Ben Carroll is a collector of wisdom. In particular, he likes to collect quotes from wise people.

On a computer at his Aberfeldie home, Victoria’s new premier keeps a 25-page document with aphorisms he has read and jotted down over the years. The list includes everyone from JP Morgan Chase boss Jamie Dimon to Abraham Lincoln to the Dalai Lama.

One of Carroll’s idiosyncratic habits is to take a selection of these quotes into meetings, including meetings of cabinet, and pore over the familiar lines as if swotting for a test. In many ways, this is what he has been doing ever since he entered state parliament 14 years ago.

So whose words did he take into the caucus meeting that delivered him the Labor leadership? “I think it was Damien Hardwick,” he laughs during a chat at his favourite local coffee shop.

Some of the world’s great philosophers, military strategists and political leaders would be humbled to learn they got pipped by the coach of the 14th-placed Gold Coast Suns.

The quote Carroll attributes to Hardwick – “Sometimes when you are in a dark place you may feel you have been buried, when in fact you have been planted” – appears to have been borrowed from Australian evangelist campaigner Christine Caine. Either way, it is telling that Carroll walked into that fateful meeting armed with a message about personal resilience and growth.

As a political persona, Carroll is deliberative rather than instinctive, self-assembled rather than naturally made.

He’ll never have the easy charm of his neighbouring premier Peter Malinauskas or the charisma of Chris Minns. When he opened the new Brimbank Tech School earlier this week and came face-to-face with an AI-powered droid, it invited a joke about who was more robotic.

But Carroll has been thinking about leadership and the qualities he admires in good leaders long before he entered the frame for Victoria’s top job. Now that the job is his, at least until November 28, he remains an assiduous work in progress.

During our chat, Carroll explains that he is a voracious reader of biographies and a copious notetaker.

One of the books on his bedside table is Team of Rivals, Pulitzer-prize winning author Doris Kearns Goodwin’s 2006 book about Abraham Lincoln. It delves into how Lincoln managed leadership tensions within a Republican Party that, at the time of his presidency, was less a broad church than a group of warring tribes.

Lincoln’s way of dealing with this, Goodwin recounts, was to appoint the three men he beat for the Republican nomination to the three most senior positions in his cabinet. He surrounded himself and took the counsel of forthright people with differing opinions to his.

Carroll won’t invite his predecessors Allan and Daniel Andrews to serve on his executive team but he has surrounded himself with experienced, capable Labor people who date back to the Bracks and Gillard governments. These include his chief of staff Julie Ligeti, media director Kimberley Gardiner, speechwriter Joel Deane and advisor Mounir Kiwan, who fell out with Jacinta Allan’s chief of staff and is now back in favour.

Carroll’s favourite book at the moment is Where the Light Gets in, a best-selling, self-help guide written by Ben Crowe, a former Nike executive-turned mindset coach who mentored the careers of tennis champions Ash Barty and Dylan Alcott and Hardwick during his premiership run at Richmond.

“It’s about entering the cave, backing yourself and going for it,” Carroll says. “I really love that book. It’s also about the expectations on yourself. You have just got to work hard and be who you are – be your authentic self.”

During our chat, Carroll mentions that he practises stoicism, an ancient Greek philosophy that, about 2300 years before self-styled influencers started vlogging about mindfulness, offered advice for leading not just a good, moral life, but a less stressed one.

Although the central principle of stoicism has become a locker and boardroom cliche – to control things you can and not worry about things you can’t – a lesser-known quote from its founder also informs Carroll’s approach to politics.

“We have got two ears and one mouth so we should listen more than we say,” Zeno of Citium wrote. So far, Carroll’s leadership has been faithful to this maxim.

Carroll’s willingness to open his door to people who felt locked out by his predecessors – most notably the business community – this week resulted in him delaying both the passage and implementation of the government’s work from home laws.

It is also reflected in his careful approach to framing the terms of reference for a royal commission into Big Build corruption, appointing a royal commissioner and counsel assisting and establishing a special prosecutor’s office to run in parallel.

He has brought in Mary Polis, a legal academic who administered the royal commission into family violence, to help establish the inquiry. “This is a very serious endeavour,” Carroll told parliament this week. “We are going to get it done, and we are going to get it done right.”

At the same time, Carroll’s laconic responses in question time has presented Opposition Leader Jess Wilson and her team with the unaccustomed challenge of trying to keep the premier on his feet for more than a few seconds at a time.

When the premier does speak, he delivers his lines with a slow, calming cadence that borders on the soporific. One of the four virtues of stoicism is temperance and Carroll, in both the time he took to challenge for the leadership and his approach since taking it, is a study in emotional restraint.

You wouldn’t know from watching him that his greatest test is less than four months away.

Chip Le Grand is state political editor.

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