When new Questers arrive at the farm, they come from widely diverse backgrounds: different schools, different countries, different ideas of what a gap year even is. So early on, Jim Musto sits them down and gives them a shared way of thinking about why they are here. He tells them that they need to build certain qualities that will make them more effective and allow them to lead more purposeful, exciting and fulfilling lives. These qualities are embodied in the “soldier”, the “philosopher”, and the “poet”.
It's a working framework for the kind of person Quest is trying to build, and the Quest programme is structured around it.
The soldier: discipline, courage, and getting on with it
The soldier represents the hard character qualities: discipline, hard work, courage, grit, sense of humour, loyalty, teamwork and self-sacrifice. These aren't abstract virtues at Quest Ascent; they're things you build gradually through repeated daily practice. These qualities are at the heart of the ethos of Quest. They become part of the language you speak and the things you do every day.This is how you build habits that last. Early morning physicals. Made beds and cleanup. “Right place, right time, right kit”! Following through on a task when nobody's checking. A sense of humour under pressure, because a good soldier has to be able to work with people, be resilient, and not take himself too seriously.
You don't develop courage by sitting still. You develop it by being placed in situations that ask something of you and answering the call.
The philosopher: learning to actually think
Then there’s the philosopher, the thinker. This is where Sheila Musto's work comes in, running weekly sessions that push students to reason through big questions for themselves rather than simply accepting what they're told. In a world of algorithm-fed opinions and social pressure to hold the "right" view, this is deliberately countercultural: students are asked to sit with a question, examine the evidence, and arrive at their own considered position, then have the nerve to hold it.
Jim describes the combination of soldier and philosopher as what actually lets someone make a difference in the world: courage without thought is just recklessness, but courage paired with the discipline to think clearly is what lets a person say what they believe and act on it.
The poet: the capacity to actually enjoy life
The third figure is easy to overlook, but it might be the one modern life erodes fastest. The poet represents feeling: the ability to genuinely enjoy a sunset, a joke with friends, or a good meal, rather than needing constant external stimulation to feel anything at all.
Jim has watched this recalibrate in real time. Take away the screens that most young people default to for entertainment, and something in their capacity to enjoy ordinary life quietly resets. After a few weeks of limited screens, people start enjoying and appreciating ordinary pleasures: meals for the food and also the conversations and humour with your mates, the beauty of the farm, a sunset or sunrise, a card game or banter and stories around a fire. Questers often tell us that they have learnt to appreciate the time to think, even the time to get bored, and then to think and be creative about what to do with that downtime. Others tell us that when they get their phones, that’s when they get bored, because they soon realize that scrolling Instagram is a poor alternative to living fully in real life. The ‘’simulation’’ leaves you empty and bored, compared to the active engagement with life that happens when you escape the bondage of the small screen.
Why the three together, and not just one
Any one of these on its own is incomplete. Discipline without thought is blind obedience. Thought without discipline rarely gets acted on. And neither means much if a person has lost the capacity to actually feel alive in their own life. Quest Ascent's structure (the physical challenges, the training of skills, the weekly debriefs, the reflective coursework, the deliberate removal of phones) is built to develop all three at once, because they have found that real character growth, the development of habits and the shifting of perspective, doesn't happen through any single lever pulled in isolation.
It's a simple framework. That's the point: most young people have been too distracted to think about who they are and how to develop their characters, as opposed to their image. This kind of framework allows them to think about their own character in a structured way and provides a language that can help them articulate their thoughts, that lead then lead to action in a positive direction.