Off-Topic: The Power of Myth, Redux

In recent posts I gave an introduction to why “mediocre” thinking is harmful and why it’s necessary to understand that there is no such concept as “average” in the real world.

Some people have already asked me for book recommendations. In recent posts I left some very important ones. The Black Swan is one of the key ones. It explains how we ignore “black swans.” It explains how trying to predict the long-term future through past events is an exercise in futility, and most importantly: how we naturally always try to “reduce” things, how we try to “simplify” to make them more digestible, and how that’s a problem.

In this post I want to try to explain how the modern hero trivializes the importance of great myths.

Modern Heroes

Not necessarily related, another work I recommend is The Power of Myth by the great Joseph Campbell. This book is fantastic and, among other things, describes the Hero’s Arc. In all civilizations, myths have always been predominant. Each culture has its myths, populated by “heroic” figures.

Briefly, the Hero’s Journey begins with someone who starts out exactly like most of us — in the “average,” or below it. The journey takes them through paths full of dangers, temptations, and trials. At the end, the hero reaches the end of the journey and returns to preach what they learned. It’s one of the reasons why myths like that of Buddha or Jesus are told to this day. They are heroic allegories that form an important part of each culture.

Every Star Wars fan knows that George Lucas was a disciple of Campbell, and Luke Skywalker’s story is exactly the hero’s tale — beginning as a poor boy in the backwaters of Tatooine, passing through trials and temptations from the Dark Side of the Force, until managing to transcend himself and return to his people as a Hero. It’s one of the reasons Star Wars is a classic to this day.

In the modern world we still have various heroic stories. Today some of them are successful businesspeople. Steve Jobs, Jack Welch, Henry Ford, and many others.

All of us, in one way or another, enjoy having these “heroes.” Their stories inspire us and, as a side effect, sell many books and other merchandise, like courses and certifications.

The “self-help” of today is a poor representation of the mythology of old. And in this market that tries to manufacture the next heroes, pitiful copies try to claim the space of the next Perseus.

Charlatans

All this talk of “Heroes” was an introduction to the point I want to reach: how easily we’re deceived by charlatans and how to break out of this vicious cycle.

Ask Campbell, but perhaps it’s in our nature to need heroes to model ourselves on, to use as models and inspiration. And there’s nothing wrong with that. The names I mentioned above are reasonably worthy of being “modern heroes.”

However, many charlatans try to sell themselves as heroes and many succeed. The ‘Leader’ of today is the ‘Hero’ of yesterday. I just searched for ’leader’ on Submarino and just with that we can already see the quantity of books on the same theme: “How to become a leader.” This is probably the best-selling category among corporate self-help books.

First of all: self-help is a massive exercise in futility. If you can avoid it, avoid it — it represents a huge waste of time. Very few have any value. Of course, publishers aren’t exactly the best filters, so we’ll always have an enormous quantity of books that have no value at all. We just need to know how to separate the wheat from the chaff. Many people say you should read many books, and they’re right. But they need to explain more clearly that it doesn’t mean any book. Reading worthless books makes you dumber rather than helping. If only those kinds of books existed, I’d recommend stopping reading altogether. Remember Pareto: only 20% of all books are perhaps worth anything.

Any of those books with themes like “How to Be…”, forget it — waste of time. To understand this, just ask the most obvious question of all: ask yourself whether any of history’s great leaders needed any self-help book, course, or lecture to become a memorable hero. Can you imagine a John Kennedy, a Martin Luther King, an Abraham Lincoln reading a “How to Become a Leader” book backstage? Unlikely.

Now ask yourself another question: how many people do you know, in your immediate circle, who genuinely became good leaders because of this kind of material? I’ll go further: there are dozens of project management “methodologies” that promise miracles and everyone buys them.

The Great Fallacy

Here’s how it works: if you apply a certain technique or methodology and your project happens to succeed, all the credit goes to the methodology! “Of course it worked, thanks to the revolutionary methodology.”

But if your project fails, you’re to blame, because you obviously didn’t follow the methodology as it was supposed to be followed. If you had followed it, everything would have worked!

Do you understand the absurdity of this argument? All these books and courses on management, leadership, and results hide exactly this as their big trick: they list dozens of people and companies that have already benefited from their “techniques.” I’d bet all of those were successful in their projects not because of these methodologies but because of the quality of the teams, the people who executed them!

Those were teams with people who had the ability to navigate each obstacle, who subverted the “methodology” until they reached their objectives. They would have reached that objective with or without the recipe. In fact, they would probably have been even more successful, even sooner, without the hassle of these magic recipes.

I personally like the Agile philosophy. In reality, many people prefer to call them Agile “methodologies,” but I prefer to say “philosophy.” That’s because “methodology” seems to denote a systematic recipe that can be repeated in any scenario, which isn’t true. If team members don’t have awareness and discipline in the philosophy, then even if the techniques are implemented, the project will never be truly Agile. Just because you write on a sticky note and put it on the wall and time your meetings to not exceed 15 minutes, that doesn’t make your company or project agile.

In the age of modernity, we think we’re smarter, more intelligent. Are we? We seek heroes who overcame adversity and, as Nassim Taleb would say, we want to take their past successful experience and their recipes and apply them to our own projects. In other words, we’re trying to plan our future based on the past successful experience of those we consider heroes.

Worse, we still “adapt” these recipes because we think we know better. We currently speak very badly of the so-called “Waterfall process,” the staircase process, which was characterized as one of the worst ever created for software development.

The Waterfall was described in the paper Managing the Development of Large Software Systems, in the 1970s, by Winston Royce. It’s in this paper that the staircase-phases diagram that characterizes waterfall appears. But few people know that Winston himself wrote in that same paper that "…the implementation described above is risky and prone to failure." He himself was already proposing that this waterfall be executed at least twice — meaning he already knew it would evolve toward an iterative process.

We like to base ourselves on previously successful projects, on masters and scholars who give us magical solutions, but the vast majority (if not all) simply don’t do their homework and fall for the fairy tale like naive children.

Want to see something else that few people question? Has anyone stopped to check, empirically, how many of these managers formed via training actually have consistently successful careers (not accidental ones) in the future? I’ve never met one. I’ve also never seen any credible data on the subject from any credible entity with any relevant independent study.

Manufacturing Managers

I’ve been through all kinds of lectures, courses, and everything else about how to manage projects, how to deal with people — in short, how to be a leader. In a Gaussian world where the entire educational system incentivizes the average, when all these students hit the job market, there’s suddenly a shortage of people above the average.

Obviously: we’ve been creating people in a paternalistic, protectionist way — the worst way to raise a person. In school we only study what we’re given to study. We only do the homework we’re given. We only study to get a passing grade and move to the next year. We’re so accustomed to receiving orders that it’s now publicly apparent this generates excellent factory workers, but few thinking professionals and certainly very few great leaders.

I like to say that “leaders aren’t formed, leaders form themselves.” The way to encourage the formation of leaders while they’re still children is to remove from them the thought of the average and raise them in a meritocratic environment: where merit is rewarded far more handsomely than mediocrity. And when I say “far more,” I mean in an absolutely unequal way.

A democratic and evolutionary civilization doesn’t have so much to do with forcing equality — trying to artificially raise the weak while trying to bring the strong down so everyone ends up at the average. “Equality” simply means that nobody will prevent them from rising above average. But most people confuse this, thinking it means making everyone equal.

The correct solution is exactly the opposite: maintaining high inequality based on the criterion of merit. In the real world, this is what happens: the successful are orders of magnitude wealthier than those who make little effort. Wealth not only in the form of capital, but also in the form of recognition and influence.

Instead, companies continue doing the opposite: trying to follow the primary school curriculum of putting their employees in a classroom, expecting great leaders to emerge from it.

I know how this works: I’m a PMP Project Manager, certified by the PMI, the “renowned” Project Management Institute. Here’s what I say: it’s one more of the great corporate lies, so common today.

Here’s how it works: you’re required to attend about 2 or 3 months of classes to learn the “trade” of being a manager. You learn how to break your projects into WBS, how to put them on a Gantt Chart, how to calculate slacks, how to create a Project Chart, how to analyze risks (in Gaussian fashion!!) and so on.

You receive a workbook, do homework every week, exactly like you did in elementary school. At the end there’s the “entrance exam” — the 300-question certification test. Passing the 70% cut score (the average), you get a nice PMP diploma, a pin, and a signature template to put on your business card so you can start signing your emails as “Fabio Akita, PMP.”

Does all this make you a better manager? Well, if you were very bad, at least you get a little bit out of absolute badness and become something close to average. Don’t feel too proud about that…

But the question is: does this create “good managers”? Absolutely not. At best it proves you can read well enough to get 200 questions right in 4 or 5 hours, which, let’s be honest, proves nothing. After the brainwashing and rote memorization, you may become skilled at passing a test. You’ve all been through university entrance exams — you know how it is. A management course is exactly like a cram school.

I’ve met many project managers — more than I’d like — who are notoriously terrible, and they passed the PMP exam! When you graduate you’re happy, of course — I was. But if you’re smart, you start getting embarrassed to show this title when you see the other bad PMP managers. That’s when I stopped using the PMP title even after going through a process that cost me around R$5,000 (yes, a piece of paper is expensive), not to mention dozens of hours of mock exams.

Oh yes, and we become Leaders with an expiry date: mine expires in 2009…

Manufacturing Leaders

Either way, if your resume is weak and you’re self-aware enough to know you can’t deliver, go ahead and certify yourself in as many things as possible. The certification market exists because people never learned in school how they should be learning.

Everyone only learned to study what they’re given and to pass the test, at the average. I’ve known few truly self-taught people who have “game.” These people are precisely the ones who don’t give a damn about certifications. An acquaintance of mine — who I unfortunately had little contact with — but who is very intelligent, was one of those who told me “good people don’t get formed.” Indeed.

Also, “getting a 10 on a test” and “intelligence” have nothing to do with each other. You can get 10 on every test and that doesn’t automatically make you an intelligent person. In fact, I’ve known many nerds who got perfect scores on every test and are nothing more than slightly better-than-average factory workers.

Our concepts of heroes have changed a lot. For me the figure of the “Hero” has always been very strong and influential in my attitudes. People who are outliers, who alone managed to start from zero and build empires. Among my heroes have always been the great artists of the Renaissance, for example. People like Leonardo Da Vinci who broke barriers as a painter, sculptor, inventor, philosopher, anatomist, physicist, mathematician, etc. Among other great personalities like Thomas Edison, Benjamin Franklin, Carl Sagan, Stephen Hawking, Charles Babbage, and various others I came to know while reading encyclopedias in junior high school. Yes — encyclopedias were not made to serve as decoration.

Fortunately, my upbringing always pushed me to exceed the average. If I came home after a test saying I got a 9, my mother would respond “the test goes up to 10, if you’re missing 1 point it means you’re missing effort.” If I got a 5 — the average — it was punishment. My father, for his part, always prized self-knowledge, bought books and science magazines, and gave me a globe with a world map as a birthday present.

You’re a company and you want to form great leaders? Put great challenges in their hands, push them to their maximum, extract everything you can from them. Be a tyrant without being a dictator. Demand perfection, and for that you need to know how far they can go. Only those who manage to surpass extraordinary obstacles are extraordinary people. Leaders are Heroes, by definition!

But “leader” is not something you earn through a title. Subordinates’ respect just because of job hierarchy means exactly nothing. A structure where the only form of command is the old “chain of command,” where the subordinate obeys simply because their job depends on it, represents a company that can’t extract a fraction of the capacity it could. That’s why I’m against hierarchical organizations. As I mentioned in the other post, hierarchies are one more Gaussian form of control through the average — something that doesn’t work. Insisting on the mistake only makes things more wrong.

The Death of Heroes

Here’s the problem with Gaussian thinking: in a world that incentivizes the average, there’s no room for Heroes. According to this thinking, the heroes that do exist today are “accidents” — because according to Gaussian probability, the chance of a hero appearing is so small it’s almost zero, meaning something a “normal” person will never achieve and therefore shouldn’t even consider as a possibility. It’s “safer” to stay at the average.

Heroes exist; they appear every day. Open Fortune and see the list of the world’s 500 richest. There are already 500. But the last person on that list is infinitely richer than any of us. Extend the list and get the 10,000 richest — even the last person on that list is far richer than anyone you’ve ever known. Go further down the list and you’ll realize there are thousands of small heroes: people who left the “normal” path and became small heroes. And not just in terms of money.

But there’s another problem in the world of the average: many people know this trick. The “trick” is that people would even like to be heroes, but it takes work: everyone knows it’s a monumental effort and highly risky to try to follow the hero’s path. Everyone knows that in the Hero’s Arc, the middle of the journey is full of trials, dangers, and temptations of the devil. Nobody likes to suffer for an uncertain future. People are naturally short-sighted. They like to “say” they plan for the future, but that’s just rhetoric.

Exactly the people who know this trick are the ones who invent the magic recipes, the methodologies, the step-by-step procedures for how you can become a hero in 24 hours, without sweating, without effort, without risk. For a small sum of money and a few hours of your day, anyone can be a hero — and they’ll even give you a certificate saying so! And companies hire these fast-food heroes! Give them positions of command and their subordinates will obey them simply by the force of the title. What could be easier?

But as I said before, there’s no empirical data proving the effectiveness of this kind of method. Companies simply “believe” these things work. After all, the trainers’ pedigree looks good, other companies say it works, it has good references — why doubt it?


Everyone falls for the fallacy of only showing the projects that succeeded (thanks to the people, not the methodology) and, of course, “forgetting” to list the projects that applied the methodology and didn’t work out.

It sounds so smart when the trainer says: “As a Leader, you need to motivate your team.” He just fails to explain exactly, step by step, how you actually “motivate” someone. But, of course, nobody explains that. Worse still: as Taleb describes, people are reduced to stereotypes and roles: inanimate puppets that, according to the magic recipe, are predictable and easily controllable. Just “motivate,” just “incentivize,” just “be communicative.” It’s very easy to build attractive rhetoric — though completely empty. What’s difficult is actually leading a project to success.

An acquaintance of mine used to say: “Those who know, do. Those who don’t know, teach.”

But according to Pareto, this is normal. At least 80% of the population, companies, and professionals will think the same way. Good for the other 20% or fewer: less competition.

The world was not made to be fair or equal. The real world is, by nature, highly unfair and highly unequal. In the real world, true heroes are battle-hardened, thick-skinned from so much hardship, and rise thanks solely and exclusively to their own efforts. The real world is based on meritocracy. Many will be fooled for a time, thinking they’re in a place that will be infinitely stable and equal — but that period is temporary and destined to disappear, giving way to a merit-based system that will crush them without mercy. Most people are terrified of this; terrified of losing their comfort zone.

All these step-by-step recipes, disguised as self-help, masquerading as serious courses, are nothing more than cheap mythology in homeopathic doses. I won’t describe them as anything more than what they really are. They all have great “advice.” The best definition of advice I’ve ever seen was in the famous Sunscreen video:

“Advice is a form of nostalgia. Dispensing it is a way of fishing the past from the disposal, wiping it off, painting over the ugly parts, and recycling it for more than it’s worth.”

Campbell’s Heroes don’t live in the comfort zone: the hero’s routine is precisely to leave the common path. The hero’s journey begins exactly when they decide to challenge what others consider impossible. The hero becomes myth when they conquer the impossible. And the impossible is not conquered through “normal” paths.

Myths are rare, unfortunately (or fortunately).