Heroic Philosophy A.K.A. “Heroism”
Everyone is born with talent and the desire to unleash it, and that makes life the quest to devote your time and attention to your talent’s optimal expression. The most effective strategy for transforming your talent into skill and peak performance is to follow your conscience, no matter the obstacle and no matter the cost.
Your conscience is the voice that calls on you to be your most authentic, most courageous, most extraordinary self, and calls you out when you fall short. Your conscience emanates from your talent and points in the direction of your talent’s optimal expression. Your conscience is your compass during times of uncertainty.
Integrity is the ability to align your decisions and actions with your conscience. Integrity the transcendent ethic upon which Heroism is based. It is a skill that can be trained and mastered, and when this skill is mastered, flow becomes more readily accessible.
Flow is the “reward” for integrity. Flow is the optimal state of human consciousness that delivers peak performance. Flow is the bliss that Joseph Campbell referred to when he said “Follow your bliss.” If there is an optimal state of human consciousness that delivers the optimal expression of human talents, and integrity delivers that state of consciousness, then integrity is the transcendent ethic because it serves optimal human flourishing.
The greatest tragedy in life is wasted talent, because the optimal expression of one person’s talent can change the world. That’s the tragedy on a global scale. On an individual scale, wasted talent leads to a life of regret, resentment, despair, and destruction. If one person’s lack of integrity leads to destruction, what happens when a community lacks integrity? What happens when a community sacrifices integrity for comfort and safety, for status and approval, and for meaningless, momentary pleasures?
If integrity is the transcendent ethic upon which our morality is based, then what is the most effective strategy for living a life of meaning and fulfillment that contributes to human flourishing? What is the most effective strategy for developing integrity and achieving flow?
The most effective way to live a life of meaning and fulfillment is to devote your time and attention to your talent’s optimal expression.
The most effective way to do that is to align your decisions and your actions with your conscience. That is the skill we call integrity.
The most effective way to develop your integrity is to make decisions in advance that align your time, attention, and actions so you don’t get distracted by changes in your emotional state.
The most effective way to construct your decision making framework that makes loss aversion work for you is to precisely define your quest, the stakes, and the available time frame.
This approach allows you to confront and overcome distractions like uncertainty and self-doubt so that you never surrender your quest for the optimal expression of your talent.