Brian Johnson – Areté – Activate Your Heroic Potential

In Areté, Brian Johnson integrates ancient wisdom, modern science, and practical tools to, as per the sub-title of the book, help you activate your Heroic potential and fulfill your destiny.

If you asked the ancient stoic philosophers how to live a good life, they’d answer you in a single word: Areté. We translate Areté as “virtue” or “excellence” but the word has a deeper meaning—something closer to being your best self moment to moment to moment.

As a Founder and CEO Brian Johnson has built and sold two social platforms. As a Philosopher/teacher, he’s helped millions of people from around the world, trained over 10,000 Heroic Coaches from 100+ countries, and created a protocol that science says changes lives. In his first book, he distills those decades of study, teaching, and coaching training into 451 bite-size, easy-to-implement ideas to help you gain greater:

• Wisdom – Learn the ultimate game of life and how to play it will. Gain the knowledge to strategize and win with your family, business, physical, and all other mental goals.
• Discipline – Forge antifragile confidence with every action you take as you learn the best practices to train your mind for mental toughness and how to overcome any obstacles in your way without anxiety or stress.
• Courage – Build the ability to take action in the presence of fear, discovering how to be your best in life’s most difficult moments and be the hero of your own epic story.
• Gratitude – Live life with appreciation, feeling grateful for all of the gifts and blessings in your life and cultivating one of the most important virtues for wellbeing.
• Hope – Creatively and confidently set clear goals, trust in your agency and ability to accomplish those goals, and create multiple pathways to succeed as you become the leader in your life.
• Curiosity – Have Heroic compassion for yourself and an experimenter’s growth mindset as you shine the spotlight on what’s working and what needs work.
• Zest – Dominate the fundamentals and build better habits to and create Heroic levels of energy as you master the #1 virtue most highly correlated with wellbeing according to positive psychology.

Phil Stutz, MD, the author of The Tools, who was featured in the Netflix documentary called Stutz, wrote the foreword to the book.

He says: “What Brian has developed is much more than a bunch of coping mechanisms for the over-stressed modern person; although that would be an improvement for most of us. He’s developed a training program for the soul. Commit to this training and you will gain the ability to transmute your biggest problems, your darkest days, into unstoppable courage, endless enthusiasm, and an unshakable faith in the future. This book will change your life. And, if enough of us commit, it will change the world.“