for “it was a brutal week.” A bad week explains a failed test, and the grade stays the same.

The test

• Which virtue do you rate yourself highest on, and does it ever get used to excuse a subject you fail?
• When were you last angry at work, and did it pass all five tests?
• What should you have been angry about this month and let slide?
• If your team ranked you on anger, money, credit, and humor, which would come last?

The challenge for this week: keep a short anger log from today through next Friday. One line per incident, with the five tests marked pass or fail. At the end of the week, read it and see which test you fail most.

Final Thoughts

The four cardinal virtues are a fine summary, but they make a poor checklist for your week. Filed under courage or self-control, a temper never gets examined on its own terms. Aristotle gave anger its own excellence and its own tests, and he counted both too much and too little as failures.

You can be brave, disciplined, and honest and still lead a team that checks your mood before bringing you bad news. Grade yourself on the subjects your week tests. Start with anger, since the people who work for you have probably been grading you on it for a while.

If you want to build character one subject at a time, starting with the ones your week tests hardest, MasteryLab is built for that.

FAQ

What are Aristotle’s virtues?

In the Nicomachean Ethics, Aristotle goes through the areas of life one at a time and names an excellence for each, sitting between too much and too little. Courage concerns fear and confidence. Temperance concerns bodily pleasures. Generosity concerns giving and taking money, with a separate virtue for spending large sums well. Two virtues concern honor. Good temper concerns anger. Truthfulness about yourself, wit, and friendliness concern social life. Practical wisdom is the intellectual virtue that judges the right response in each case.

How did Aristotle think about anger?

Aristotle gave anger its own virtue, good temper. He praised the person who is angry at the right things and with the right people, as they ought, when they ought, and for as long as they ought. He counted both sides as failures: too much anger, and too little. Not being angry at things that deserve it, and putting up with insults to yourself and your friends, he called foolish and slavish.

What are the four cardinal virtues?

The four cardinal virtues are wisdom, courage, moderation (also called temperance), and justice. Plato names them in the Republic. The Stoics kept them as the four primary virtues and filed many smaller virtues beneath them, and later Christian writers called them cardinal, from the Latin word for a hinge. The four headings are a useful summary, but filing a subject like anger under one of them can keep it from being examined on its own terms.

What does praotes mean?

praotes is the Greek word Aristotle uses for good temper or mildness, the virtue concerned with anger. It means being angry at the right things, at the right people, in the right way, at the right time, and for the right length of time. Aristotle admitted the virtue has no exact name and that praotes leans slightly toward the side of too little anger, but he still counted too little anger as a fault.