Creating Heroes to save the world
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its been a long time since I wrote a long blog post, but this is worth it!
We as a race of people are always fascinated by Heroes. As children and as adults, we love to read super hero comics and watch movies about super heroes. The theme of most successful move involves heroes of some sort, doing something out of the ordinary and something heroic. It captures our imagination and sweeps us up into a land of fantasy. Heroes are things of legend. Right?
What if that is not true. What if we all have the capability and the capacity of being a hero. Doing something extra ordinary. Saving people and making a difference in the world. Wouldn’t that be an amazing world to live in? Well guess what. It is the world we live in; and it is possible for every single one of us to be HEROES.
Welcome to the word of Dr. Philip Zimbardo. Dr. Z as he is affectionately called by his students is professor emeritus at Stanford University where he has spent 50 years teaching and studying psychology. Philip Zimbardo is one of the most distinguished living psychologists, having served as President of the American Psychological Association, designed and narrated the award winning 26-part PBS series, Discovering Psychology, and has published more than 50 books and 400 professional and popular articles and chapters, among them, Shyness, The Lucifer Effect, and The Time Paradox. He is best-known to the public for his controversial Stanford Prison Experiment that highlighted the ease with which ordinary intelligent college students could cross the line between good and evil when caught up in the matrix of situational and systemic forces.
He has made it his life time goal to study human behavior; specifically what makes people do “bad” things, and what makes people do good. His latest book the “Lucifer Effect” explores this in detail. In his book he talks about Lucifer (commonly known to all of us as the DEVIL) In fact, Lucifer was god’s FAVORITE angel until he disobeyed god and was banned into HELL. Hows does someone so good. Someone so pure; go from being the very representation of good into being the very representation of evil?
Dr. Z, says that heroes are not born heroes. They do not have special powers. Its their belief and the situation that makes a hero. By studying heroes over time; both the famous heroes of history past and newer everyday heroes from around the world he is convinced that “EVERYONE IS A HERO IS WAITING” Given the right situation we all have it in us to shine and do heroic deeds. Even something like taking some time to teach the elderly and non tech savvy how to use the internet or the computer can make you a hero. You are the person you are helping’s hero. Standing up to domestic abuse can make you a hero.
Dr. Z talks about this at his 2008 TED appearance where he introduced the idea of the Heroic Imagination Project (www.heroicimagination.org) or HIP for short. The Heroic Imagination Project (HIP) will inspires ordinary people to trigger extraordinary social change. HIP is based on the insight that all people have the capacity to act heroically, and that it’s possible to prepare anyone to be a hero when called upon.
I mean what an amazing goal. The more i read about and learn about this project, it just makes me happy. It makes me happy because i truly this that something like this could have an amazing impact on peoples outlook. HIP plans on introducing school based curriculum to educate middle and high school children about heroism. Image, a new generation of children brought up with the knowledge that they can be heroes. That helping others is the correct thing to do. This does not mean to go out and act irrationally, but to know what is right. From what I gather; frameworks and modals are being developed that will allow teachers to analyze heroes of the past and teach the underlying principals the guided that person to do something heroic. Those same principals can be used in everyday life by us, whether its standing up to a school bully, or helping an elderly person cross the road.
It all comes down to DOING THE RIGHT THING.
I wish Dr. Zimbardo and the whole HIP team all the very best in this endeavor and here’s to a better and brighter tomorrow!
Source: www.heroicimagination.org
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Well said. I’ve been working with Dr. Z for three years and run my own program teaching kids to be heroes. I’d love to know what you think.
My blog is at heroworkshop.wordpress.com and the main site is linked in this comment.