Perhaps you've heard of or read David Brooks's widely selling book on character.  In an age in which too many of us in the West (and, to an extent, other parts of the world as well) focus on what we can do or acquire, Brooks is suggesting that we pay more attention to whatever is in which impels us to live.  Think less about what we do, he offers, and more to how we do it.
     Brooks's observations are of course not terribly new.  Most psychologists would say the same thing.  Yes, existentialism's thesis that existence precedes essence (what we do makes who we are) proved wildly popular in the Seventies, Eighties, and beyond.  Today, however, more and more of us are coming to realize that it is, in fact, bankrupt.  If we think that what we do makes us who we are, we overlook the far more important thing: who are we?  How do we know who we are if we construct ourselves solely on what we do?  We're ignoring where "we" in fact begin:  within.  We are moral beings.
     Many a writer has noted that although we can spend our lives running from our innate to cultivate inner holiness (do not we, if we live rationally, all wish to do good?), in the end it will catch up with us.  We will die, maybe satisfied with what we have done, but thoroughly befuddled as to why, other than for the enjoyment of a self which we never stopped to consider or examine, we actually did it.
     As Jesus said, what does it matter if we gain the whole world but lose our soul?