By the end of January, most of us have given up on our New Year’s resolutions. These are goals we enthusiastically set during the silent nights of self-reflection that Christmas affords us. We contemplate our Savior’s magnificent and humble life in contrast with our own feeble and self-seeking, sinful existence. We intensely desire personal renewal to e holier and nobler persons; yet, alas, we lack the will to actualize our true human potential.

Many blame the failure mit on laziness or some other insuperable vice; others point to the natural distraction a busy life has on our focus once we are caught up in the flurry of school and work again.While true for the most part, such excuses are symptomatic of a deeper mea culpa based on a lack of anthropological clarity of what human beings are meant to be.

Created for Greatness: The Power of Magnanimity (Scepter, 2014) by the French-Russian author Alexandre Havard provides a remedy to this intellectual and spiritual gap.It is one of the most valuable contemporary philosophical books to help us understand just why abandoning virtuous achievement is a serious anthropological mistake, leading to general discontent and even despair.

Havard’s short book—just 96 pages—is essentially the sequel to his acclaimed, multi-language publication Virtuous Leadership: An Agenda for Personal Excellence (Scepter, 2007). In it, the Moscow-based executive leadership coach dedicates five chapters, replete with practical and spiritual wisdom, to the virtue of magnanimity — what he calls the “jet fuel…, the propulsive virtue par excellence” of human achievement…

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