In this Heroic Plus One podcast episode, Brian Johnson shares a personal story about dropping his son Emerson off at a high‑stakes chess tournament. He recounts Emerson’s challenging matchups and uses the experience as a backdrop to discuss a recent moment where Brian was overly "jerkish" with his son after Emerson didn’t follow his new coach’s principles. Brian admits the behavior hurt Emerson’s confidence the next day, reflects on how his own upbringing in a fixed‑mindset household contributed to the lapse, and describes how he repaired the relationship by openly acknowledging his mistake and recommitting to supportive parenting. He then delivers a micro‑lesson: when we fall short of our ideals, we must own the failure, feel its impact, learn from it, and get back to work improving ourselves and those we support. The episode ends with a call to action to subscribe and visit heroic.us for further resources.
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Hi, this is Brian. Welcome back to another Heroic Plus One. I'm typing this one after dropping Emerson off at yet another chess tournament match. Yes, we are having fun seeing how many reps he can get on his quest to be a good person, a GP, and a chess grandmaster, a GM. He's about to play his 6th round of the tournament. This is by far the strongest field he's ever played against. To put it in perspective, in the first round, he played one of the top 20 best women in the country. In the last round, he played a girl who is the youngest female in U.S. history to earn a Women's FIDE Master WFM title. If you know chess, you know that's kind of a big deal. In this round, he's playing a kid who is the 36th best 13-year-old in the country. Emerson is number 35. So the tournament has been a fantastic challenge. It's also given us a few great opportunities to practice our philosophy. We're going to be taking A little series of +1s talking about a bunch of little micro lessons we've been dominating this weekend. I'll be repeating some themes we've discussed for years and using my commitment to honor my heroic love identity of being the greatest wingman ever as the context to share this wisdom. Now, seeing that I've soaked up so much of our time together setting the context, we'll keep it simple for today. What shall we focus on? How about this? Are you a parent or grandparent or someone who cares about kids? If so, do you support your kids or grandkids in their competitive activities, whether that's sports or school or anything in between? If not, do you support anyone in anything? The answer to that is yes, by the way, even if that's just yourself. Now, 2 nights ago, I sucked at practicing my philosophy. Emerson didn't follow the principles his new coach has been teaching him, and I was unnecessarily JERKISH about it. All caps, JERKISH. Now, I wasn't crazy bad, but I wasn't anywhere near my best. I won't bore you with the details, but I will ask you, have you ever done that, whether with your kids or colleagues or yourself? The answer to that question is yes, by the way. And if you deny that, then you have even bigger issues we'll need to deal with. Hate to break it to you. Now, I repaired my oops jerk moment, but What happened after I was way more jerkish than I needed to be that night was that Emerson played more timidly than he's ever played a couple of games later the following day. I could feel how my behavior the night before directly impacted his lack of confidence the next day. And it breaks my heart to even type that as I feel into the fear I personally felt growing up in a dysfunctional, fixed mindset household and the enormous amount of pride I feel in helping raise a boy who's becoming a young man who has such a fierce level of confidence and trust in himself. I was humbled to see how my poor parenting, if continued, would lead to the exact opposite of what I am so committed to helping create. Then I fiercely recommitted to playing my role as well as I possibly can. I repaired even more powerfully with him the next morning, told him about how lame I was a couple of nights before and how that had affected him the following day. Then we had some of the best chats we've ever had. It was amazing. So today's plus one, bring to mind a time when you recently failed to live up to your standards with your kids or your loved ones, or including yourself if you don't have kids. Now, feel the pain of your lack of integrity and how that impacted your relationship and the human being you're trying to support. Tears in my eyes right now. You got that? Own it. No excuses. Then get excited about getting better. We learn the most when we fall short of our ideals, but only if we own it, take the time to see what we could have done differently, then get back to work crushing it. Let's do that today. Hey, this is Brian. Thanks for spending a few minutes with me today. If you enjoyed it, please hit subscribe so that the best of the show keeps landing in your feed. Then head over to heroic.us. That's heroic.us, where you'll find the full library of wisdom I've created over the last 20 years, as well as the app, advanced training programs, coaching, and everything else we've built to help you optimize your life, actualize your potential, and live heroically. It is day 1. We are all in. Let's go.
