Heroes!

Michael here. 👋

Happy Sunday

This week’s two new Notes were a powerful (and powerfully sobering!) reminder of just how important it is for each of us to be the change we wish to see.

If you or those you care about haven’t yet optimized your relationship to technology, check out the new Notes, as well as this week’s featured 101 class on Conquering Digital Addiction.

And if you or those you care about aren’t yet making a dedicated effort to craft your morality, psychology, and identity — consider getting into the Heroic app and crafting your daily protocol. (It’s free!)

(Note: The latest versions of the app (2.4.3+) include a “welcome journey” to walk you through the process and help you learn to leverage all the tools for helping you move from Theory to Practice to Mastery.)

And…

As sobering as those new Notes are, the stories so many of you shared this week were an even more powerful reminder of the local impact YOU can make in your families, teams, schools, communities, and beyond.

From Heroic Workshop Instructors activating the potential of friends, neighbors, students, and businesses.

To new community members spreading Areté, and teachers bringing Heroic wisdom to bi-lingual classes.

To Heroic high-school athletic coaches leading their teams to victory by helping their players identify + commit + hit their best with a Soul Force score of 101 in the Heroic app.

(The version of your team, doing the things that help them be their best, beats the version of your team that doesn’t, but only every. single. time. 🙌)

We also shared our latest Heroic organizational core values.

And we’re less than 24 hours away from kicking off the Heroic Activation & Workshop Instructor Training events in Athens!

With Brian, Donald Robertson, our Heroic community, the birthplace of western civilization, and millennia of concentrated wisdom all coming together, it’s going to be another transformative period.

Stay tuned to Heroic social for the updates. (And expect an extra email or three with the goodness!)

And remember…

The world needs heroes NOW (!!!) more than ever.

And YOU are the hero we’ve been waiting for.

Note: Forwarded this email? Sign up for updates and a free Heroic membership here.

1. Nexus by Yuval Noah Harari

The first new Philosopher’s Note is on Nexus by Yuval Noah Harari.

“We have named our species Homo sapiens—the wise human. But it is debatable how well we have lived up to the name.

Over the last 100,000 years, we Sapiens have certainly accumulated enormous power. Just listing our discoveries, inventions, and conquests would fill volumes. But power isn’t wisdom, and after 100,000 years of discoveries, inventions, and conquests humanity has pushed itself into an existential crisis. We are on the verge of ecological collapse, caused by the misuse of our own power. We are also busy creating new technologies like artificial intelligence (AI) that have the potential to escape our control and enslave or annihilate us. Yet instead of our species uniting to deal with these existential challenges, international tensions are rising, global cooperation is becoming more difficult, countries are stockpiling doomsday weapons, and a new world war does not seem impossible.

If we Sapiens are so wise, why are we so self-destructive?”

— Yuval Noah Harari from Nexus

Read or listen to the full Note here!

2. The Chaos Machine by Max Fisher

Our second Note this week is The Chaos Machine by Max Fisher.

“In summer 2020, an independent audit of Facebook, commissioned by the company under pressure from civil rights groups, concluded that the platform was everything its executives had insisted to me it was not. Its policies permitted rampant misinformation that could undermine elections. Its algorithms and recommendation systems were ‘driving people toward self-reinforcing echo chambers of extremism,’ training them to hate. Perhaps most damning, the report concluded that the company did not understand how its own products affected its billions of users.

But there were a handful of people who did understand and, long before many of us were prepared to listen, tried to warn us. Most began as tech-obsessed true believers, some as denizens themselves of Silicon Valley, which was precisely why they were in a better position to notice early that something was going wrong, to investigate it, and to measure the consequences. But the companies that claimed to want exactly such insights stymied their efforts, questioned their reputations, and disputed their findings—until, in many cases, the companies were forced to acknowledge, if only implicitly, that the alarm raisers had been right all along. They conducted their work, at least initially, independently of one another, pursuing very different methods to the same question: what are the consequences of this technology? This book is about the mission to answer that question, told in part through the people who led it.

The early conventional wisdom, that social media promotes sensationalism and outrage, while accurate, turned out to drastically understate things. An ever-growing pool of evidence, gathered by dozens of academics, reporters, whistleblowers, and concerned citizens, suggests that its impact is far more profound. This technology exerts such a powerful pull on our psychology and our identity, and is so persuasive in our lives, that it changes how we think, behave, and relate to one another. The effect, multiplied across billions of users, has been to change society itself.”

— Max Fisher from The Chaos Machine

Read or listen to the full Note here.

P.S. Not yet a Premium member? Get access to this new Philosopher’s Note (and 700+ others and a TON of other wisdom and tools to support your growth) with Heroic Premium. Your first two weeks are free!

3. Heroic Core Values: ARETÉ

As part of our commitment to go next-level as a team and company, we recently refreshed our Heroic organizational core values.

Here they are, along with a video from a recent team-wide Soul Force Forge where we went deep on the core values, what they mean to us, and how we’re using them to perform Heroically as an organization.

(Links to download the posters + slides on the page!)

Hope you enjoy!

Again…

YOU are the hero we’ve been waiting for!

Thank you for being a part of our movement. 🙏

4. Conquering Digital Addiction 101

Ready to optimize how you use your digital devices after reading this week’s Notes? 😳

Check out Conquering Digital Addiction 101.

In the class, we walk through the costs of digital addiction.

Then we talk about how to conquer it so we can sculpt our ideal lives.

The goal? Use technology wisely to become the BEST version of yourself—rather than mindlessly let your 1 million-year-old prefrontal cortex get hacked all day every day.

Check out the class here!

P.S. For more on the topic, check out Digital Minimalism 101 featuring guest teacher Cal Newport.

5. Community highlights

A few favorites from another week of moving from Theory to Practice to Mastery, Together!!!

  • North Cobb High School Warrior Football team with 101 Soul Force scores: After winning the Regional Championship, they landed the #1 seed in the state playoffs. “We began our journey over the summer and are blessed to have found the HEROIC APP and Brian Johnson to guide us every step of the way… These kids COMPETE to get their SOUL FORCE SCORES up to 101.” 👏 🏈 Go Warriors! (Check out the awesome video of the team here.)
  • Chas creatively gifting Areté in his local community: Inspired by how he serendipitously found Areté one day on a trip to the bookstore with his daughter. “The profound changes within me over these last couple of weeks, living a life of Areté, and the philosophies and tools within its pages needed to do just that has really blessed and humbled me to a point that I want to take action.” 🔥
  • JoAnn’s Halloween Heroic workshop: “Today I waved my witches wand and brought forth superpowers in 4 lovely ladies with a Heroic Workshop! … Everyone loved it and left energized.” You’re the Hero we’ve been waiting for. Well done, JoAnn! 🙇‍♂️

+1. Wisdom from the week:

“Radical acceptance is akin to willingness... Willingness is when you allow the world to be what it is. And, no matter what it is, you agree to participate in the world.”

— Marsha Linehan

(Social shareable quote in light mode or dark mode.)

And this week’s Heroic +1s:

This week’s featured Meditation is Enjoy the Little Things (a 7-minute meditation to reflect on the little things you can celebrate, save, and enjoy today — available in-app only).

And…

Have questions or suggestions about Heroic, or ANYTHING we can help with? Reach out to our top-rated Heroic Service team by replying to this note or sending an email to support@heroic.us.

Alright…

With Wisdom + Discipline + Love + Courage + Gratitude + Hope + Curiosity + Zest.

Heroes Unite!

Let’s do this.

Day 1.

-Michael and Team Heroic

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