Corporate term: “Hero Scale”

There is a subset of people who will always, in a given situation, do better than average. You see it in all environments: sports, work, everything. But for many people, the reason they do better is because of built-in advantages. They got a high-paying job because they knew somebody. They were brilliant at singing because they had singing lessons as a child. All those kinds of things. And to their credit they don’t realise they have these advantages. But if you call someone “hero scale”, that means they genuinely are better. They are better than other people regardless of any advantage or disadvantage they might have started with. So, someone who is in a field dominated by one gender, but still rises to the top, is hero scale because they have done it despite the disadvantages. They are themselves worthy of being a hero. These are people to watch out for and work with because they genuinely know how to try, and they are good people to be with and learn from.

 

End note The phrase “hero scale” comes from tabletop wargaming. A six-foot-tall individual represented as a scale model in tabletop wargaming might be around 28 millimetres high, but for the sake of making important characters stand out when you’re playing, heroes tend to be closer to 32 millimetres high. They are hero scale.