Off-Topic: The Power of Myth, Redux

In recent posts I explained why “mediocre” thinking is a problem and why there is no such thing as “average” in the real world.

Some readers already asked me for book recommendations, and I dropped a few important ones in recent posts. The Black Swan is at the top of the list. It explains how we ignore “black swans” and why trying to predict the long-term future from past events is an exercise in futility. The core point: we instinctively “reduce” and “simplify” everything to make it digestible, and that is a problem.

Now I want to explain how the modern hero has trivialized the great myths.

Modern Heroes

Another book I recommend, not directly related to the subject, is The Power of Myth by the great Joseph Campbell. It’s a fantastic book and it describes, among other things, the Hero’s Journey. Every civilization had its myths, populated with heroic figures.

The short version: the Hero’s Journey starts with someone just like most of us, at the “average” or below it. The road is packed with danger, temptation, and trials. In the end the hero completes the journey and returns to preach what he learned. It’s one reason myths like Buddha’s or Jesus’ are still told today: they are heroic allegories baked into every culture.

Every Star Wars fan knows George Lucas is a Campbell disciple. Luke Skywalker’s story is the hero’s tale beat for beat: a poor kid from the backwaters of Tatooine faces trials and the temptations of the Dark Side of the Force until he transcends himself and returns to his people as a hero. It’s one reason Star Wars is a classic to this day.

The modern world still has its heroic stories. These days some of the heroes are successful businessmen: Steve Jobs, Jack Welch, Henry Ford, and many others.

We all like having these “heroes”. Their stories inspire us and, as a side effect, sell mountains of books and merchandise, like courses and certifications.

Today’s self-help is a poor man’s version of ancient mythology. And in this market bent on manufacturing the next heroes, pitiful copies fight over the spot of the next Perseus.

Charlatans

All this hero talk was the setup for the point that matters: how easily charlatans fool us, and how to break the cycle.

Ask Campbell, but the need for heroes to model ourselves on is probably in our nature. Nothing wrong with that: the names I mentioned above are reasonably worthy of the “modern hero” title.

The problem is the charlatans selling themselves as heroes, and plenty of them pull it off. Today’s “Leader” is yesterday’s “Hero”. I searched for “leader” on Submarino’s site and the results alone show the size of the gold rush: a flood of books on the same theme, “How to become a leader”. Probably the best-selling category in corporate self-help.

First things first: self-help is a giant exercise in futility. If you can avoid it, avoid it, because almost all of it is a waste of time. Publishers were never good filters, so there will always be a mountain of worthless books. The job is separating the wheat from the chaff.

Plenty of people say you should read a lot of books, and they’re right. They just forget to add that not every book counts. Reading bad books makes you dumber; if those were the only books around, I’d tell you to stop reading. Remember Pareto: maybe 20% of all books are worth anything.

A book titled “How to Be…”? Skip it, waste of time. To see why, ask the most obvious question: did any of history’s great leaders need a self-help book, course, or lecture to become memorable? Can you picture John Kennedy, Martin Luther King, or Abraham Lincoln reading “How to Become a Leader” backstage? Hardly.

Now the second question: how many people around you actually became good leaders because of that material? I’ll go further: there are dozens of project management “methodologies” promising miracles, and everyone buys in.

The Great Fallacy

The logic goes like this: you apply the technique or methodology and, if the project succeeds, the method gets all the credit. “Of course it worked, thanks to the revolutionary methodology.”

If the project fails, it’s your fault, because you obviously didn’t follow the methodology properly. Had you followed it, everything would have worked!

See the absurdity? All those management, leadership, and results books and courses hide this exact trick: they list dozens of people and companies that benefited from their “techniques”. I’d bet those projects succeeded because of the quality of the teams, the people who executed them. The methodology only showed up afterwards to take the credit.

These were teams full of people able to route around every obstacle, who subverted the “methodology” until they hit the goal. They would have gotten there with or without the recipe, and probably sooner without the magic-formula baggage.

I personally like the Agile philosophy. Many people prefer to say Agile “methodologies”, but I prefer “philosophy”. Methodology implies a systematic recipe you can repeat in any scenario, which isn’t true. If the team lacks awareness and discipline in the philosophy, you can implement the techniques all you want and the project will never be truly Agile. Writing on sticky notes, slapping them on the wall, and timing 15-minute meetings doesn’t make any company agile.

In the modern age we think we’re smarter, sharper. Are we? We chase the heroes who beat the odds and, as Nassim Taleb would say, we want to take their experience and their recipes and apply them to our own projects. In other words, we plan our future based on the past success of the people we call heroes.

Worse, we still “adapt” those recipes, convinced we know better. Take the reputation of the so-called “Waterfall process”, the staircase process, considered one of the worst ever created for software development.

Waterfall was described in the paper Managing the Development of Large Software Systems, from 1970, by Winston Royce. That’s the paper with the famous staircase diagram. What few people know is that Royce himself wrote in it: "…the implementation described above is risky and invites failure." He already proposed running the process at least twice, which means he knew it would evolve into something iterative.

We love leaning on past successful projects, on masters and scholars with magic solutions. The vast majority simply doesn’t do the homework and falls for the fairy tale like naive kids.

Here’s another thing almost nobody questions: has anyone empirically checked how many of these training-formed managers go on to have consistently successful careers? I never met one. I also never saw a single credible number on it, from a credible institution, in any relevant independent study.

Manufacturing Managers

I’ve sat through every kind of lecture and course on managing projects, dealing with people, being a leader. In a Gaussian world, where the whole educational system incentivizes the average, students hit the job market and suddenly there’s a shortage of people above average.

Of course there is. We raise people in a paternalistic, protectionist way, the worst way to raise anyone. In school we only study what we’re handed, only do the homework we’re assigned, only study to scrape a passing grade. We’re so used to taking orders that the outcome is plain for everyone to see: excellent factory workers, few thinking professionals, and very few great leaders.

I like to say that “leaders aren’t formed, leaders form themselves.” The way to encourage future leaders, starting in childhood, is to rip out the average mindset and raise them in a meritocratic environment: one where merit gets rewarded far more than mediocrity. And when I say “far more”, I mean absolutely unequal.

A democratic, evolving civilization was never about forcing equality, artificially lifting the weak and dragging down the strong until everyone lands on the average. “Equality” simply means nobody will stop you from rising above the average. Most people confuse that with making everyone the same.

The correct solution is the opposite: keep a high level of inequality based on merit. That’s how the real world works: the successful are orders of magnitude wealthier than those who barely try. Wealth in capital, but also in recognition and influence.

Companies keep doing the opposite: they rerun the grade-school playbook, stick employees in a classroom, and expect great leaders to walk out.

I know how this works: I’m a PMP-certified Project Manager, certified by the PMI, the “renowned” Project Management Institute. And I’ll say it out loud: it’s one more of the great corporate lies so common these days.

It works like this: you’re required to sit through 2 or 3 months of classes to learn the “trade” of being a manager. You learn to break a project into a WBS, build a Gantt chart, calculate slacks, draw a project chart, analyze risks (in Gaussian fashion!), and so on.

You get a workbook, you do homework every week, just like grade school. At the end comes the “entrance exam”: the certification test, 200 questions. Beat the cut score, barely more than half, and you get a handsome PMP diploma, a lapel pin, a signature template for your business card, and the right to sign your emails “Fabio Akita, PMP”.

Does any of that make you a better manager? If you were truly awful, at least you climb out of absolute awfulness and land near the average. Don’t be too proud of that.

But does it create good managers? Absolutely not. At best it proves you can read well enough to get slightly more than half the questions right in 4 hours, which proves exactly nothing. After the brainwashing and the rote memorization, anyone gets good at passing tests. Anyone who survived a cram school knows: a management course is the same deal.

I’ve met many project managers, more than I’d like, who are notoriously terrible. And they passed the PMP exam! When you get certified you’re happy, of course, I was. But if you’re smart, you start feeling embarrassed about the title once you see the other bad PMPs out there. That’s when I stopped using mine, even after a process that cost me around R$ 5,000 (a piece of paper doesn’t come cheap), plus dozens of hours of mock exams.

Oh, and we become Leaders with an expiration date. Mine expires in 2009…

Manufacturing Leaders

Anyway, if your resume is weak and you know you can’t deliver, go ahead and get certified in as many things as possible. The certification market exists because people never learned in school how to actually learn.

Everyone only learned to study what they’re handed and to pass the test, at the average. I’ve met few truly self-taught people with real street smarts. Those are exactly the ones who couldn’t care less about certifications. A very smart acquaintance of mine, one I unfortunately had little contact with, put it to me straight: “good people don’t get manufactured.” Indeed.

And by the way, acing a test and being intelligent are two very different things. You can get perfect scores across the board and still be far from smart. I’ve known plenty of straight-A nerds who turned into slightly-better-than-average factory workers.

Our concept of the hero has changed a lot. For me, the Hero figure was always a strong influence on how I act: outliers who single-handedly went from zero to empire. I always admired the great Renaissance artists, like Leonardo da Vinci, who broke barriers as a painter, sculptor, inventor, philosopher, anatomist, physicist, and mathematician. And other giants like Thomas Edison, Benjamin Franklin, Carl Sagan, Stephen Hawking, and Charles Babbage, all of whom I met reading encyclopedias in junior high. Yes, encyclopedias were not made to be decoration.

Luckily, my upbringing always pushed me past the average. If I came home with a 9, my mother would say: “the test goes up to 10; if you’re missing 1 point, you didn’t try hard enough.” If I got a 5, the average, I was grounded. My father, for his part, always prized self-knowledge: he bought books and science magazines, and once gave me a world globe for my birthday.

You’re a company and you want to grow great leaders? Put big challenges in their hands, push them to the limit, squeeze out everything they have. Be a tyrant without being a dictator. Demand perfection, and know how far each person can go. Only those who overcome extraordinary obstacles are extraordinary people. Leaders are Heroes, by definition!

Now, you don’t earn “leader” from a job title. Subordinates’ respect through sheer hierarchy is worth nothing, zip, zero. A structure where the only form of command is the old “chain of command”, where the subordinate obeys because his job depends on it, is a company extracting a tiny fraction of what 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, and it doesn’t work. Insisting on the mistake only makes everything more wrong.

The Death of Heroes

Here is the problem with Gaussian thinking: in a world that incentivizes the average, there’s little room left for Heroes. By that logic, the heroes who do exist are “accidents”: Gaussian probability says the odds of a hero appearing are so small they’re nearly zero, something no “normal” person could ever reach. Not even worth considering. The “safe” move is staying at the average.

Except heroes exist, and new ones show up every day. Open Forbes and look at the list of the world’s richest people. Take the top 500: the last name on that list is already infinitely richer than any of us. Stretch it to the 10,000 richest and the last one is still far richer than anyone you’ve ever met. Keep going down and you realize there are thousands of small heroes: people who left the “normal” path and won. And not only in money.

There’s another problem in the world of the average: plenty of people know the “trick”. People would even like to be heroes, but it’s work. Everyone knows the hero’s path takes a monumental, highly risky effort: the middle of the Journey is packed with trials, dangers, and the devil’s temptations. Nobody likes suffering for an uncertain future. People are naturally short-term thinkers; they love to “say” they plan for the future, but that’s just rhetoric.

And the people who know this trick best are precisely the ones who invent the magic recipes, the methodologies, the step-by-step procedures for becoming a hero in 24 hours, no sweat, no effort, no risk. For a small fee and a few hours of your day, anyone becomes a hero, certificate included! Companies hire these fast-food heroes, hand them command positions, and subordinates obey through the sheer force of the title. Could it get any easier?

As I said, there’s no empirical data proving these methods work. Companies simply “believe” they do. The trainers’ pedigree looks good, other companies swear by it, the references are great. Why doubt it?


Everyone falls for the fallacy of showcasing only the projects that succeeded, where the people did the heavy lifting, and “forgetting” to list the ones that applied the methodology and sank.

It sounds so smart when the trainer says: “as a Leader, you need to motivate your team.” He just forgets to explain, step by step, how you actually “motivate” someone. Of course nobody explains it. Worse: as Taleb describes, people get reduced to stereotypes and roles, inanimate puppets that, according to the magic recipe, are predictable and easy to control. Just “motivate”, just “incentivize”, just “be communicative”. Building attractive, empty rhetoric is easy. Actually leading a project to success is hard.

An acquaintance of mine used to say: “He who can, does. He who cannot, teaches.”

And according to Pareto, that’s normal. At least 80% of the population, companies, and professionals will think this way. Great news for the other 20%: less competition.

The world was not made to be fair or equal. The real world is, by nature, highly unfair and unequal. In it, true heroes are battle-scarred, thick-skinned from taking so many hits, and they rise solely and exclusively through their own effort. The real world runs on meritocracy. Many will fool themselves for a while, thinking they’ve found a place that will stay stable and equal forever, but that period is temporary and doomed to disappear, replaced by a merit-based system that will crush them without mercy. Most people are terrified of that, terrified of losing their comfort zone.

All these cake recipes dressed up as self-help, masquerading as serious courses, are cheap mythology in homeopathic doses. I won’t describe them as anything more than what they really are. They all come loaded with “advice”, and the best definition of advice I’ve ever seen is 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: leaving the common path is the hero’s routine. The journey begins exactly when he decides to challenge what everyone else considers impossible. The hero becomes a myth when he conquers the impossible, and the impossible never yields to “normal” paths.

Myths are rare, unfortunately (or fortunately).