A unique individual is not someone who has a single undivided view of the world and speaks with one voice on every subject. In fact, the most certain sign that someone has anesthetized individuality in service of some ideology or party line is that he has a consistent, unequivocal answer to every question. Individuality is a continuous process of arguing against your own beliefs—an argument that is sometimes a friendly intellectual debate, sometimes a passionate emotional battle…. Everyone knows that fictional characters in novels debate different points of view with each other. What is less obvious is that, behind the scenes, unheard by the characters, the author’s inner voices are also arguing with each other over which story to tell and how to tell it. This is not a sign of weak-mindedness or inconsistency, but of intellectual flexibility and strength. The authors refuse to be satisfied by simple or straightforward explanations of complex things, and they repeatedly correct the flaws of one explanation by exploring a different one.
Edward Mendelson, The Things That Matter
Interestingly, that’s one of three books on the shelf with almost the same great title, all worth reading: The Things That Matter, Things That Matter, and Things That Count. And a potential fourth: Leading Lives That Matter. All of them seem to echo—and, if I could remember, they probably quote—Socrates’s famous line in Plato’s Republic: “We are discussing no small matter, but the right conduct of life.”