Escape The Hero Trap ft. Bill Flynn on Rules for Success

Yeah, it's basically, it's a, it's the paradox of success.

You know, we talked a little bit.

I have a, tiny glimpse of what you had in terms of your experience.

And my guess is you were very successful.

You're probably a great student.

You're probably great at engineer, et cetera.

And all those things that we were rewarded and recognized for through our life.

Once you become a leader of teams and organizations, those things begin to work against you.

Hmm.

because it's not about you anymore.

And you can't be the hero or the controller, as I call it in the book, all the time, because as you grow, that does not scale.

And it makes your life more difficult.

It creates learned helplessness within your team.

So it's one, as they say in AA, first thing you got to do is recognize that you have a problem if you're going to solve it.

And there's a whole bunch of things that's working against us.

One is obviously we've been rewarded for decades, right? And so to undo habitual rewards and training and thinking, it doesn't feel right when you say, you know, I don't have all the answers.

And even if I have the answer, I shouldn't give it because it's my job to make those around me better.

Yeah.

And to, in essence, fire myself from the day-to-day because my job isn't to run the company anymore as the company gets bigger.

It's to predict and create the future.

Which is a completely different set of skills and thinking than doing the day-to-day.

But we get sucked into it.

It feels good, all that kind of stuff.

And by the way, what's interesting, and this happened, I sort of had this experience tangentially, is when you realize that and you begin to pull away and sort of give them a responsibility and agency and guard lines and guardrails and all this stuff, they don't like it.

Because it's like you're abandoning them.

Yeah, it's basically, it's a, it's the paradox of success.

You know, we talked a little bit.

I have a, tiny glimpse of what you had in terms of your experience.

And my guess is you were very successful.

You're probably a great student.

You're probably great at engineer, et cetera.

And all those things that we were rewarded and recognized for through our life.

Once you become a leader of teams and organizations, those things begin to work against you.

Hmm.

because it's not about you anymore.

And you can't be the hero or the controller, as I call it in the book, all the time, because as you grow, that does not scale.

And it makes your life more difficult.

It creates learned helplessness within your team.

So it's one, as they say in AA, first thing you got to do is recognize that you have a problem if you're going to solve it.

And there's a whole bunch of things that's working against us.

One is obviously we've been rewarded for decades, right? And so to undo habitual rewards and training and thinking, it doesn't feel right when you say, you know, I don't have all the answers.

And even if I have the answer, I shouldn't give it because it's my job to make those around me better.

Yeah.

And to, in essence, fire myself from the day-to-day because my job isn't to run the company anymore as the company gets bigger.

It's to predict and create the future.

Which is a completely different set of skills and thinking than doing the day-to-day.

But we get sucked into it.

It feels good, all that kind of stuff.

And by the way, what's interesting, and this happened, I sort of had this experience tangentially, is when you realize that and you begin to pull away and sort of give them a responsibility and agency and guard lines and guardrails and all this stuff, they don't like it.

Because it's like you're abandoning them.