My Heroic Enchiridion
Preamble
Last November (2023), I listened to a podcast I like called Front Row Dads (thanks Tom W). The guest was Brian Johnson, and he was on a podcast tour promoting his book, "Arete" (pronounced are-uh-tay). His message instantly resonated with me. Sometimes there's a profound truth you can physically feel (somehow). I could feel it deep down - Brian was on to something important. He was talking about stuff I had studied in Marcus Aurelius' Meditations (my favorite book). He was making connections with CBT (which I learned when I was a kid). He was talking about changing (a profoundly sick) society from victims into heroes, starting with you and me. I was attracted to his company Heroic like a compass is drawn to North. So I downloaded their app, plugged at the end of the podcast. From there I got on their email list, where I learned about their coach training program. As somebody who leads a team every day, I knew that upgrading my coaching skills would be directly applicable to my effectiveness with my team. So I convinced my HR director to foot the bill.
If you follow along with Heroic, you may have heard that every day is day 1. It's a bit of a rallying cry. On my Heroic (actual) day 1, I had JUST signed up for their 300-day (nod to the Spartans at Thermopylae) coach certification training. Here's a 3-minute recap video of the program I took, serendipitously named "It's Day 1".
So, back to the story... I had just signed up - and I was fired up. It was day 1 for real. In one of the introduction videos, I was encouraged and inspired to write this blog post - https://www.kaneganderson.com/index.php/blog/journal/top-10. It's a top ten list of my most treasured wisdom that I've learned so far (pre-Heroic).
Well... those 300 days are now finished, and I completed all the course content. One of the final exercises of Heroic coach training tasked me with making a review of the top ten big ideas I'm taking away from Heroic. This reminds me of my day 1, when I wrote the linked article above - the top ten nuggets pre-Heroic. Now that I've learned all of the fundamentals of being a Heroic coach, it's day 1 again.
With a nod to Brian's favorite philosopher (and one of mine) Epictetus, I decided to name this article My Heroic Enchiridion. It means "ready at hand". Kind of like a sword hanging at your belt. I love the idea that the wisdom is ready at hand. That's why my laptop bag (which goes everywhere with me) has a copy of Epictetus' Enchiridion. I've read it, highlighted passages, and underlined stuff so much it's becoming ragged. I think maybe I should make a 15 page booklet of my Heroic Enchiridion - I might just end up printing whatever is below. So without further ado, here are my top 10 favorite ideas (+1... champions do more) from the 300-day coach training.
My Heroic Enchiridion
- Areté /closing the gap
- Targeted thinking
- Masterpiece days
- Antifragility
- Algorithms
- Big three x 3
- Flip the switch
- Making your previous best your new baseline
- Practicing my philosophy
- Grateful flow
- Champions do more. Dominating the fundamentals
I think each of these merits having their own dedicated blog post. Maybe I will in the future. But here's a super quick look at each one.
Areté & Closing the Gap
If I had to sum up Heroic's philosophy in one sentence, it would be "show up as the best version of yourself, so you can give your best to the world in service of something bigger than yourself". Positive psychology pioneer Martin Seligman calls this flourishing, by putting your virtues in action. The ancient Greeks would have called it being a eudaimon (etymology: good soul), through areté (living with virtue moment-to-moment). It comes down to minimizing the delta between how you show up, vs. the optimal, best version of yourself. As Jordan Peterson said, "I have never met anyone who was satisfied when they knew they were not doing everything they should be doing." That's what Areté means to me. It gives me great satisfaction to know I gave it my best shot. Whenever my words and actions fall short (oops), I feel a sense of disappointment at myself. Areté aims to eliminate that yucky feeling. It's win-win. The people and world that I love get my best, and I feel great. And if I focus my energy on what's important now, I can make a positive impact in the lives of those around me.
Targeted Thinking
Before I ever encountered Heroic I read Trevor Mowad's "It Takes What it Takes". My review at the time was not great lol. https://docs.google.com/document/d/1e24jqdol_i3uY7GwnaCoq_6c9M5RfPNP1v3mH_8Vpuo/edit?usp=sharing
I said the book was "meh" and the writing style was like having a coach yelling at you. But my #1 takeaway was this on neutral thinking:
This is about giving a nod to the reality of your situation, but refusing to accept that an outcome is predetermined. It’s like if you’re golfing and you chunked the drive. Didn’t even hit past the ladies’ tee. Acknowledge the truth of the matter. Yes you’re down a stroke in a bad location. Yes, making par is going to be harder now. No, my next shot isn’t doomed. I can still use my hybrid and hit 250 yards to get back on track.
It’s about realizing that every moment is now. Time has only 3 states: the before, the now, and the later. The before is what it is. No use whining, bitching and moaning about it. Accept it for what it was. The now is actionable. Will you waste it worrying? Will you let negativity dictate how you act now? Will you act like the champion you aspire to be and do your best?
Don’t worry about the past. Don’t think about the odds. You can’t afford to do anything but focus on the next steps required.
Well, Heroic took this further and made it easier to digest. Targeted thinking is based on neutral thinking, with one big distinction. You don't think negatively and get stewed in "this sucks". You don't think positive and lie to yourself saying "this situation is fine...". You don't stop at Moawad's "focus on the next steps". You dig a bit deeper and ask "what do I want?". Then you set a target and get to work. That's targeted thinking.
Masterpiece Days
Your life is made up of days. No individual day will make or break the whole thing, but you can't have a great life if your normal days are mediocre. So you need to realize that all your life is made up of days (or even moments) and make each day a masterpiece. You need to live intentionally and stop wasting your time on stuff that doesn't matter. Shit that will feel like a waste of time when you're on your death bed. When I'm 90 I highly doubt my Netflix watching will seem worthy of reflection. So I want to craft my days such that I can look back with pride, knowing I made the best of what time I had. The Heroic website says "make TODAY the day... Know what your ideal days look like, set clear targets, make progress while you make waves, control the kryptonite, create AM + PM bookends, remember the Deep Work + Deep Love blocks and iterate, iterate, iterate."
Your day is made up of the AM bookend, the bulk of the day, and the PM bookend. You have the most control of your AM. You can get up early, you can focus on what you want to, and the pressures and distractions haven't yet punched you in the gut and demanded your attention. But you have to recognize that your day started with how you felt when you woke up, which is HUGELY determined by the sleep you got. So if you think about it... today started last night when you wound down for bed time. If you want to make today a masterpiece it starts with a good night of sleep.
Antifragility
Being fragile is no good. When life inevitably bumps you, you don't want to break. You might think that you need to become resilient. That's a step up, but we can still do better. What if, whenever life bumped you, it caused you to get stronger? What if obstacles made you stronger? What if you were like a super saiyan from Dragon Ball, and the more beat up you got the stronger you evolved? That's the idea behind antifragility. Basically it comes down to one key idea: the worse you feel, the more dedicated you become to following your protocol. Some people stress eat (I've been guilty). When they feel bad, they make the matter worse by eating a bunch of garbage that makes them feel disgusting. Did that help? No. What if instead... hear me out... they went for a walk instead? Or did burpees until they felt better? Or connected with their loved ones? It comes down to something called "pre-committing". When you're feeling normal, you pre-determine what you should do whenever things go wrong. Meditatio Malorum mixed with your unique protocol. It begs the question - what is your protocol? When the time comes, rather than spiraling downward, what will you do?
Algorithms
This is kind of an extension of one of my other favorite books called "Atomic Habits" by James Clear (my review here https://www.kaneganderson.com/index.php/blog/books/atomic-habits). As I explored in my review of Atomic Habits... The more you reinforce a behavior, the stronger your belief becomes in your new identity as someone who [does good stuff x]. Act "as if" you already possess that trait or identity. Eventually you'll have no choice but to accept the identity.
The Heroic version is that you can install and delete habits, and "reprogram" your AI (ancient intelligence) via your Basal Ganglia, and run if-then algorithms on auto-pilot. Remember when you first learned to drive a car? Every moment felt like an eternity. Every action had to be carefully considered. Do I lane change? How much do I turn the wheel? Where is my turn signal again? Don't forget to shoulder check! What about now? Have you ever driven an entire hour without even realizing you were driving? All of a sudden you arrived at your destination. Presumably you did some accelerating and turns, and shoulder checks... probably... but who's keeping track? Your brain did it for you on auto-pilot.
Your basal ganglia is the part of your brain that gets programmed via repetition. It's your auto-pilot. And we want to get good at installing algorithms B=MAP style (behavior equals motivation x ability x prompt). Make changes to your habits so tiny that you can't fail, and repeat them religiously until they happen on auto-pilot.
Have you ever noticed how small habits compound over time? All of these little changes add up to something big, if you're consistent.
Big 3 Times 3
A good life can be considered in 2 bins. Your work and your love. Dominate both those areas, and you'll be alright. You can have a great career, and a great family life, and die happy in old age. HOWEVER... if you want to show up most powerfully in work and love, you're also going to need ENERGY. A lot of it. You need good energy. That means you need to go back to basics and dominate your fundamentals (more on that later). You need to show up with with energized tranquility. A calm and level-headed stillness which is powered by a deep well of super-charged physical power.
In each of the 3 categories - energy, work, and love - Heroic says you should get clear on 3 parts. Your identity, your virtues, and your behaviors. Your identity is who you aspire to be. Your virtues are the qualities you bring, and the behaviors are specific things you can do to live out your identity. For example in work I try to be "an engineering wizard", show up with "equanimity", and "crush deep work time blocks". Those are my identity, virtue and action. I have some for energy and love also. What about you? Who do you want to be? How does that person show up? What do they do? Think superhero alter-ego. Only the hero isn't the alter-ego, it's your true self. Superman isn't Clark Kent - that's just a mask he wears for protection in social life. The same is true for your heroic side - what you aspire to be is the real you! You just need to be that identity more and more consistently. In fact identity etymologically means "repeated being-ness". So go out and embody those ideals, act in integrity with those values, and crush the behaviors that align you with that ideal.
As part of the heroic coach program, you have to commit daily to your big 3. I took this a little further after reading Sahil Bloom's Curiosity Chronicle blog about the 3-3-3 journaling method. You plan your day based on: a 3-hour focus block on one important task, 3 little tasks you've been avoiding, and 3 maintenance tasks to stay on top of things. I combined that with the Heroic big 3 x 3, and added another 3... 3 things I'm grateful for, 3 goals (day/week/month), and 3 little reminders for self-encouragement. Check out more on that here: https://www.kaneganderson.com/index.php/blog/articles/3-3-3-x-3
Flip the Switch
This is a combination of meditation, an action for getting back to balance when life knocks you off balance, and a tool to practice noticing and extending the gap between stimulus and response. Holocaust survivor Viktor Frankl wrote in "Man's Search for Meaning" that "Between stimulus and response there is a space. In that space is our power to choose our response. In our response lies our growth and our freedom." You can practice finding that gap by flipping the switch. This is a quick mental/internal action that consists of 3 things - body, mind, action. Put your body into a powerful posture. Sit or stand up tall. Hold your head up with dignity and take up space, maybe striking a power pose. Take a deep breath to slow and clear your mind. Inhale patiently through your nose into your belly, and then exhale slightly longer. Then choose your optimal response and take action. This can be done any time, including in the middle of a conversation. It takes less than 10 seconds. It can ground you, calm you, and remind you to act in integrity with your best self.
Making Your Previous Best Your New Baseline
When most people hit a personal best, or achieve their goal, it doesn't take long until they slide back. Have you ever tried to diet or fast, or exercise? Did you accomplish some small goal like "intermittent fast 12 hours" or "lose 10 pounds" or "complete a run of 5k"? What happened after that? Were you able to lock in those gains and make that the new normal? If you're like most people, you slipped back into your old comfortable routines. Your old habits. Your old vice. The thing that led you to a spot where you felt you NEEDED to lose 10 pounds. It's not a problem with you - you're human. It's a design problem. We're all designed to seek the easy solution. To get comfortable and rest for a short time because hard times are coming. To relax when we can, and store up fat for times of famine. The only problem is... modern life. We can have it easy all the time. There's nothing stopping us from laying on the couch watching TV 30 nights a month for 30 years straight. There's no famine. We're not hunting for our food, we order it delivered to our home. So it's not up to life to challenge us, it's up to ourselves. We are the ones that need self-regulate. And that's the only way to lock in those gains these days. Stop giving up your hard-earned gains! When you find something that works for you, make that your new every day practice.
Practicing My Philosophy
Heroic is the first self-improvement book or website that actually held me accountable. It's easy to get fired up over a weekend retreat, then lose interest and forget all about it. With Heroic, I had to define my philosophy, practice it, and check in daily on my targets. Simple as that. With Heroic you go from theory to practice, en route to mastery. I read lots of books but never had to actually do anything. Until I got into Heroic coach training. Now I am being held to some pretty great standards. Standards I want to meet. Before I got into Heroic I wrote wishy-washy blog posts like this one... https://www.kaneganderson.com/index.php/blog/articles/what-do-you-live-by (sigh). Nice ideas but there are no action items. There's nothing making me actually do anything. Now I have dozens of targets that I hit daily ranging from "follow my nutrition protocol" to "go to bed on time" to "I play with my kids" or "I do sets of 11 burpees". If I fail one of these targets, it nags at me. I'm not satisfied. Heroic is why.
Grateful Flow
This is a simple exercise where you look around and find things to be grateful for. As I type this I'm sitting in my hotel room in Austin TX, during a week-long training/workshop series on Digital Power Supply Design and Power Factor Correction. I'm grateful for being here. I'm grateful for the instructor sharing his technical expertise. I'm grateful for my employer sending me here. I'm grateful for all our anonymous customers that funded my trip. I'm grateful for the hotel. I'm grateful for the desk I'm sitting at, and whichever anonymous carpenter made this beautiful desk. I'm grateful for the hotel staff that made my stay enjoyable. I'm grateful for Steve, my "lab partner" who is awesome and has tons of experience and wisdom to share. I'm grateful he went running 4 miles with me this morning. I'm grateful for my cellphone waking me up early to go running. I'm grateful for the anonymous developers who made my alarm clock app. I'm grateful for .... on and on and on forever.
This exercise has simply brought me a lot of joy.
The Fundamentals
Champions do more. #11 of my top 10 favorite ideas from Heroic is dominating my fundamentals. The fundamentals to being a happy, flourishing human are: eating, moving, sleeping, breathing, focusing, celebrating, and prospering. Just focusing on each one individually and making little improvements has been huge for me. Having a protocol on each has helped me show up more and more consistently as the version of me I want to be.
Eating - I have cut way down on sugars, flour, and vegetable oils. Learned more about balancing omega 3 / omega 6. Discovered interesting facts about food "science", nutrition, and food systems.
Moving - installed a habit that runs on autopilot. Every morning I get up early and run 5k. Every time I go to the bathroom, I owe myself 11 burpees and 11 pull ups. Every 20 minutes or so I stand up from my chair and shake off the "sedentary sludge".
Sleeping - I go to bed on time. I have a digital sunset.
Breathing - I know my coherent breath rate. I breath through my nose, even when exercising. I train my breathing every day.
Focusing - I block of sections of my daily schedule for deep work, and focus on my most important targets. I minimize distractions and focus on W.I.N. (what's important now) consistently with all the intensity I can muster. I realized that my super power is putting my attention on whatever I want, whenever I want, for however long I want to.
Celebrating - I celebrate joyfully the blessings in my life. I appreciate the unique and special individuals around me, and celebrate their awesomeness. I have a gratitude journal (see 3-3-3 x 3 above).
Prospering - I go forward with hope, knowing that I have inspiring goals. I have the ability to affect my life positively and make my future better than my present. And I am willing to try plan A, B, C, ... Z, AA, AB, ... ZZ and follow multiple pathways to achieve my goals. I remind myself daily that I have everything I need, and I have long ago jumped off the hedonic treadmill. I provide for my family, always turn forward. I have "turned pro" (Steven Pressfield style... see my notes on the War of Art ... that reminds me, I should read 'Turning Pro').
Summary
Well that's a super quick look at my top 10 favorite ideas from the Heroic coach certification training. I learned a lot, and also fleshed out some thoughts I'd already had. I really enjoyed summarizing it all in this quick note.
Did any of these strike a chord with you? What was your favorite takeaway from here? Try implementing one or more of these ideas in your own life, and let me know how it goes. Really. I'm interested to see if it helps you like it has for me.
