Hero's Rules

1 .You are a hero on a journey.

When did you stop wanting to be a hero?

As a child, you were obsessed on heroes, changing the world. You have grown up, but did you stop wanting to be a hero?

You want to do good in the world.

You are motivated by the opportunity to improve the life of others. You need to matter.

And when you see a young athlete pushing themselves at practice or making a game saving play, you know they are imagining themselves as their hero as well.

You know that you are a hero when you bring together your greatest talents in the areas of your greatest passion.

2. Your significant achievements have followed a Hero’s Journey.

ll significant achievements in your life have followed a version of the hero's journey. It starts with making the decision to do something amazing, jumping into the unknown, hopefully finding a mentor to help you, teaming up with others, coming up with solutions to challenges, facing the biggest challenge of all, and ultimately overcoming both your fears and big external challenges.

You want to be part of organizations that themselves are on Heroic Journeys.

As a leader of others, you understand that the biggest perk for people you are recruiting is to help them on their own big Journeys and to give them the experience of completing meaningful Journeys with you.

The Hero’s Journey has twelve stages of progress:

Hero lives in the ordinary world, comfortable but hobbled by an internal barrier.
Hero receives a call to adventure to do significant good
Hero refuses the call
Hero meets a mentor
Hero commits to the quest
Hero faces increasingly difficult obstacles (external such as monsters and internal such as anger), forms alliances, and gains tools
Hero loses mentor
Hero confronts a seemingly insurmountable obstacle standing between them and the Quest goal, to some degree alone.
Hero and allies overcome the obstacle, which requires using everything earned on the journey, and overcoming their internal barrier.
Hero receives treasure
Hero begins the journey back home. Hero is tested again near home, including with the decision to return home after all
Hero returns home with the treasure, without past internal barriers. Hero is wiser and more powerful, if also a bit more sober.

3. You want to find you calling.

You want to find your calling in life. Why are you here? What is the point of your existence? As you discover your callings through a series of Journeys—what you're good at and what your talents are—you level up. Our callings never stand still.

Once we achieve our callings, we level up and reveal new higher-level callings. This is how we grow—it’s an ongoing process. You value anything that helps you move along your journey and know how to make progress.

People talk about the importance of education. And while they are right, to a point, you value anything that helps you make progress on any of your journeys. Sometimes a new tool helps you make progress. Or a new contact. Or free time. Or someone to share the heavy lifting. Or a map or instructions. Or the right feedback. People around you call these things by different names, but they are all interchangeable to you.

And what helps you most in getting from here to there is simply past success in getting from here to there.

4. You can't be forced to learn anything.

You are motivated by money, or good grades, or a performance review. To a point.

Your time and hands can be bought. But not your passion and creativity.

Instead, the first step in any project for you is the decision to do it. You need to decide to go all in.

You need to know how any project will help you. And if it isnot going to important, it at least has to be fun. (Or is it the other way around?)

You also believe this is true when recruiting others. You have to sell to them why the project is worth their head and heart, not just their hands.

5. The people from whom we learn the most are peers.

Learning and growing is the result of working with peers and colleagues, including online, with whom you can have real interactions.

You have never learned much from teachers. Or bosses. You don't trust them, and the way they think they are teaching you doesn't work.

This in part because...

6. You hate to be bossed around.

Even when the person is right.

If you are told something, your first instinct is to prove them wrong. If you are told to do something, you scheme on how to get out of it.

When you are micromanaged you know you are cheated out of the ability to grow. You want to make your own mistakes - that is how you learn. You want to earn your independence.

As a leader, you motivate others to action not by fiat but by giving them interesting choices.

7. You learn through deep group projects, not lectures or essays.

"How would you rather learn a computer game? Playing the first few levels or reading the instruction book?"

Some of you Journeys are a day, and others are decades long. Some are solo, and others with large groups. Some are playful, and others have impossibly high consequences.

But you have found that when Journeys are about two months long, with real stakes, objective success criteria, trackable progress, interesting risks, that you care about, and that are challenging, you grow ten times faster than any other time.

They allows you glimpses into the person you can be. They allow for calibrations, they require self management and group leadership, and the threat of failure is real.

When you are a leader, you set up work for yourself and others as often as possible to follow this framework.

8. What you need to know are about 200 mental models.

What you are really learning are about two hundred mental models for how organizations and industries function, some industry specific professional skills, decision making, self-management, and team management.

Decision making

When doing something new, plan to fail (cheaply) early on.
Factor in opportunity costs.
When researching, fight the confirmation bias.
Factor in the impact of The law of diminishing returns.
Factor in the impact of compound interest.
Use inverse thinking (rather than thinking about how to succeed, and then doing those, instead think about how to fail, and then avoid doing those).
Understand that Pareto principle (80% of the results often come working on 20% of the challenges).
When planning more than a few steps ahead, think of probabilities of outcomes, not just possible outcomes.
When faced with a problem, before adding things to solve it, try eliminating things.
When planning, use the bell curve
Have recipes for conducting and understanding research.

Self management (Leading Yourself)

Assume all worthwhile projects will follow the Hero’s Journey.
When you make a promise, keep it no matter what.
The less you spend of what you make, the more you have to invest.
Have recipes for engaging a new industry.
Every place you shine, create new contacts.

Self governance (Leading Others.)

Build a Tribe
Differentiate between types of community members;
protect the givers and phase out the takers.
Calibrate being warm hearted and tough minded.
Evolve Persecutors into Challengers, Rescuers into Coaches, and Victims into Creators.
Increase the level of the Tribe, from focusing on individuals to embracing an abundance mentality.
Establish the right metrics
Have recipes for assembling a team.
Have recipes for servant leading.
Use stories.

9. You return frequently to the big questions of life to help make decisions.

At least once a week, you wrestle with the big, philosophical questions.

What is a good life?
How do you motivate a hero?
For what should a citizen be responsible?
Does power corrupt?
When should we disobey authority?
In fifteen years, would you rather be rich, famous, or happy?
What do we owe future generations?

As a leader, you put some time aside for your team to also consider their work in the context of these big questions.

10. You value guides and mentors.

You need "adults" who are not authority figures. You need guides and mentors.

Guides seldom answer questions, do not evaluate, are not subject matter experts and do not try to fix cultures.

Instead, they may tell a useful story. They ask good question. They encourage participation, deep thinking, and commitments to ideas.

They praise efforts, not results or individual strengths.

And they remind people of tools that could help.

We can share with Guides because they can't use it against us when it comes to being a candidate for a new opportunity or promotion.

Mentors are similar to guides, but with industry knowledge and a few more answers.

And just as guides and mentors perish or otherwise go away in cinematic depictions of the Hero's Journey, so to do Guides prepare participants for the (fast approaching) day when they will not be there at all.

11. You need a culture that helps you build good habits.

A couple of hours after you wake up, for a couple of hours, you have the will power and focus to accomplish intense, brilliant work.

You have a second, shorter window in the later afternoon.

If you use that time well, you can can increase your power (volume of output, quality of output, brain growth) by a factor of ten.

The rest of the day can be be used for interpersonal work, discussions, daydreaming, answering emails.

The focus time of the morning must be protected, either by you or the people who wish you well. It is not more important than the creative "just waking up" or "In the shower" time, but it is easier to casually lose.

Any specific activity that has value in repetition (reading, exercising, eating well, sleeping, goal setting) needs to become a habit.

You track time.

You need and want leadership practice opportunities until it becomes second nature.

You need a culture that supports your good habits.

When a leader, you similarly nurture the good habits in your team.

12. You value accomplishments that are valued by the outside word.

You don’t want your accomplishments to be tied to your relationship with your boss or personal capital with one person. Or even one organization.

You want your work to be recognized in a transferable way through earning defined accomplishments. You go after accomplishments that have non-subjective, externally valued successes associated with them, which can be audited by others with your permission.

You want to earn these accomplishment at about the rate of 4 - 6 a year.

And you frame work for your team similarly, helping them help themselves.

13. Your team is accountable and so is self-managed.

You want to produce great things. You can do this alone, but you are more powerful in a team.

You want your team to be generative, and accountable for what it generates. Which means, you need your community to be self-directed. You and your teammates each have an ongoing voice in management and the opportunity to take turns being the leader.

You know that progress within your heroic community comes from balancing failures, successes, chaos, and order. You don't expect it to be a smooth ride.

You want to control your community so that, over time, you can phase out people who don't want to be there or play the same game as you.

Your team invests around 20% of its time together in self-management.

This includes an early investment in tribe building. As a leader, you then focus on you and your team 1) understanding why you are working, 2) how to get along with each other, 3) how to keep energy high, and 4) how to produce outputs of excellence.

14. The best way to prepare for a life of meaning is to practice a life of meaning.

Every project allows the members to practice a life of meaning.

You use arcs for each day, project, and year. Each arc presents a challenge and defines why it is important, and then ends with a review of how well the challenge was met.

15. If you don't feed the heroes, you lose the heroes.

The stakes are high.

If organizations feed the heroic employees, they attract more heroic employees. Over time, those employees not interested in being heroes tend to leave. Those on the fence often find their inner hero and become amazing.

In organizations today, heroes are often sprinkled around in pockets of "Heroic communities" -- self-managing generative communities that follow most or all of these rules - that are doing the organization's important work. Leadership teams tend to be heroically organized, as are some pockets of product development and sales teams. These fast-moving communities produce deliverables that are innovative, substantial.

Heroic communities also level up the participants, evolving members into leaders with great industry skills. These heroes become motivators who inspire others to play hard. Finally, these communities increasingly define the organizations culture, and generate accountability, scrappiness, proactiveness, and attract more heroes.