Fifty-two weeks. Fifty-two specific things to actually do, not just agree with.
That is “Building a Moral Compass” in one sentence. Each week hands you a single, concrete practice, tell the truth for seven days, forgive someone, reduce what you throw away, learn to say no, and asks you to try it, not admire it from a distance. No week asks for more than a week can hold.
The book opens with a short chapter on where our sense of right and wrong comes from in the first place, Aristotle’s idea that character is built through repetition, Kant’s sense of duty, the utilitarian case for weighing consequences, before handing the theory over to fifty-two weeks of practice. Each challenge follows the same shape: what to do, why it matters, what tends to get in the way, and a few honest questions to ask yourself once the week is over.
It took the better part of seven years to finish, missed a Christmas 2024 deadline along the way, and went through more rewrites than its author cares to count. The book’s own Author’s Note says more about that delay than this page needs to. What matters here is simpler: every one of these fifty-two challenges has actually been lived with first, not merely written down.
“Building a Moral Compass” is the third book in the “Scattered Notes” series, following “Living True, Living Well” and “Parents, the Forgotten Angels.” Where those two books look inward and toward family, this one looks outward, at the small, repeated choices that add up to a character. A moral compass, the book argues, is not handed to anyone fully built. It gets built, one week at a time.
Readers working through the book can also download a free companion spreadsheet: the first few weeks are filled in to show you how it works, and the rest is left deliberately blank, so you can choose which challenge to take on next rather than follow a fixed order. There is space to log the date you took on each one, a reflection, and your own honest assessment of how it went. It works alongside either the printed or digital edition, and it is yours to keep and reuse for as many years as you want to repeat the practice.
Available in book stores and from Amazon in Kindle, paperback, and hardcover soon.
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