12 Essential Skills for Catholic Men
On building houses upon rock
GK Chesteron hated self help gurus, saying, “...They do not teach people to be successful, but they do teach people to be snobbish; they do spread a sort of evil poetry of worldliness.”1
He’s not wrong. Self improvement is often a code for not really improving at a particular thing. As soon as you write a book, or article, or online course about something like improving your mile time, it’s no longer self help, it’s a course about running. That is a solid answer to cringy self help: be more specific. Is there another one?
Foundations
On the blog of author Scott H Young, there is a monthly "self improvement" series that I have been following along with. Scott and any readers that are joining in, are working through 12 "foundations".
A foundation is the underlying support for something larger. If your life is the building, those parts of it that are less visible but essential to stability are the foundations. If something is wrong with the foundation, whatever it is supporting cannot last long.
Put more positively, foundations are parts of life that, by their nature, support multiple other parts of life in multiple ways. Each of us have different vocations, but Young thinks that the support for these things overlap, “...there’s a core in life that is relatively universal. Things we all need to do simply because we are human beings.” (Young 2024)
And he has identified a few of these:
Consider exercise. Outside of a few medical exceptions, we all should be exercising, at least a bit. Exercise is good for keeping strong, of course, but it’s also linked to improved cognition, mood, health and longevity. Regardless of your career, hobbies, or personality, exercise is good for you.
Reading is another foundation. The world is full of knowledge that would benefit each one of us, whether we’re academics or athletes. (Young 2024)
The course, called Foundations, goes through 12 areas and asks you to develop a habit for each.2
Objection
It may seem like this is focusing on worldly pursuits, and another of many productivity distractions from the spiritual perspective. There are many misguided courses along those lines. If I had to summarize the curricula of these courses in two words they would be money and bodybuilding. However, the ultimate goal, spoken or unspoken, for the students is to "get girls".
There is so much wrong with this. Not only objectifying women but assuming they are ultimately shallow. Or perhaps only pursuing the women who are. Really it’s both and both are sad. And yet, many men are lost in life and rolling with it. Instead of calling out depravity, the political right is trying to capitalize on it, as explained in an article in the Front Porch Republic.
The idea that [Andrew] Tate’s success a few years ago at convincing a segment of young men to enter his Hustlers University to earn a P.H.D. (Pimpin’ Hoes Degree) will translate into convincing that same segment of men to commit to a movement aimed at preserving the best of Western culture and virtue seems fanciful at best. (Dean Abbot. Front Porch Republic. 2025)
I think Foundations is different from these kinds of courses in that it (1), considers a more broad view of life. Money and fitness are in fact on the list of foundations, but they are put on the same level as reflection and service, aspects of life I doubt you will find in an Andrew Tate video.
(2), even if some elements are the same, it takes a much humbler stance: that these habits are not ends in themselves, but high return supports for your more particular goals. By being less grandiose, it ends up much more impressive. To an extent, this is a program for every goal all at once.
Making Foundations More Catholic
That said, Mr. Young is not Catholic (to my knowledge), but since I am, I want to explain how I am "making it Catholic".
1. Pursuit of Perfection
A natural organization of the course can be brought out to help a Catholic on his way to perfection. I mean this literally.
In the fall, we lost three things that we had in paradise. Those gifts were:
Infused science: Adam, like the angels, had knowledge of all things he needed to know. It was infused because he didn’t go about gradually acquiring them like we did.
Bodily immortality: Our first parents would have lived forever in their bodies.
Control of the passions: There was no concupiscence, which is the natural inclination towards sin. Obviously, Adam and Eve could (and did) sin, but practicing virtue was naturally easy for them.
That is how we were originally made, and what we are meant to return to in the bodily resurrection. How are those for lofty ambitions? They are a consequence and in service of loving God perfectly.
I would like to propose that you view those three gifts as the perfection of three areas, mind (perfect knowledge), body (immortality), and spirit (control of the will). I think this is an easy jump and that when we pursue these areas in life, we are, without knowing it, trying to return to this original state. Further, I contend that it is good to do so. (Provided you match the original purpose of better loving the Lord).
Now where the foundations come in is as a breakdown into more specific focuses for those categories. With the leftover category of work, which you will want to do well, but is not necessarily in one of those columns.
Mind and Body seem dead on as breakdowns to me. The spirit column? I’m not as sure. Certainly they are all ways to love your neighbor, which is about as good as a secular perspective can do for the spiritual life. Still, it doesn’t completely sit well with me conceiving it in this way.
Additionally, once you have them lined up like this, it makes you wonder… what are the spiritual foundations? What should a Catholic add?
2. The Spiritual Foundations?
Prayer. Fasting. Almsgiving.
In my experience, they not only support each other, but if I am doing well in one of these areas, the rest of my life will improve as well.
So, do we have 15 total or are we going to cut some? I say neither. They should just be recognized as the essential elements of three of the existing foundations.
Prayer is the most important goal of reflection.
Fasting is the most important goal of food.
And almsgiving is the most important goal of money.
It may seem contrived, but I hope the two previous sentences show just how bold this really is. That the most important thing about food is fasting and the most important thing about money is giving it away is very radical and very Catholic. That is the stuff that makes saints, if only we can find the courage to follow it.
I also think that having this spiritual category overlap with the categories of Mind, Body, and Work, can help to consecrate these categories to the goal of loving God, which (as mentioned above) is necessary for these pursuits not to become idols.
Now “Social” is our extra category, but as mentioned above, these are very good ways to love your neighbor. So you even have a third breakdown of loving God, loving your neighbor, and loving yourself.
That is a lot of categories, but I think the fact that they fit together in so many ways proves just how core and natural they are. The Saints loved matching together anything that came in sevens, like virtues and vices or gifts of the Holy Ghost, and they could do so well because those things are pretty near the core of life.
Making Foundations More Manly
How this course meant for all can, specifically, help men trying to get their [stuff] together:
1. Problem Solving
All the foundations have some sort of habit involved with them. Some look more like goals, where you create some sort of system, but the habit would come afterwards to follow the system you have set up. You’d probably also include going back and tweaking your system.
In fact, all of them involve setting up systems. All habits are systems, usually pretty binary ones, if X time, do Y action. However, if you live anywhere but a cloister (and even there) there will be obstacles compelling you to do something other than Y. For the habit to still get done, you have to adapt.
Problem solving is a key part of habit building. If you usually workout at home, what will you do on vacation? If it is usually intense, what will you do if you are sick or injured? To steal Young’s diagram:
But problem solving doesn’t just apply to exercise, it applies to all habits. In that sense, it is a foundation for the foundations: a meta-foundation. It is what you might call one of the meta-skills of manliness. As men, we want to be able to fix things. We want to accomplish goals that we set and it is actually preferable if there are considerable options to think around; that makes it all the more masculine.
This is something I’m trying to bring out as I do Foundations, improve at problem solving by simply taking new obstacles as constraints in a nuanced problem.
2. Discipline
Once you have the system, you need to follow it. This requires another manly meta-skill: discipline.
A habit based course will build discipline, the words are synonyms. After all the systems in the world, hard things are still hard to do, the systems just organize those things. Men need to be disciplined. Maybe more so now than in ages past. When 90% of society were peasant farmers, you didn’t need so much discipline to be strong.
Prayer has always required discipline, it can be difficult to watch even one hour.3 And now there are even more distractions, including browsing different productivity courses and Substack.
Because of the nature of discipline and the soft lives we live, many men simply don’t enter the arena and don't even try. Having the system can give you the courage to start, to believe that it is possible. Another failure of discipline is trying to do too much at once, getting overloaded, and giving up in despair.
Foundations can help here because it gives you a whole month to establish a pretty reasonable habit. You may look at the list and see that you do many of the things already, that some seem easy, and then be tempted to do many of them at once. Don’t do it, humble yourself to one seemingly obvious trait at a time. In just 2 or 3 months, you will find that balancing them all is, in fact, quite difficult and you will have to rely on past months successes to bolster your efforts.
Building discipline is physiologically similar to breaking an addiction, you have a certain baseline that you have built for yourself through experience, and you have to be slow and steady in building a new baseline.
To not do so may be another mechanism by which you avoid doing hard things in the long term. Certainly, it is a symptom of pride.
3. Competence
Let’s return to the idea of getting girls to be interested in you. If men really want a course that will help them get a girlfriend, this is the best one I can imagine... because it doesn't mention or reference getting a girlfriend.
On one level, there is a glaring oversight in the courses predicated on building muscle and a strong stock portfolio (even if they were valuable in the dating world or decent moral attitudes). They miss a much more important area: social skills.
This is much more valuable in dating. And usually a lack of these social skills are the reason for struggling with women. It is also a lack of social awareness that explains why people would fall for thinking money and muscle mass are the silver bullets.
The foundations structure has sections on money and fitness, but it also has sections on outreach and connection. If you want a relationship the odds are in favor of the latter two. This is another advantage and distinction over and against the popular, secular men’s courses.
On a higher level, not even this point matters, because if there is anything that is true about the allure of money and fitness, it's that they prove competence.
No woman, especially a good, virtuous woman, wants a guy that is only interested in them. You have to have other interests. And it’s attractive to be good at things.
And yet, as a man reading this, I am willing to bet that you want to be good at things anyway. Even if you’re in a relationship you still want to be skilled. Even if your crush didn’t know about it, you want to know that you have what it takes.
If we’re being honest, few men are competent in all of these areas. So many extrapolate from their experience in high school or even grade school and assume they can never be in good shape or the life of a party. Those who think they are doing pretty good in a foundation probably never think to spend dedicated time improving competence in that area. At best, they stay the same. More likely, skill atrophies.
On the spiritual side, you can perfect your aims and commit to prayer, fasting, and almsgiving within the context of normal, human life. On the masculine side, you can build discipline, problem solving skills, and become generally competent.
I think Chesterton would approve.
Conclusion
I am wary of humanism. Even the name sounds bad, a focus on the world, the material, the self. And indeed, much that has gone wrong is culture can be linked to Renaissance humanism. Modern humanism is specifically focused on excluding God, so that is definitely out. But there is a Christian Humanism, which history counts St. Thomas More as a member.
Christian Humanism came about because smart but pious people saw the value in reviving classical sources of knowledge. You can see it in Aquinas referencing Aristotle and Augustine referencing Plato. The problem was that smart but less pious people were taking it too far, basically becoming pagan again and rejecting revelation. This is a defining feature of Christian Humanism: the careful balancing of the human centered values from ancient thinkers with a continual appreciation of the divine and eternal values of our faith. That is obvious to us now with our classical, Christian high schools. It is an academic definition more than a practical one.
If Christian Humanism is to work as more than something purely intellectual or the paring away of pagan elements in Renaissance Humanism, I think it would look something like my diagram from number 2 with the spiritual foundations. Something like “the disciplined use of the uniquely human aspects of life to the best of each aspect and properly balanced with each other all in the service of the Lord our God”.
Chesterton, GK. The Fallacy of Success. https://duval.focusschoolsoftware.com/uploaded-assets/file/THE%20FALLACY%20OF%20SUCCESS.pdf. This is a very good article as you may expect.
https://www.scotthyoung.com/blog/2025/06/03/connection-day-one/ As of writing, this is the most recent post, it helpfully links to all the others if you would like to follow along.
Mt 26:40