The strangest virtue on this list is the one they teach on the Grinder

Humor might be the least likely quality to appear on a list of heroic virtues next to courage and integrity, and that is exactly the point Admiral William H. McRaven wants to make with it.

He locates its clearest classroom on what Navy SEALs call the Grinder, a stretch of rough asphalt where new officers face a daily ritual of physical training combined with public, merciless teasing about everything from their college choice to their love life. McRaven remembers his own first morning there, when a chief needled him about being too tall for his own good, and he shot back a line about being taller than the chief himself, a man visibly sensitive about his height. The circle went quiet for a beat before the chief burst out laughing. Welcome to the Teams, Ensign. Passing that test, McRaven says, mattered more to his acceptance than any physical score.

He extends the same idea into far darker settings: soldiers in hospital burn wards trading one-liners about their own injuries, eulogies for fallen friends built almost entirely around old pranks, because a life remembered through laughter is remembered as one that was actually lived. He points, too, to Abraham Lincoln, who kept telling self-deprecating jokes throughout the Civil War, criticized for it at the time, and who reportedly believed children should be taught humor in school alongside reading and arithmetic.

McRaven's argument is that humor isn't a break from the other virtues, it's a way of practicing all of them at once. Laughing at danger is a form of courage. Laughing at yourself is a form of humility. Turning a joke on your own failure instead of someone else's is a form of integrity. What humor does, in every one of these settings, is let people stay present with something painful, a wound, a loss, a public failure, without either denying it or being crushed by it. That, McRaven suggests, is a skill worth deliberately building rather than waiting to naturally possess.

Next time something goes wrong in a way that stings, a mistake at work, an awkward moment, a piece of bad news, try making one honest joke about it, aimed at yourself rather than anyone else, before you say anything defensive. Watch for the moment humor is being used to dismiss real pain rather than to survive it, and pull back if that's what's happening. When you're comforting someone else who's struggling, look for a way to let them laugh at the situation with you rather than only offering sympathy, since both have their place. Practice this the way SEAL recruits do on the Grinder, as a small daily habit rather than a talent you're either born with or not.