Mike Brown argues that hero culture gets it wrong by treating top performers as infallible. He uses Lance Armstrong's seven Tour de France wins as an example of how extreme drive often masks personal flaws and unresolved childhood wounds, not moral integrity.
When we look at what it takes to be the best in the world, we have a hero culture and we think those people are infallible and they must have made really good decisions. When I look at people who are the best on the planet, they can be singularly focused on that goal and they can leave a lot of destruction in their wake. Lance Armstrong is a great example. He won 7 Tour de France and we create this hero out of this guy who it turns out wasn't necessarily a very good guy in his personal life. My question is, why are we actually surprised by that? To me, when you have that kind of dedication and that drive, there are things that probably happened in their childhood that are driving them to fill this giant hole that they have and push through to success, and then we idolize those kind of people. And that necessarily shouldn't be the case because a lot of times when they're driven in that kind of way, they're actually just looking to fill a part of them that can never be filled from external success.
