The Moral Bucket List Analysis

According to the articles, “What Leads to Success in Life,” by Jocelyn K. Glei, and “The Moral Bucket List,” by David Brooks, a person must possess certain qualities in order to achieve ‘success’ in his life. While Glei emphasizes that self-control, passion, and perseverance are the necessary qualities needed to accomplish a person’s dreams, Brook illustrates that the keys to a successful life are the virtues that inspire the inner characters of a person. The article that resembled my outlook on success was “The Moral Bucket List” because the lessons that Brooks expounds on follow closely with the teachings of my religion as well as how they produce life-changing decisions.

As a Mormon, or Latter-day Saint (LDS), I’ve been taught that the virtues that Christ possessed and exhibited during his lifetime are the same virtues that a person should live by and the attributes listed in the ‘bucket list’ are similar in nature, albeit if not the

However, Brooks provides two examples of people, Dwight Eisenhower and Mary Ann Evans, who had decided to make the effort ‘to be better than used to be.’ Former president Eisenhower was a person that recognized that his temperament was a concern and would continually attempt to maintain an optimistic and cheery image; in fact, he occasionally performed ‘silly things’ to soothe his anger, such as throwing written slips of paper with the names of people he hated. Evans, an ‘emotionally needy’ woman who “[fell] for every man she met and [was] rejected,” lived in a society that condemned outside relations in marriages. When she fell in love with George Lewes, a married man, she made the pivotal decision in her life to pursue her love and this choice led to a steady devotion and a change in her character. Whether it is a personality or controversial issue, these people sought to improve themselves by making the effort to