Jameson Olsen joins guest host Liberty to discuss Protagonism, the life philosophy he is building from the mechanics of great stories. They talk about his podcast Becoming the Main Character and the fiction that shaped his thinking, including Hamlet, Mary Shelley's Frankenstein, Lord of the Rings, Sherlock Holmes, and True Grit.
Jameson explains why fiction is a compressed human experience rather than mere entertainment, how the story of Hercules at the crossroads guides his decisions under pressure, and why training montages give us the wrong idea about how slow and monotonous real change actually is. They also discuss main character syndrome versus narcissism, the pull of tribalism, what separates heroes from villains and anti-heroes like Walter White, and how William James clawed his way out of a breakdown by choosing to act as if his choices mattered.
We’ve shared some highlights below, together with links & a full transcript. If you like what you hear/read, please leave a comment or drop us a review on your provider of choice.
Links
Highlights
What Training Montages Get Wrong
Liberty: You wrote about the danger of training montages. What do they get wrong about transformation?
Jameson: Yeah, that’s a fun thing for me with this pursuit. I can look at things in stories, or in storytelling formats, and then look at them through this lens of protagonism. One thing I thought was funny is that these training montages are effective at conveying to a moviegoer that they put in so much work, and we’re compressing it into 60 seconds of visual cues. Rocky, or whoever it is, he’s been grinding.
Liberty: The Karate Kid, waxing cars.
Jameson: But it’s dangerous for us to be exposed to that, because it makes it seem like it’s not as big a deal as it really is. Let’s take the Rocky example. It shows him working out, especially in Rocky IV, working out in the snow, pulling logs, whatever, and it’ll show one scene of him drinking raw eggs. It shows a variety of things. But what it doesn’t show is him doing that every single day, for months.
Liberty: And years of grinding.
Jameson: And even when he’s sick, having to do stuff that’s just miserable. So it makes the idea of a training arc glamorous, because it’s only showing you 60 seconds’ worth. Whereas the reality of any training arc in real life is that I’m signing up for a suffer-fest, and what I just watched in that training montage are literally the highlights of it, the best moments. But the truth is that there are times in life where you need something like that. You need to buckle down and say, yeah, I’m going to remove distractions for this period in my life if I really want to achieve this thing. There were a few other things in the article, but the biggest one is just the idea that it doesn’t show how monotonous and boring it is to actually achieve something that great.
Liberty: That’s the counterproductive aspect of this, because it’s fun to watch. But if it sets your expectations so that you think, oh yeah, it’s going to feel so satisfying and I’m going to see the progress, it’s almost like a time-lapse. It compresses time so much that it gives you the wrong impression of how slow real progress is, and how not fun it is as you’re doing it a lot of the time. So if you come in expecting that and you start training and you don’t see much progress, it feels crap. You may stop, if you come in with the wrong expectations. It could actually do the opposite of what you’d think going in.
Jameson: Yeah. It makes you get really frustrated really quickly when you’re not seeing a similar level of change, or you’re bumping into way more obstacles than you thought you would. What I’d love to see is a training montage that shows the person eating their Tupperware of chicken and rice while everyone around them is eating pizza. Just show that scene dozens of times, that would be a more accurate representation of a training montage. Or show them having to wake up to the 5am alarm day after day and dragging themselves out of bed. We don’t need to see the log-pulling or the deadlifting of 500 pounds, because again, those are the highlights. Show me the true lowlights of what this journey is, if you want me to have a more realistic expectation of what it’s like.
NPCs and Tribalism
Liberty: What are the signs that someone is living like an NPC? How could someone realize their own NPC tendencies? How do you fight that? And what are your own NPC tendencies that you’ve discovered and dealt with, to bring that to your own story arc?
Jameson: So one of the ideas about an NPC that I think is very interesting, because it translates to real life pretty well, is that if you find an NPC, most games are only going to program a few lines of dialogue for it. If you keep going back, they’ll end up repeating the same line, because they don’t have more in the tank to share with you. That translates to real life in the sense that an NPC is more likely to be running off of only a few scripts, and they’re not open to new information. They’ve just decided, this is life, I’m 25 years old, I’ve figured out life. And they spend the next 50 years assuming they have a grasp on the entirety of truth and that everyone who disagrees with them is wrong. An important aspect of living a fulfilling life is being open to new information at any given time. It doesn’t matter if you’re old. In fact, one lesson I took away from Dracula is that you have Van Helsing, who is the most educated, the most learned character, and yet he’s the one having to tell the other characters, I need you to open your mind, I need you to consider things you have thought impossible your entire life. So being able to constantly take in new information, and not letting that turn you into someone who thinks they know everything, is a crucial detail of being able to pursue the life of a protagonist, in my opinion. An NPC is incapable of that, because it’s just easier to run on fewer scripts and say, no, I’ve experienced enough to say this is what life is.
Liberty: And if you don’t think for yourself and create your own scripts, there are plenty of people out there who will be very happy to supply you with a script that helps them. Consumerism, politicians, whatever. There’s always someone else who is very happy to tell you how to think if you don’t do it for yourself.
Jameson: Exactly. And that brings up something I did not assume at all when I started this project. It’s been amazing to me how much, as I’m analyzing stories and lessons, this idea has come up: the idea of tribalism, and how it’s ingrained in us. We are all part of tribes, even in the 21st century. You’re part of your political tribe, your cultural tribe, your religious tribe, your neighborhood tribe, whatever group you identify with. The purpose of the tribe in ancient times was, we survive better when there’s more of us together, but we have to make sure the only ones with us are ones we can trust. That’s why, for a long time, being ostracized from the tribe was basically a death sentence, because you wouldn’t have access to their resources. So even though we have grocery stores now, and I can get access to food without some tribe granting it to me, there are still definite needs filled by tribal instincts, social needs, things like that.
I just witness how often people’s choices are dictated by the need to make sure they can maintain membership in a certain tribe. Tying this back to NPCs, part of it is that it is exhausting to actually think through how you feel about every single thing. It is a monotonous and terrifying task to actually think, no, I’m going to decide for myself.
Liberty: And if you’re wrong, so you’re wrong. It’s not someone else’s fault.
Jameson: So it’s easier to just adopt a belief system from a tribe and say, if Democrats think this way, then that’s how I feel. Or if Republicans feel this way. Or, trying to think of others.
Liberty: My family, my whatever.
Jameson: Yeah, exactly. It can be as granular as my family. Whatever tribe you’re part of, if they believe this, it’s easier to just say, okay, I guess I believe this too. And you cling to the parts that actually resonate with you, and you bury the ones that don’t under a rug and say, well, I agree enough that it’s better for me to just say I’m part of this group, and bury the things that are actually friction points for me. So to me, an NPC is someone who has largely found two or three tribes that they outsource all of their thinking to, and they say, okay, if that’s what they believe, then great, that’s who I am.
Transcript
Liberty
Hello, everyone. I’m not Jim O’Shaughnessy, I’m Liberty. Jim is writing a new book, and while he was knocking it out, I snuck into the studio and decided to record this conversation about what we can learn from fiction and fictional characters, because I could use more of that in my life. I think we could all use more of that wisdom. I used to read about 95% fiction growing up, but sometime in my 20s it flipped, and now I’m 90% nonfiction. But I miss it. So who better to talk about this with than my friend Jameson Olsen? He’s building the school of protagonism based on these ideas. It’s a life philosophy built from the mechanics of great stories, and his podcast, Becoming the Main Character, is case studies in that. He’s trying to combine the entertainment of those stories with the learning and growth, drawing on Lord of the Rings, Sherlock Holmes, Moby-Dick, Dostoevsky, Project Hail Mary. Very varied, but the central thesis is always that fiction is not just entertainment, it’s a compressed human experience. Jameson, welcome to the show.
Jameson
Hey, Liberty, it’s great to be here.
Liberty
Maybe we can begin like a good story, at the beginning. Could you tell us a bit about yourself? The Jameson origin story. Why did you need protagonism? How did you arrive at this?
Jameson
That’s a great way to start. Like a lot of people, I found myself years past college graduation, feeling like life wasn’t going where I thought it would be at that point. Until you graduate college, you’re basically told exactly what step to take. As long as you’re getting the grades and hitting the benchmarks you need to make, you just know you’re doing fine. Then you enter the real world and things can go a little differently. So I had a period, a big chunk of my 20s, where I was living a pretty small existence in terms of what I was doing. My career was moving forward, but not nearly as quickly as I thought it would.
In the meantime, I was consuming a lot of self-help content and personal development. I got into philosophy. That was the first time I started reading some of the ancients. So I was feeding my brain all these ideas, and that was all layered on top of my love of stories from the beginning of my life. I’m the youngest of four siblings, and my older brother was the problem child, if you want to call it that. By most standards he really wasn’t even that problematic, but out of the four of us, he was.
Liberty
It’s all relative.
Jameson
Exactly. He’s such a social butterfly that my parents were conditioned to think, to punish him, we send him to his room. That was torture for him, not being able to interact with people. So after him, they just figured, send James to his room. If he’s being bad, put him in there. Problem was, that’s where my Legos were. They were basically condemning me to go into my own little world. I had all the pirate sets. This is before the IP Legos came out, like Harry Potter and Star Wars. It was just the pirates or the others.
Liberty
You had to use your own imagination.
Jameson
And so it started young. I’ve always been very interested in understanding what makes a great story great and what makes others fall flat. Why do you forget some movies as you’re walking out of the theater, whereas others you think about for days after you see them? During that period of my 20s, most of that effort of understanding stories came through film analysis, watching video essayists on YouTube, reading books here and there.
Liberty
If I did my research correctly, you were much more of a film buff and only started reading classic literature when you started your podcast. Is that true?
Jameson
It is. I think that also works to my advantage, because I bring enthusiasm to my episodes, since I’ve just read the book for the first time. But I’ve never claimed to be a trained expert on the classics, because I hadn’t spent that much time reading fiction until the last three to four years. I just watched movies. It’s beginner’s mind, which is perfect. You sit down, turn it on and consume, whereas a book takes effort. So it was a transition, but the opportunity came along, this idea of a podcast to talk about the greatest stories ever written. And I couldn’t go down that road without infusing it with, marrying, my two greatest interests, which are: what makes a good story good, and how can I find a better, more fulfilling existence in my own personal life? It was the fusion of those two things. It was the combination of the years spent reading personal development books and studying philosophy with the years of watching movies and analyzing why the great ones work. So I set my sights on bringing the classics to 21st-century consumption habits through a podcast.
Liberty
I’m curious, because we can have the inverse. I used to be all fiction and moved into nonfiction. You were probably more into nonfiction. What surprised you most when you dove really deep into these great stories? What was your expectation going in, and did it match, or was it something else?
Jameson
I don’t know if I really had severe expectations either way. But one thing I’ve noticed is that I used to carry the pragmatic view that a lot of people who only read nonfiction have: I get real value from nonfiction, whereas fiction is just entertainment.
Liberty
It can’t be profound because it’s fun, right? As if those things are opposed.
Jameson
One thing that surprised me was realizing that my anxiety levels were higher reading nonfiction, because it put more on my plate of “this is what I should be doing” or “this is what I need to fix about myself.” I’d leave with great ideas, but basically I’d leave with homework. Whereas with fiction, partly because it’s more entertaining to consume a narrative, but also because you read about these situations and think, it could be worse, my life’s not so bad. That was one thing I wasn’t expecting to piece together, that reading nonfiction is incredible and necessary. That’s one thing I should get straight right off the bat. I am never taking the stance that fiction is better than nonfiction. I think both are essential to a well-balanced life. I still read a lot of nonfiction now, but most of it these days is less personal development and more narrative theory and understanding how to craft a great story. I think both are essential. And because I’ve been that person, I think there are a lot of people who have boxed out fiction because they think the real value is only in nonfiction, whereas I think both are important.
Liberty
I think the takeaway here is balance. If someone is only reading nonfiction, they can probably get a lot out of even adding a little fiction to the mix. And if someone is only reading fiction, I’d recommend the inverse. Get some nonfiction, some history, some biographies. But both have so much to contribute. I’m curious, because we all have favorites. Is there a fictional character that has changed the most how you think about your life, that has had the biggest impact? Or maybe even someone you first judged, like, that guy’s an asshole, and then later understood better and could get more out of?
Jameson
I’ll share two. The first is the one I resonated with most at a personal level. The second doesn’t really fit any of the setups you just shared, but it’s the one I can’t stop thinking about almost two years later. The first one, ironically, was the very first episode I ever did, which was Hamlet. I read Hamlet in high school, and that’s been part of the fun, because so many of the books I cover, someone had to read in high school.
Liberty
Which is the best way of making you not get it and not like it.
Jameson
Exactly. The problem isn’t the literature. The problem is the way you’re forced to see a certain perspective based on your teacher’s perspective. That’s why, when I present my thoughts and lessons from episodes, I’m very clear: this is what I took from it. If you take the same thing, great. But maybe you read it and get something else. That’s where the real value comes, if a story is so well structured that you take what you need from it at that time in your life, and I may take something slightly different. So, rereading Hamlet as an adult, on my own terms, and for anyone with Shakespeare, I do think it’s very much worth having a side by side of the original with a more modernized version. I was using a service called LitCharts for that, which is basically CliffsNotes on steroids. For the most part they have these massive PDF files of analysis of a book, but they have a whole part of their website that’s Shakespeare with side by sides, where they highlight in different colors exactly which text they’re interpreting with the modern version. That helped me see it more deeply.
I resonated a lot with Hamlet and his overthinking tendencies. That’s always been something I struggle with. I used to frame it in my personal narrative, to use a term that’s used to describe someone like Hamlet, as my hamartia, the Greek idea of your tragic flaw, which is also tied to your greatest strength. I used to try to frame that as, yeah, there are downsides to it, but because I’m an overthinker, there are also these upsides.
Liberty
You talked yourself into thinking overthinking was great.
Jameson
Luckily, in recent times I’ve been challenging that notion. Why do I have to justify that there are strengths to this? Why can’t I look at how to remove it and maintain the strength anyway? In particular, the scene that sits with me so much from Hamlet is, I think it’s act four, and I believe it’s scene four of act four. It’s when he’s traveling and Fortinbras, the Norwegian prince, is marching through with an army of 20,000 men or so, and Hamlet is marveling at the realization that this is an equal to me. We’re both princes of these nations, and here he is leading 20,000 men to fight for a scrap of land that’s not even worth the bodies that will be buried in it from the war. But he’s leading men on this cause, and I have been running around, unable to even stick with one decision I make. How frivolous has my life been? There’s a line where he says something about how, if man is only good to eat and sleep, “he’s no better than a beast.” So Hamlet has really stuck with me at a personal level.
The story I was so surprised by, and think about all the time, was actually Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein. Part of it is because Hollywood has never done it justice. The del Toro one is the best we’ve ever had. It’s better than anything else by a mile. It still makes one little change, that’s classic Hollywood, that I hated.
Liberty
What is it?
Jameson
To me, the beauty of that story is that you have two opposed forces in Frankenstein and his monster. Obviously Victor made choices. He’s responsible for the choices that created the situation, so he’s guilty in a sense. But the beauty of the book is that as soon as the monster wakes up, literally the moment it starts breathing, he’s just, oh no, what have I done, this was a terrible mistake. And he spends the rest of the book trying to grapple with how to live with that. He’s constantly trying to figure out how to stop it. He wants to take responsibility, he just doesn’t know how. Whereas every portrayal makes it seem like he’s running away from his problems, classic white male who causes something, gets chased, and doesn’t want to be responsible. So they paint him as the villain, whereas early Hollywood painted the monster as truly monstrous. We’ve always had one or the other. One of them has to be a villain.
To me, my read on the book, and of course there are a lot of theories, because Mary Shelley was descended from one of the original feminists, so the story has ties to themes of feminism. And again, I’m not here to say definitively. In fact, that’s one of my biggest pet peeves, people who say definitively that a story is about this one thing. Maybe for you it is.
Liberty
It can be many things at the same time.
Jameson
To me, the beauty of Frankenstein is that you have these two opposed forces. You have the innocence of the monster. It’s crazy, when you’ve grown up with the idea of him being this big, slow, lurching guy with bolts in his neck, and then you realize in the book he’s actually like a zombie-looking Captain America. He’s physically formidable, he’s fast, he’s super strong. He’s kind of a superhero, because Victor used all the best parts to build him. So he’s got all that, and he’s got the tenderness. I basically describe him as if you put a three-year-old in the body of that creature, because he’s sweet and innocent, but when he’s hurt or when he doesn’t understand what’s going on, he lashes out. And that is terrifying when he’s as big as he is.
Then you have Victor, who made the choices that created the situation, so he’s responsible, but he’s trying to figure out what to do. It’s the two of them butting heads, and they cannot coexist. That tension is something so unique to me. For me, the takeaway of the book is the double-edged sword of ambition. Victor wanted to do something great, but because he became obsessive about it, he basically wasn’t in control of his actions, because he was consumed by this need to do something incredible. In the same way, Jurassic Park’s biggest moral is that if you’re so consumed with whether you can, you may end up making a huge mistake that you shouldn’t have made. So, because early Hollywood was so simplified, oh, he creates a monster and the monster terrorizes everybody, to realize how much depth and room there is to explore moral complexities in that book really took me off guard. It’s one of my favorites to this day.
Liberty
That’s great. I need to read it. I’ve actually never read that book, and you’re selling it very well. Let’s get deeper into what protagonism is. I love that name, by the way. What is it? And what is it most likely to be misunderstood as by someone who just hears about it? Someone could be hearing this and thinking, oh yeah, main character syndrome. How is that different from narcissism, thinking the whole world revolves around you and you’re the main character? Explain what it is and what it isn’t.
Jameson
I’m glad you bring that up, because main character syndrome, or main character energy, are terms I hate, because they bring these assumptions of people who lack self-awareness, who are narcissistic, who don’t care about anybody but themselves. To that I say, show me a story where that is actually the case, where the main character acts like that. There’s another disclaimer I should put in: I’m not claiming all fiction is incredible, there’s a lot of trash out there. But of a story that resonates deeply with a human experience, and for me that’s most classics, because that’s why they’ve survived where other books didn’t. They resonated on a very deep level with people. So show me a main character who is supposed to be a heroic figure from any of these books who acts like that. That is literally not what a main character does. But it is interesting how the term main character brings this assumption of egoism into things.
When you look at stories, the hero is always somebody who starts from a much more humble or collectivist place. They’re doing something for other people, or they’re just trying to improve themselves. That’s much more accurate of what a main character does. One of the best parts in Lord of the Rings, which the movies cover but change, and I think they’re both good, so I’m not here to dog on it and say the movie version is bad, is near the end of The Two Towers, the speech Samwise gives to Frodo about the heroes from the great tales. He says that when he was younger, he used to think the heroes were the people who wanted adventure, who were seeking after it. And now he knows the heroes are the ones who didn’t choose to end up in the places where they were, but who just decided to keep going. There are plenty of other stories that exist, but because the people gave up, we never hear about them. The ones we hear about are only the ones who kept going. That’s such a beautiful way to frame it, in my opinion. The heroes, the people we uphold as the ones we want to emulate, are not people who acted brashly or disregarded others. They were the ones trying to improve themselves, trying to improve or protect other people. And they were willing to undergo a lot of sacrifice or transformation to do that.
So for me, protagonism. First of all, it’s still very new, and that’s part of the fun. I’m building a school of philosophy as I go. Some people may hear this and think, who is this guy to think he can build a school of philosophy? And I’d say, you’re right. But also, who could stop me? You can tell me you don’t agree with my ideas, but there’s no benchmark of having to hold certain degrees to start a school of philosophy. It all comes down to, do your ideas stick? Do your ideas hold truth in them? It’s just been a very fun way to frame what I’m trying to state or prove.
So, protagonism, and who it’s for is where I’ll start. It’s for people like me, first and foremost, the people who think they’ve got more in the tank, wherever they’re at in life. They think, I am capable of more, but I feel stuck. I don’t know why I’m not where I thought I’d be. I don’t know how to get traction in the direction I want to go. Because when I was coming up with these ideas at the beginning, most of the stuff I saw online went into one of two extremes. Either it was very much a victim mentality, other people are the problem, it’s not fair, other people have to change so I have a fair chance. Or it was the other extreme, the hustle-porn, alpha culture of just do it, like David Goggins. And the thing is, I like to consume some of that content sometimes, because it gets you going.
Liberty
It’s useful, but it’s not enough.
Jameson
It wasn’t actually doing it for me either. So I thought, I need a system for improvement that’s more centrist than either of those, and it’s more about recognizing that it’s on you. The whole “nobody’s coming to save you” idea.
Liberty
Yep.
Jameson
No one else is ever going to make you the main character in their story. At best, you’ll be a side character. So if you really want a fulfilling life, it’s up to you. It’s about taking ownership, accepting that a level of agency is required to get a satisfying life, but then also doing it in a way that accepts you’re probably not Superman. You’re not going to be able to flip a switch and all of a sudden your life is completely different. It’s going to be a journey, a narrative of the ups and downs to get from where you are to where you want to be. People in those extremes may resonate with what I talk about, but I’m not making it for them. So if I ever have some alpha bro who’s just like, I don’t approve of your lesson, you should just whatever, that’s cool, I’m not talking to you. That’s fine.
The actual approach, as you alluded to in the intro, is that my theory is that the same rules authors, screenwriters, any storytellers use to create a great character for a great story can transfer over to how you visualize and execute your life. And my theory, which there’s no way I can just prove now, it’s more an exploration, is that the reason those became the rules for great storytelling is because they represent the greatest and most resonant truths that humans have discovered about a good, fulfilling life over millennia. Because otherwise we wouldn’t care about the movies that use those rules, or read the books that use them. It’s the same reason we put down bad stories now. They don’t connect with us enough, because there’s not enough truth buried in there.
Liberty
This reminds me of something I’ve long believed, that in great fiction you can smuggle in wisdom and lessons that would not stick if they were stated directly. We remember a good story way better than a PowerPoint slide with the lessons as bullets on it. Charlie Munger used to have this anecdote about the shoe button complex. A guy made a fortune during the war selling shoe buttons, and he was so successful at that one thing that it made him believe he was now an authority on everything else, because he was so great at that. You understand the principle as he’s telling the story, but you remember the story, and the payload is in the story. Our brains evolved to sit around the campfire telling each other stories and heroic poems. That’s how ideas and wisdom have always been communicated. And now, nonfiction may be great, but if you look at the best nonfiction, self-help, Morgan Housel, whatever, it’s full of stories. It’s almost like trying to use the same infrastructure. So we may as well go back to the original, or at least use it well.
Jameson
Yeah. Humans are wired for story. There’s no two ways of looking at it. There’s a reason we don’t find cave paintings of Excel sheets. It’s just how we make sense of things. The irony to me is that even the people who claim, I don’t care about stories, I don’t watch movies, whatever, you’re still living a narrative. Your narrative just isn’t as rooted in traditional stories. It’s more, look at Elon Musk, I want to emulate him. You’re picking a real figure and you want to emulate their story. You’re still using stories as the framework, because we just can’t help it.
Liberty
Ironically, you may actually know more about a character in fiction, because you can hear them thinking. You can know everything that goes into a decision. You can live the consequences. You have the whole epilogue, and you can learn from all of it. While in real life, you only have what people will show you. People can fake it, people can lie. When things go badly, they disappear, and you never know it went wrong. You only see the highlights on Instagram. So, ironically, real life is often faker and more curated than fiction, which can show you more.
Jameson
That’s a great point. There are studies that have shown people who read fiction rank higher in empathy. Even for me personally, there are a lot of people who don’t love the idea of empathy, because it feels soft.
Liberty
You’re so weak.
Jameson
Because I talk about it in The Hound of the Baskervilles, which I know is one of your favorite episodes of my podcast, I distinguished that there’s actually what’s called cognitive empathy, which is the ability to understand how someone else thinks differently from you, and to understand why they think differently, without you going to the level of emotionally sympathizing with them. That’s why Sherlock is an empath, which sounds ridiculous if you think of any adaptation of Sherlock Holmes, but he’s a cognitive empath. He’s incredible at understanding, this person, because of their situation growing up and because of their personality, is going to think this way and make this type of choice, but he doesn’t need to bog himself down by feeling what they feel in order to do that.
So there’s incredible value to what you said. Whether it’s because other people are wearing masks and aren’t being truthful in real life, or because we really struggle to truly get outside of our own perspective and see things from someone else’s point of view. We just filter what we see them doing through our point of view. That’s how we arrive at, you’re so stupid, why would you do that? It’s because we’re filtering what they’re doing through our mindset, and that just doesn’t work. When I was young, 19 or so, I heard a phrase at a lecture that stuck with me the rest of my life. It’s so simple, but it’s just that “the things people do make sense to them.” So the people you hate, the people you think have completely lost the plot, the fact is, their life experience has led them to a point where that is what makes sense to them. You don’t have to agree with it. You don’t have to say it’s as true as yours. But you have to acknowledge there is truth for them in that action.
Liberty
If someone’s not a total psychopath, a total dark-triad type of person, the rest of us are doing our best and see ourselves as the heroes of our own stories. Even if from the outside it doesn’t make sense, having this cognitive empathy of placing yourself in other people’s shoes is a superpower, because so many people don’t even take the time to learn that skill.
Jameson
Yeah. Whether you want to get better at your relationships with your spouse, your children, or on the far more tactical side, if you want to become a better negotiator, there are all sorts of skills that will improve if you can develop the ability to truly see through other people’s perspectives instead of filtering them through your own. And fiction is great at that, because you’re forced to not only hear the actions of other people, but to get inside their brain and see how the dots connect from the first time you’re introduced to them to why they take the actions they take later. In that way, it’s the only real format for truly getting inside someone.
There are memoirs, where someone you admire who’s a real person is sharing their experience. But again, the question is, is their memory faulty? Are they covering up the real truth and masking it to make themselves seem better in the story? We can’t fully know. Whereas with a fictional character, the author has full reign of what they say. But again, it all comes down to whether we feel it. You read a character and you decide, this feels accurate, or it doesn’t. That’s where it comes down to whether it feels true. We have a BS meter in our head that says, this doesn’t feel right.
Liberty
Very finely tuned by evolution.
Jameson
As long as the character feels truthful in its portrayal, it’s a good enough representation of a different perspective from our own to use as data to consider. One of the ways I frame it is that every story is a simulation in the Matrix. It’s a way of understanding a potential circumstance without having to physically live it yourself, seeing how choices play out and how a choice draws reactions from other characters. That’s one of the other values of consuming stories. It lets you get a better understanding of people in the world without you having to pay the price of experiencing everything yourself.
But to close up this section, we made fun of the fact that they don’t have cave paintings of Excel sheets. But to me, the best truths are ones that have a narrative that the numbers back up. It’s the two of them combined that create the best. One thing I’ve paid attention to in my own life since I started this show is what comes to my mind when I’m in the heat of a moment, when I’m feeling tension, when I’m feeling pressure, when I don’t know what to do. It’s never statistics. It’s never, if I react this way, then 73% of the time that will be favorable. I may internally know that stuff, but that’s not what comes to mind when your reactions are more emotional.
But because I know the story of Hercules at the crossroads, which is one of the best stories about Hercules in all of Greek mythology. If I were to place it in the Disney animated Hercules, this is the scene that takes place right before he starts singing “I Can Go the Distance,” because that’s what this sets up. When he’s a young man, he’s walking towards a crossroads, and he sees a woman coming towards him from each of the paths. On the left side she’s running towards him. The other one is just walking, taking her time. So when he gets to the crossroads, the one who’s running is there first. Her name is Kakia, who in Greek mythology is the goddess of vice, of moral misbehavior. She gets to him first, and she’s gorgeous. She’s wearing fine jewelry, she’s very made up, she’s a smoke show for all intents and purposes. And she’s telling him, come with me, you’ll never have to work again. Life will be nothing but pleasure and enjoyment, and you won’t have to worry about a thing. So he’s taken aback by this promise. By the time Kakia has finished her pitch, Arete, the goddess of virtue, has reached the crossroads. She’s a beautiful woman, but she’s not extremely made up. Her clothes are much more plain, but she holds herself with a certain regalness. So she makes her pitch: I promise you nothing except a life of the fruits of your labors. I cannot promise you that you won’t experience hardship, but I can promise you that what you do experience will be the highest you can. And there’s one line from whatever interpretation I read that stuck with me. She says, “The gods have set a price on every good and noble thing.” Nothing is free. You have to give in order to receive. So whatever Kakia is telling you, that luxury, that lavishness, comes with a cost, which is that you won’t experience meaning.
Liberty
Right.
Jameson
Noble things. And so, ultimately, Hercules chooses to follow Arete, and that’s how he became the hero he became. I share that whole story, because if I find myself in a situation where I’m being offered two paths, one that seems easy and way more lavish, and another that feels like a lot of work but has a lot of potential upside, I’m not going to remember statistics, but I may remember Hercules at the crossroads. All of a sudden that story races through my brain, and it makes the choice a lot easier, because that story rang true with me when I read it. The recall I have of that story in my moments at the crossroads makes it a lot easier to think, of course, this is the path I have to take. There are other situations where a lesson or a quote I took from a book comes to mind in key decision moments, in emotional or stressful situations. Not every book I cover sticks with me that much. I’d have to go back and look at my notes to remember the lessons I took from a certain book. But every few books, there’s one that just hits.
Liberty
And that can be life-changing. One can be enough. The right one at the right moment can alter the course of a whole life.
Jameson
And that’s the same with nonfiction.
Liberty
Right.
Jameson
You’ll read 10 books, and maybe two of them really have any impact on you, but you have to go through them to know which ones will. I’d say that’s the same for fiction as well.
Liberty
And speaking of cognitive empathy, I can hear the listener wonder, okay, that sounds good, but is it about great ambition? Do I need to be a hero to do this, to be a protagonist? Is it about great courage and all that, or can it take other shapes? Can it be a smaller-scale version of that?
Jameson
That’s an incredible question, because it’s one I think about a lot. People I know in my own life have different visions of what our best life looks like, and I see no reason to label one as better than the other. The commonality between them is that they both take intention. Neither will happen by just existing. So whether you want to be the CEO of a billion-dollar company, or some sort of celebrity, or, on the other end, you just want a job that pays the bills and lets you have plenty of time with your family because your ultimate goal is to raise kids you’re proud of, those are both incredible aspirations. I’ve tried to come up with a way to distinguish the two types without one sounding lesser than the other. A type A protagonist versus a type one protagonist. I haven’t come up with terms I feel good about, because if I just say A and B, then everyone thinks B’s not as good.
Liberty
It’s almost like once you’ve picked what you want to do, whatever that is, then these tools can help you live the fullest version of that, the best version, be the best protagonist for that story. But the story itself is for you to choose. And if you try to live someone else’s story and it doesn’t sync up with who you really are, that’s another problem. Having someone else’s ambition sounds great in theory, but you can’t borrow someone’s ambition or someone’s confidence. You have to live your own thing. But then I think these things can help you take that to where it can go.
Jameson
I 100% agree. In fact, one of the foundational principles that came from my studies before I was building this is a concept from Carl Jung, where he talks about the only two things any person needs to be happy. The first is to define your values. Maybe you grew up with a value system from your culture, your religion, your political affiliation. You’ve definitely had values imprinted on you. Some of them will resonate, some probably don’t. So we all need to do the work of actually defining our personal values. They’re nobody else’s. This is what I believe makes a good life. This is what I want from life. Then the second part is living in accordance with those values. That’s all it takes to have a happy life.
Liberty
Easy, right?
Jameson
The problem is that most people never sit down and define their personal values. And even those who do, a lot of them aren’t living up to that expectation. That’s where all the discord, the despair and the lack of satisfaction come from. Either you’re living someone else’s code, or you know what your code is but you keep making choices that violate it. So to me, protagonism is very much rooted in taking control of your story by defining the code you live by. And then the harder part is making sure everyday choices are in line with that. That opens the field wide up in terms of what the end results can be. It doesn’t have to fit one specific type. It doesn’t have to be heroic in the sense of looking at an action hero and thinking, I’ve got to be this macho, Jason Bourne, Ethan Hunt kind of guy.
But one of my favorite books that’s informed the way I talk about protagonism, and I reference it on the podcast all the time, is a book by Donald Miller called Hero on a Journey. It’s one of the only books I’ve come across that does the same thing I’m trying to do, where it uses story principles to map a real life. He talks about how there are villains, victims and heroes, and the similarity they share is that they all experience pain, which is an absolute truth about human life. It doesn’t matter if you’re impoverished in a war-torn nation or born with a silver spoon in your mouth, you will experience pain.
Liberty
The human condition is inescapable.
Jameson
The difference comes in how you respond to pain. A victim feels powerless to do anything about it. They just accept that this is all my life is, unless someone else steps in and takes care of it for me. A villain becomes obsessed with making someone else feel their pain, whether that’s the person they blame for it, or they’re just passing it on to other people. Their whole thing is, I feel pain, others need to feel pain as well. And the hero, the only real difference, is that they decide, I don’t want to feel this pain again, and I don’t want the people I care about to ever have to feel this pain. So I will take on the sacrifice. I will transform into what I need to be to make that happen.
There are so many examples of this story in real life. The parents who grew up pretty impoverished and had a rough life because of it, and they say, I don’t want my kids to live like this. So they work two, three jobs so they can send their kids to college and break that cycle of poverty for their line. That’s an amazing example of a hero saying, this is the pain I felt, I don’t want my kids to have to feel it, I’m going to do whatever it takes to fix that. That’s as much a story of a hero to me as someone who’s actually a war hero, or someone who has created a massive industry benefiting millions of people. The scope is different for everybody, but the same principles are true of everyone. To be heroic, all it takes is saying, this is the pain I feel, I don’t want to feel it again, and I don’t want anyone I care about to have to feel it, so I will take on the responsibility to become the person who stops that pain from happening.
Liberty
That’s a perfect segue, because I want to ask you about what you call the principle of becoming, and how all of this sounds like a verb, a journey. It’s not a destination. One of the main differences between a story in a book and real life is that in the book it’s very clear where the beginning, the middle and the end are. And you know that if the hero is suffering, it’s for something, it means something. In real life, sometimes it’s a lot harder to find a meaning. It’s a lot harder to know where the end is, to have a clear moment where, okay, we’ve won, let’s wrap it up, let’s have the epilogue party, it’s done, we’ve won. Life just keeps going on. So whatever this is, I think it has to be more of a constant thing, a never-ending, infinite game, so to speak. So tell me about this. I think it’s fascinating.
Jameson
Yeah. The principle of becoming is the first and, at this point, the only principle I’ve codified as an official principle of protagonism. It’s just the idea that this isn’t about setting a standard of, I’m trash unless I reach this, that I have to do this or else my life is worthless, because that’s such a burdensome way to live. Thinking that I don’t have value unless I do X is a really rough way to live. And the thing is, there’s always going to be great achievers who talk about how that’s how they live, how they lived with constant insecurity. Again, if the hustle-culture people resonate with my stuff, awesome, but I’m not making it for them. I’m making it for the people in the middle who think, I know there’s more in me, but I don’t know how to go about it.
So the principle of becoming is just the idea that you’re approaching life with almost a curiosity above anything else, of just, what am I capable of? If I got rid of a couple of vices that take up a lot of my time and applied that to a couple of hobbies or skills I’m curious about, what could I become? What is the highest version of me that I could achieve? And approaching that with a patient love for yourself, knowing you’re going to trip up, knowing you’re going to make mistakes, but never yielding that curiosity that asks, whether you’re 20 years old or 60, I still have decades left, what can I do with that? What can I achieve? What kind of existence can I create? What kind of legacy can I leave in terms of my descendants? Are they going to look at me and think, all he did was slave away for the man to make a buck? Or are they going to think something else?
Liberty
I love the idea of being a good ancestor. I don’t remember who said it. Maybe Alex Petkas, maybe someone else. But I love looking at your life from the point of view of someone in the future looking back: was that person a good ancestor? That feels a lot healthier as a drive. It comes from a place almost of peace, of aspiration, rather than insecurity of, I set this goal and I’m a failure until I reach it, and the moment I’ve reached it I need to set another goal and be a failure again. I think it’s better to be a vector going in a direction rather than just looking at this point on the line and, in the meantime, feeling bad. I love that.
Jameson
Yeah. The last thing I’ll say about the principle of becoming is that it’s about not living in a deficit where you feel like I am not whole yet until I achieve whatever. It’s about living in a place of contentment: hey, I’m where I’m at because of my choices, for better or worse, but this isn’t the finish line. So if I apply myself a little more, or just focus, it may not be about what skills I can learn at night so I can start a business. It doesn’t have to be something like that. It could be, how can I be more present in my children’s lives? Or how can I be a better contributor to my community? Again, it comes down to you defining what matters to you and what you want out of life, and then having a curiosity you take with you to the grave of, how can I dive a little deeper into this? How can I become a better version of what I think is important in life? There will be seasons where you’re more doggedly attacking that and trying to achieve something, and seasons where you’re resting a bit more, but you’re always thinking about it: what can I do to get a little bit more out of this? Instead of living the life of an NPC, which, for any listeners who aren’t familiar, is a video game term, non-player character, a character that you, as the player, interact with, but they don’t do anything on their own. They’re just there. So to me, the people who aren’t pursuing a protagonism life are kind of NPCs. They’re just clocking in and out of life, because they’re not holding the pen of their story. They’re just, well, this is what life dealt me, so I’ll follow that script. Whereas a protagonist is always curious about what am I capable of becoming if I just am intentional about how I live my life.
Liberty
Yeah, I have a lot more to ask about NPCs. But first I want to ask about something else you wrote about. You wrote about the danger of training montages. What do they get wrong about transformation?
Jameson
Yeah, that’s a fun thing for me with this pursuit. I can look at things in stories, or in storytelling formats, and then look at them through this lens of protagonism. One thing I thought was funny is that these training montages are effective at conveying to a moviegoer that they put in so much work, and we’re compressing it into 60 seconds of visual cues. Rocky, or whoever it is, he’s been grinding.
Liberty
The Karate Kid, waxing cars.
Jameson
But it’s dangerous for us to be exposed to that, because it makes it seem like it’s not as big a deal as it really is. Let’s take the Rocky example. It shows him working out, especially in Rocky IV, working out in the snow, pulling logs, whatever, and it’ll show one scene of him drinking raw eggs. It shows a variety of things. But what it doesn’t show is him doing that every single day, for months.
Liberty
And years of grinding.
Jameson
And even when he’s sick, having to do stuff that’s just miserable. So it makes the idea of a training arc glamorous, because it’s only showing you 60 seconds’ worth. Whereas the reality of any training arc in real life is that I’m signing up for a suffer-fest, and what I just watched in that training montage are literally the highlights of it, the best moments. But the truth is that there are times in life where you need something like that. You need to buckle down and say, yeah, I’m going to remove distractions for this period in my life if I really want to achieve this thing. There were a few other things in the article, but the biggest one is just the idea that it doesn’t show how monotonous and boring it is to actually achieve something that great.
Liberty
That’s the counterproductive aspect of this, because it’s fun to watch. But if it sets your expectations so that you think, oh yeah, it’s going to feel so satisfying and I’m going to see the progress, it’s almost like a time-lapse. It compresses time so much that it gives you the wrong impression of how slow real progress is, and how not fun it is as you’re doing it a lot of the time. So if you come in expecting that and you start training and you don’t see much progress, it feels crap. You may stop, if you come in with the wrong expectations. It could actually do the opposite of what you’d think going in.
Jameson
Yeah. It makes you get really frustrated really quickly when you’re not seeing a similar level of change, or you’re bumping into way more obstacles than you thought you would. What I’d love to see is a training montage that shows the person eating their Tupperware of chicken and rice while everyone around them is eating pizza. Just show that scene dozens of times, that would be a more accurate representation of a training montage. Or show them having to wake up to the 5am alarm day after day and dragging themselves out of bed. We don’t need to see the log-pulling or the deadlifting of 500 pounds, because again, those are the highlights. Show me the true lowlights of what this journey is, if you want me to have a more realistic expectation of what it’s like.
Liberty
And in this world of social media and influencers, people are getting advice from every direction all the time. Tell us about advice with unshared consequences, or why we should be careful with advice from very confident people.
Jameson
So this was a lesson I took from True Grit, which I covered recently. There’s a scene about halfway through the book, so it is a spoiler, but not necessarily a big plot spoiler. They’ve cornered these two outlaws, and in a scuffle Rooster has shot one of them in the leg, and he’s bleeding out. The other outlaw is telling the wounded one not to say anything. Rooster is dangling this in front of him: tell me where your boss is and I’ll get you to a doctor, you won’t die. But the other outlaw is just telling him to can it, don’t say a word. It got me thinking about how it’s easy for him to say don’t talk, because he’s not going to die regardless of the choice. In fact, he benefits more from the other one not talking, because then the boss won’t be angry at him. But this poor kid who was shot is portrayed as maybe 18 or 19 years old. He’s scared and wide-eyed and doesn’t know what he’s gotten into by working with these outlaws. He’s panicking, and he’s impressionable. So when this colleague of his is yelling at him, you shut it, don’t you dare say anything, he’s kind of believing him, even though his life is draining from him as he does it.
That got me thinking about this idea that people will always give you advice, and there are a lot of times when they’re giving you advice that’s only beneficial to them, because they won’t share the consequences of you following it. Unless it’s from a source you completely trust, a mentor, a family member, your oldest friend, if you’re getting advice from someone who isn’t that deeply connected to you, someone you trust implicitly, you have to think through what their motivations are. What do they get out of me following the advice they’re sharing that might benefit them regardless of what happens to me? Because this world is a tough place, and there are people who will take advantage of you at the drop of a hat if it means them getting what they want. So being able to sit back for just a moment and think, okay, why is he telling me to do this, or why does she want me not to do this thing I was talking about? Sometimes you may not come up with anything detrimental, and you think, okay, maybe they just really meant that. But there might be times where you think, oh yeah, they would look really good if I did that, but I’m carrying all the risk for them. It was such a random thought. The actual lesson isn’t connected to any of the main characters in that story, except that one of the main characters shot the kid. But that’s one of the reasons this project has been so fun for me, that the lessons can come out of nowhere. They aren’t necessarily, oh, the main character did this and then that happened, so here’s a lesson. Just inhabiting the world of that story exposes me to thoughts and ideas that I can extrapolate, concepts that are important to think about in modern life.
Liberty
Let’s get back to NPCs. I think this is another great mental model to have. You mentioned it’s from video games, but I think before that it was from role-playing games like Dungeons and Dragons.
Jameson
That’s true.
Liberty
You get to some inn somewhere and there’s a bunch of people there, but they’re all NPCs. They’re not fully fleshed out. They’re just there for a small purpose. They’re not actively changing the story. So that’s the way to think about it. How do you transfer that to real life? What are the signs that someone is living like an NPC? How could someone realize their own NPC tendencies? How do you fight that? And what are your own NPC tendencies that you’ve discovered and dealt with, to bring that to your own story arc?
Jameson
So one of the ideas about an NPC that I think is very interesting, because it translates to real life pretty well, is that if you find an NPC, most games are only going to program a few lines of dialogue for it. If you keep going back, they’ll end up repeating the same line, because they don’t have more in the tank to share with you. That translates to real life in the sense that an NPC is more likely to be running off of only a few scripts, and they’re not open to new information. They’ve just decided, this is life, I’m 25 years old, I’ve figured out life. And they spend the next 50 years assuming they have a grasp on the entirety of truth and that everyone who disagrees with them is wrong. An important aspect of living a fulfilling life is being open to new information at any given time. It doesn’t matter if you’re old. In fact, one lesson I took away from Dracula is that you have Van Helsing, who is the most educated, the most learned character, and yet he’s the one having to tell the other characters, I need you to open your mind, I need you to consider things you have thought impossible your entire life. So being able to constantly take in new information, and not letting that turn you into someone who thinks they know everything, is a crucial detail of being able to pursue the life of a protagonist, in my opinion. An NPC is incapable of that, because it’s just easier to run on fewer scripts and say, no, I’ve experienced enough to say this is what life is.
Liberty
And if you don’t think for yourself and create your own scripts, there are plenty of people out there who will be very happy to supply you with a script that helps them. Consumerism, politicians, whatever. There’s always someone else who is very happy to tell you how to think if you don’t do it for yourself.
Jameson
Exactly. And that brings up something I did not assume at all when I started this project. It’s been amazing to me how much, as I’m analyzing stories and lessons, this idea has come up: the idea of tribalism, and how it’s ingrained in us. We are all part of tribes, even in the 21st century. You’re part of your political tribe, your cultural tribe, your religious tribe, your neighborhood tribe, whatever group you identify with. The purpose of the tribe in ancient times was, we survive better when there’s more of us together, but we have to make sure the only ones with us are ones we can trust. That’s why, for a long time, being ostracized from the tribe was basically a death sentence, because you wouldn’t have access to their resources. So even though we have grocery stores now, and I can get access to food without some tribe granting it to me, there are still definite needs filled by tribal instincts, social needs, things like that.
I just witness how often people’s choices are dictated by the need to make sure they can maintain membership in a certain tribe. Tying this back to NPCs, part of it is that it is exhausting to actually think through how you feel about every single thing. It is a monotonous and terrifying task to actually think, no, I’m going to decide for myself.
Liberty
And if you’re wrong, so you’re wrong. It’s not someone else’s fault.
Jameson
So it’s easier to just adopt a belief system from a tribe and say, if Democrats think this way, then that’s how I feel. Or if Republicans feel this way. Or, trying to think of others.
Liberty
My family, my whatever.
Jameson
Yeah, exactly. It can be as granular as my family. Whatever tribe you’re part of, if they believe this, it’s easier to just say, okay, I guess I believe this too. And you cling to the parts that actually resonate with you, and you bury the ones that don’t under a rug and say, well, I agree enough that it’s better for me to just say I’m part of this group, and bury the things that are actually friction points for me. So to me, an NPC is someone who has largely found two or three tribes that they outsource all of their thinking to, and they say, okay, if that’s what they believe, then great, that’s who I am. Because I just want to be a part of the tribe in a way that I can lie low, that I don’t have to worry about tension in my key relationships, and I don’t have to worry about my ability to keep moving forward. That’s easiest done if I just partake in a certain number of tribes and play by their rules.
I’m not saying that’s bad. What I am saying is that you can’t have that mindset and at the same time complain about how you’re not getting what you want out of life, because you’re not living according to what you want or what you believe. So there is a certain amount of isolation that comes with truly pursuing your path. Whether it’s the famous CEOs who talk about their years of no one believing in them, or whatever it is. Tying this again to true storytelling frameworks, the hero’s journey, Joseph Campbell’s, one of the most foundational concepts of what a good story is, one of the first steps is leaving the tribe. It literally is leaving the tribe. You have to separate yourself from the people doing the normal thing in order to go do something extraordinary. So there is a conflict. While I’m not here to say an NPC life is bad, there is an inherent conflict that cannot be avoided between you trying to fit into your tribes perfectly, in a way that doesn’t rub anyone the wrong way, and you actually going out and achieving what you think you’re capable of becoming.
The trick, again using the hero’s journey as an example, is recognizing that if you don’t want to be completely ostracized from the tribe, your journey out has to come back to somehow benefit the tribe in the end, or else they’ll decide he’s a liability, get rid of him. So whether you went and slayed the dragon that was threatening the crops, or whatever it is, the only way to maintain relationships within your tribe but also do your thing is that your journey out has to somehow come back to benefit them. Maybe your family is very traditional and they don’t like that you want to go off to a big city and have a big career. If you do that long enough, they may think, yeah, he’s not really as dialed-in a family member as the rest of us. But if you do it so that you can then come back and elevate the existence of your family members, all of a sudden you’re the hero. All of a sudden you’re the one who makes everyone proud. But there are some people who go out on the journey, achieve the great thing, but don’t make the loop back. And then they wonder why everyone hates them.
Liberty
Yeah. And to be clear, being an NPC, or borrowing ideas and values from the tribe, is not all bad. It’s kind of a floor, because some of these ideas are probably great, and it’s better to have that than nothing. But it’s also a ceiling, because if you do like everybody else, you can’t expect to have outcomes too different from everybody else. But one question about this. The flip side of this mental model is, is there a danger that it could be a little dehumanizing, that you could look down on other people, oh, they’re all NPCs, and I’m not? How do you avoid this turning into something negative, or a bad way of interacting with others?
Jameson
I guess the first thing I’d say is that every belief system comes with the risk of downplaying the other, of categorizing the people who don’t see things the way you do as lesser than. So yeah, I definitely think there are risks with it, but it’s not like other, more traditional ways of thinking aren’t this way too. This is a great question. I haven’t spent a ton of time thinking about this before, but from the thoughts I have had, I guess I’d say that part of the way I try to frame this ties back to the thing I said, that what people do makes sense to them. So if they’re not living as purposeful and particular a life as me, someone who’s trying to pursue greatness in one way or another, that’s because their life experience hasn’t taught them that they’re capable of it, or they genuinely may just not desire it. That’s a huge thing that honestly freed me up in my personal life, just recognizing that if people see the world so differently from me, and they’re not doing something detrimental, they’re not harming other people, that’s an important caveat, then it’s no skin off my nose. I don’t have to hold it against them.
What’s funny is that I’d say I’m actually a very judgmental person, in the sense that I do look at people’s situations and make a judgment on them, but I don’t then carry this extra layer of, and therefore they are bad. I make the judgment, but it’s just saying, oh, that’s what they’re up to, that’s their situation, that’s what they think is important. It may be frustrating if I need something from them that they’re not willing to give because of their worldview. There are definitely situations where I wish they’d see the world a little differently, but it’s accepting that they’re living their story. I can’t control that. They wouldn’t want me to control it for them, the same way I wouldn’t want anyone else writing my story. So you try to elevate, you try to assist where you can, but ultimately your story is the only one you have a modicum of control over. So you should focus on that.
One idea to tie in here, and this connects to several things I’ve said, including coming back around to the tribe at the end of the story, is that I do believe truly heroic figures, in one way or another, are always doing what they do for more than themselves. We like to idolize a lot of people who are truly just out for themselves, at least from the outside, and there’s a lot that’s admirable about what they achieve. They accomplish incredible things. But at the end of the day, we don’t revere them the same way we do people who have sacrificed, who have done a lot for the benefit of others. So I think that’s an important way to evaluate what’s worth pursuing with your protagonist life. What are your goals? Purely to make you rich, or famous, or whatever it is you say you want? Or is it because you have a vision of how you can help other people by achieving these things, so you’re doing it for something bigger than yourself? Not only is that a more harmonic ending to the story if you benefit others, but it can also be the motivation to stick through the hard times, if you know other people are being impacted by your success or your failure.
Whether it’s your family, I try to categorize the main characters I talk about into different clusters. I have this matrix that’s partially the Donald Miller framework I talked about, are they a hero, villain or victim, based on how they respond to their pain. And the thing I added to it is, who does this person care about? The three categories that create this matrix are, first, someone I call a champion, and this is Captain America, someone who thinks everyone is worth protecting, I will put myself on the line for anybody. Then there’s the guardian, who has a select group of people they care about. Maybe that’s their family, maybe their city. It’s Frodo caring about the Shire. The guardian has a certain number of people they care about, whereas the champion is just, I am here to defend everybody, to serve everybody. And then the maverick. I used to keep it on the same level as the other heroes, but I’ve ultimately separated it, because I thought, this is not the same thing. The maverick is someone who’s willing to undergo transformation, but ultimately they only care about themselves. So this isn’t truly heroic, but at the same time these characters do the things heroes do. They make self-sacrifices, the same way you can learn from a villain in certain regards. So they’re worth analyzing, but it’s just worth pointing out that this person only cares about themselves. They are burning bridges left and right. They will ultimately only have themselves, or the people they can pay to be around them, at the end of the day. So it’s worth evaluating, who is it that I care about, and how is that motivating me to go down the path I want to go down, to transform into what I need to be to serve this group of people?
Liberty
Beautiful. As I was thinking about NPCs, it reminded me of something I wrote a while ago, about how there’s an asymmetry there. Because you can’t see into other people’s heads, but you can see into yours, you should treat others and yourself differently. I have different expectations. You should never expect others to change. If they do, that’s great. But you should always remember that you can change, and always try to. You should filter what other people say through the most charitable interpretation, but you should pre-filter everything you say through the least charitable interpretation. I think this asymmetry, if you think about the NPC principle that way, means you should always look for your own NPC tendencies and try to fix them. And if you notice them in others, you should be very charitable with it, and say, it may look like that from the outside, but I can’t know what’s going on inside. I think that’s one way to balance it out.
Jameson
Yeah, that’s a great point. The only layer I’d add is that, to me, there’s a certain layer of, I can’t know for sure their intentions. And even if I had the ability to be positive about their intentions and it is a bad interpretation, so what? As you said, you can’t change them. So a lot of being willing to transform is accepting the truth of your circumstances. If that means you have an unsupportive spouse or unsupportive parents, there’s no need to villainize them to be able to say, this is the reality of my situation, so I have to factor this in. If I want to achieve this thing, I have to assume I’m not going to have the support of these people. That’s just how it is. A big key to being a high-agency person is being willing to 100% accept the reality of where you are. Because it’s only then that you can start making the choices to change that situation.
Liberty
Yeah, looking at hard truths and being lucid about it is part of agency. If you have your head buried in the sand and you pretend everything’s okay, are you going to make the decisions, the sacrifices, that cause change, if you think they’re not needed?
Jameson
Yeah, totally. Because, going back to the start of this conversation, that chunk of my 20s, I was very much, oh, this isn’t fair, my boss isn’t giving me the opportunities I deserve. I was very much playing that victim mentality, that NPC mentality of, it’s out of my hands, so what’s the point? It’s such an unhelpful mindset. You’re asking me what the traits of NPCs are. I think it’s that they have a backpack full of limiting beliefs, things they’ve assumed to be 100% true and 100% unchangeable, whether that’s about themselves. Oh, that’s just the way I am, which is one of the most annoying phrases for me to hear, because that’s the way you have been. There’s nothing that says you have to continue to be this way. So they have limiting beliefs about themselves, or limiting beliefs about the opportunities they can expect to find out in the world. I’ve definitely had my fair share. All of us do. Even people who, if we wanted to, could claim we’re enlightened enough to see that the world is more under our control than we think, we all still carry limiting beliefs that we need to challenge on a regular basis. But there’s a big difference between saying, I have limiting beliefs and so I try to catch myself and work through them when I see them in action, and not recognizing that they are limiting beliefs and instead labeling them as concrete truths you have no say over.
Liberty
Yeah. That’s why it’s a journey. That’s why it’s not a destination. How about villains and anti-heroes? Protagonists are not always good people. Walter White is a protagonist. What separates a hero from a villain with tons of agency? And what about admiring characters for their intensity or their cleverness, rather than their wisdom? How do you think about learning from people you may not want to be like, or wouldn’t want in your life?
Jameson
Yeah, that’s another area where there’s so much more to mine than I’ve had time to so far. I cover a lot of characters who fit into the anti-hero category, or even just very compelling villains. Walter White’s a great example. He’s a perfect example of the Greek term I used earlier, the hamartia, the tragic flaw. At the surface level, people think it literally just means tragic flaw, but the deeper meaning of a hamartia is that your tragic flaw is actually tied to your greatest strength as well. It’s the downside of your greatest strength. Walter White is a great example, because his greatest strength is his genius with chemistry. He’s able to do things that have never been done before, and he creates a product that’s worth more than anything that’s ever been on the market. But that makes him pretty prideful, to the point where he creates unnecessary risk, because he’s unwilling to have his genius go unrecognized. And there are so many Shakespearean characters. Macbeth was very ambitious, and because he didn’t have the value set in place, when opportunities to achieve ambition through shady means came around, he jumped on it, even if it took his wife convincing him to. And that led to his downfall.
So to me, anti-heroes, or villains who had a more promising start, whether we hear about that in the story or it’s just assumed, they’re beautiful ways of doing what I described before, simulations of the Matrix. In fact, I love stories where the hero and the villain have similar origins, because then you can track which choices separated them.
Liberty
Especially if they’re best friends.
Jameson
It really is. So if you have characters, especially in a story where the hero and the villain were on the same side and experienced the same thing. One principle of stories is that there’s always the inciting incident. The first bit of the story establishes the world as it currently is, and then something happens that changes everything. A lot of the time it may be the pain point, the thing that creates the pain that starts them on a journey. So if you have a story where the hero and the villain start on the same side, and then the inciting incident impacts both of them, but it’s their responses that really diverge, that’s a really fascinating case study, in my opinion, because you’re witnessing in real time how you end up on different paths.
So I think they’re very valuable, because they serve as warnings. Especially in old Hollywood and a lot of dime-store novels, which stick to higher-level themes, they simplify the villain by just making them truly evil. They’re mustache-twirling, they just love being evil. They wear black, they only talk disparagingly to everybody under them. So they simplify the villain by giving them no redeeming qualities, which for the most part is not true of real life. Everyone we struggle with or see as a bad person, in our personal lives at least, there’s more to them than that, but we’re just honing in on the things we don’t like or disagree with. So I do love that evolution of Hollywood, where we’re getting more complex villains and seeing the backstory. One of the best examples was the first Black Panther movie, where we see, I can’t remember the character’s name, it’s Michael B. Jordan’s character, but we see his origin, we see the pain that he felt. So even if we think, okay, but you took some really radical choices and ended up on the wrong side of stuff, we at least understand, oh, look, this is where things happened to him that led to him feeling betrayed, that led to him feeling like justice was not done unless he took these actions.
Those stories are really interesting to me, because they serve as way better litmus tests. Okay, where was the key choice that he made to end up on this path? Versus someone like, the one that came to mind is Darth Vader. Well, the prequels actually do show his journey, but if we take just the original trilogy.
Liberty
Yep.
Jameson
Darth Vader is just, I mean, he does redeem himself at the very end, but up until the end of Return of the Jedi, it’s just, I am here to do my master’s bidding, rule the galaxy. So that type is just more flat. A cardboard character is a term I hear, not so much authors, but critics of writers use. Oh, his characters are so flat, they’re made of cardboard. So now, the funny thing is that we have so much of a push to show the depth and complexity of villains that when we get a more traditional one, and at the same time we have to show the flaws of our heroes and elevate them and show how complex they are, which, again, there’s value to it, it’s really important, but it’s funny how we’ve pushed so much in that direction that now, when we get a more straightforward story of just a good guy trying to do the right thing, it feels like a breath of fresh air. You and I recorded, as we’ve discussed, on your podcast, A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms and…
Liberty
Project Hail Mary…
Jameson
Yeah. Where it’s just, oh man, he’s not a perfect being, but his intentions are a hundred percent good. That was my favorite thing about that story, compared to the other things we’ve gotten in the Game of Thrones universe, where we’ve got to have 50 different characters and we’re showing all their motivations, and they’re all corrupt in one way or another.
Liberty
Yeah, exactly.
Jameson
So to me, we need both. You need the complex characters so you can see how you may have been headed in the right direction but slowly start to drift. Speaking of Game of Thrones, Daenerys really impressed me in the mid seasons, where we see her transformation from being this savior of the enslaved, out here to right the wrongs. In her mind, her vision hasn’t changed, she’s still doing the same things, but we see how her choices and her tactics evolve into much more sinister paths. So that’s a great example of the evolution of a villain, or just a character with villainous traits. But at the same time, we need the more pure examples as well, as something aspirational. If we’re only given stories of, oh, everyone’s flawed, then we don’t have the inspiration of, but I could be more than I am. We just think, well, I’ve got good qualities and that’s good enough, I’m going to settle where I’m at, there’s no need. Whereas we have Hercules at the crossroads, and we have these other characters who are fictional but are idealized versions of what a human could be. They give us something to aim for.
In fact, one little fascinating thing for me is the way terms are used to describe things. Fiction. We just naturally assume that means fake, that’s what it means, it’s fake, it’s not real. But several of these terms, their origins aren’t nearly as simple as that. They have a better purpose than just saying, oh, this is not real. Recently I learned that the etymology of “pretend” is actually tied to the idea of stretching forward. It’s about reaching. So to pretend is, okay, this is what we know, but let’s imagine, let’s stretch forward a little bit and visualize what could be.
Liberty
Speaking of stories as simulations.
Jameson
Yeah, exactly. So to me, having the perfect hero characters is something that needs to be in the rotation, because they give us the visual so that we can pretend, we can extend forward our assumptions about ourselves. Okay, but what if I could embody that more than I currently do? What if I could approximate this character more than I am now? How much better off would I be? So the same way I say fiction and nonfiction are both necessary, I think we need the complex stories that show that heroes have flaws and that villains had, at some point in their life, better intentions than they’re showing now. But we also need stories that just give us that gold, that shining star of, how cool would it be if I could become more like this?
Liberty
And as we approach the ending of today’s story, someone who’s been listening to this and it sounds good, but they feel like they’ve been drifting, maybe they’ve been hearing about this NPC stuff and thinking, oh yeah, that’s a little too close to home. What is the first small protagonist move they could make today? What are the small first baby steps towards higher agency? What would you recommend they think about? Or maybe don’t think, just do, and then as you do, you start to integrate it.
Jameson
Yeah. In one of the more recent episodes I covered, one of the takeaways I had was the idea of, don’t try to think your way into becoming. Just start making the choices, and then the becoming is what follows. It’s the same concept as, you don’t learn your way into being brave, you take some courageous actions, and then once you’ve got those in your bag, it’s, okay, I guess I am more courageous. But a specific exercise for people who are as overthinking and neurotic as I am: sit down, preferably with pen and paper, and preferably without any device that could distract you. Just sit down and challenge the assumptions. What do I value based on the tribes I’m a part of, and what are the sticky points of those assumptions of my tribe where maybe I need to make a choice that’s more personal to me? Sit down and decide, what is it I want from life? I feel the pull to be uber-successful and make tons of money, but is that really what I want? Because if you’re just chasing money because you know it’ll give you a more comfortable lifestyle. You know the old proverb of the fisherman, where some guy comes to him and says, you should start a fishing business and keep scaling it, and the fisherman says, why would I do that? And it comes full circle, back to saying, well, if you make all this money and have other people do it, then you can take the day off and just go fishing.
Liberty
Retire and go fishing.
Jameson
So the modern life of social media, which is only projecting these shiny versions of life, the 24-hour news cycle, everything in our existence is working to pressure you into thinking the good life is only a certain selection of pathways, and that may not be true for what you want out of life. So I think the number one thing is that you need to decide, what is it that I think I would be most fulfilled by in life? And if that’s becoming an entrepreneur, awesome. If that’s finding how to retire early so you can spend more time with the people you love, equally awesome. The only thing that matters is that you have decided this is what the best version of your story is, and you take the responsibility to recognize that it’s up to you. I will never be the main character in someone else’s story. I’ve got one shot at this. Just because I’m not there yet, and maybe I’m even in a much worse spot than I thought I would be at this point in my life, it’s never too late to take some control back, if you just grab the pen and start rewriting the script you’re currently living.
It’s not easy. The thing I’ll share, and maybe this is how we wrap up, I’ve talked to you about how I recently discovered William James, and I’ve become obsessed with him. He might be on what I’d call the Mount Rushmore of protagonism. So, the brief concept. William James, interestingly, is the brother of the novelist Henry James. He was an American psychologist from, I believe, the late 19th century into the early 20th century. He had a lot of philosophies that are very in line with protagonism, of agency and deciding what to make of your life. But what makes him so fascinating to me is that he’s not some academic who just wrote about this from a cushy life. He actually had a complete breakdown himself, where he spent years bedridden, questioning existence, sometimes considering ending his life. So he went through it personally. And then one day he just decided, because one of the things he was struggling with was, do I have free will, or is it determinism, am I just destined to do what I do? So he was struggling with these thoughts, and one day he just decided, “You know what? I don’t know which it is, but I’m just going to act like my choices do matter, and if that’s determinism, I don’t care.” I love that, because I’ve literally said that in one of my episodes. You could argue either one. As long as I, in my consciousness today, can look at my options and say, I have the choice to do something I think is a better choice than another, that’s all that matters. It doesn’t matter if I was predetermined to do this or not. All I care about is that in the here and now, I can look at my options and I have the option to choose what I think is going to contribute to a better life.
So, William James decided to do that, and he eventually built himself up into one of these very prominent psychologists and philosophers who had a very meaningful life. The detail I haven’t shared with you yet, that ties into it being a journey, is that I learned about that story, and then I learned there was controversy about it. And I thought, oh no, is the controversy that this never happened, that he never had a breakdown? But no, every source agrees he had a breakdown, he went through it. The controversy comes from the fact that some versions romanticize it, that he had that thought one day and boom, his life was changed. And people are saying that’s not true. The only contention is that they’re saying it took him a while to figure it out. He had that thought, he wrote it down somewhere, but he stumbled his way to what we eventually see him as. When I learned that, I thought, that’s even better.
Liberty
That’s more relatable.
Jameson
That’s a much more relatable story. The whole point is that he got there because he just decided, it doesn’t matter how low I am right now, or where I’m at in life, my choices from here on out matter, and I’m going to live under the assumption that I can impact where I end up based on my choices. Because I will never say, oh, everyone can be billionaires if you just choose. Your circumstances do have certain limitations. But within your fixed circumstances that are truly outside of your capability, there are millions of possibilities of how your life ends up that you do have some sway, some control over, as long as you decide that your choices will impact the way your story plays out.
Liberty
You’ve been dealt a hand of cards. How you play them is what matters. We all have a different hand, but then, what do you do with it?
Jameson
Yeah. I can’t remember the exact phrasing, but for the most pessimistic that someone could be about these ideas, my answer is actually something I’ve thought about, and I was validated by it when Matthew McConaughey was on Hot Ones. He talked about this idea that you have desires, you have these things, and, man, I’m really butchering trying to remember it. I just remember the zinger, the line he said where I thought, yes, this is exactly what I’m trying to say. He just points out that it doesn’t matter how bad things are for you right now, “what else are you gonna do?” Are you going to just sit there and do nothing and be like, well, this is life, I’m just going to survive for the rest of my existence on this planet? Or are you going to say, what can I control, what can I become? I may have robbed myself of certain opportunities because of choices I made 10 years ago. I may have certain limitations purely because of where I was born, my parents’ socioeconomic status. Yeah, but so what? What are you going to do about it? What are you going to try to create with your beautiful life? No matter what hand of cards you’ve been dealt, there are people who have been dealt an almost identical hand who have turned it into something amazing, and there are people who have been dealt an almost identical hand who have just suffered through the rest of their life. And that is the difference between being an NPC and choosing to see your life as a story that you can actually impact with the choices you make.
Liberty
I think that’s as good a place as any to close it. We’re going to put all of your links in the show notes. For people who want more, check out Becoming the Main Character in your podcast player. I’m going to steal Jim’s question. If you could be made emperor of the world, you’re the cosmic writer of the novel of life, and every human is a character in it, and you could incept two things in all those characters, two things that they will believe and act on, what would those two things be? And they can be from what we’ve discussed. What stands out?
Jameson
I would instill that the two most important things any person can have to achieve a meaningful life are curiosity, both about what am I capable of becoming and about why do people act differently than me, being willing to see things outside of yourself. So, curiosity. And then grit, the grit to grind out the vision you have, to actually live the painstaking training montages that are glamorized in 60 seconds in a movie. Those two things combined, the curiosity to explore what’s possible and what you’re capable of, and the ability to stick it out when it’s not fun, when it might feel like it’s not going to work out, but you know that the only way to find out if it works out is to stick with it. Grit and curiosity. I think if people just held those as important virtues, it would be an incredible place to live.
Liberty
I love that. Thank you, everyone. Goodbye.
