The Hero Code by Admiral William H. McRaven Part 1: Courage

There are no shortage of feelings when someone from leadership at your company offers you a book to read. From the leadership perspective, this is an opportunity to build company culture under a single vision. Reading is, after all, cool and fun for everyone, and any book can speak for itself more effectively than the one who’s read it.

For the employee, this can often be seen as an imposition, something to add on top of the workload for the casual benefit of company leadership, a way for them to feel like they’re investing in staff at scale by buying them a book and expecting work culture to just happen.

The inconvenient truth in any business is that in order to lead, you must lead. Nevertheless, while Kruse has a proven 30-year track record of leadership through high-quality service, low turnover, and deep roots in our community, we still wish to showcase what inspires us. In this series, we’ll be going through The Hero Code from Admiral William H McRaven. This is one of many books from a man known for a storied career ranging from participation in SEAL Team Six, to leading historically significant operations as a four-star Admiral. In his retirement he’s maybe most well known for a speech imitated by motivational speakers the world over, but never replicated, titled “Make your Bed.”

The Hero Code starts with a story from long before this career, when he traveled with his father to New York at the tender age of eight, head full of comic book stories of superheroes. With the vague understanding that, since New York City is the same as DC Comics’ Metropolis, he thought he may catch sight of the Big Blue Boyscout: Superman himself.

Once his dad learned why his kid was so preoccupied looking up, William’s father directed him to the real superheroes of New York, the police officers that keep the city safe. It was here that the eight-year-old had an epiphany: If Superman wasn’t real, then it was up to us to solve our own problems.

In later years, the young McRaven moved his attention to real-world heroes: astronauts and doctors, civic leaders and politicians giving a voice to the underrepresented. Even here McRaven had much to learn. We don’t have some people destined to be heroes, while the rest of the world shudders in need. The responsibility to form the world into a better place hangs on all of us. This book isn’t a code for very special people, filled with mysteries or impossible standards, but for the hero in all of us.

To Kick this off I’d like to give an overview on the first aspect of heroism McRaven puts forth, that of Courage. This book is readily available and reads like a coffee table book, but you don’t have to take my word for it. If what I’ve talked about here sounds like something you would be interested in, try it out for yourself.

Courage: Taking a Step Forward to Face Fear

When I think about courage, I usually think about Courage the Cowardly Dog. Despite his behavior in most every situation, his person Muriel got it right in naming him such. As McRaven puts it:

…Courage is not the sole purview of warriors. Far from it. I have seen equal acts of heroism from doctors caring for the infirm, police patrolling the streets, firefighters rushing into collapsing buildings, parents protecting their children, and countless other men and women who found the courage to overcome their fears and do extraordinary things.

It’s easy to see courage as a response to threat or danger, but this forgets a step. Directly after anything in our lives, whether we notice it or not, we feel an emotional response before we have any chance to act. Often, it can feel like the emotions happen out of nowhere as quickly as any other external force. Like behind any inconvenience, there’s a ghost of “bad vibes” to match it.

I can think of a few times where I thought I knew what the “brave” response was, and decided to just do that because I thought it was what courage meant. The result was engaging in risky behavior that cooler heads would have known didn’t need to happen. That’s because I was choosing riskier options as a way to avoid the feeling of fear, or to push it down.

but Courage (the dog), reminds us that courage (the virtue) only happens in response to fear fully felt and understood. Some of our most difficult battles aren’t with particularly mean looking eggplants, but with ourselves. So long as we just keep putting our heads down and going to work, we can pretend like that battle isn’t happening, that everything’s okay.

Courage (again, the dog) has no such hang-ups. Courage allows those feelings of fear to happen, and has the courage to face that fear directly in every episode. Despite what strange horror his family is subjected to, the dog still picks himself up afterwards and does something about it.

For many tradesmen, there is a cultural resistance to asking for help, or admitting when you’re not doing well. There are plenty who get into health emergencies, either physical or mental, because they didn’t know or believe asking for help was really an option for them. We may recognize fear as something that keeps us safe, but that same fear can keep us in our routines and prevent us from doing something new, even when the stakes turn out to be much higher than we realized.

But we get where we’ve never been by doing what we’ve never done, and it’s through a deeper understanding of what courage can mean that we can take the next step into matching deeply valuable careers with a long and happy life. To get there, when shutting down and saying “it’s fine” is such a normal response in this industry, is going to require a good deal of courage.

And we’re not about to be outdone by some dog in the middle of Nowhere.