The Philosophy
Be the hero of your own journey.
The most important thing in life is human potential because the saddest thing in life is wasted talent. You have a unique combination of gifts and skills, and that gives you the potential to achieve excellence. You get a lifetime to unleash that potential, so develop the skills you need to get the result you want.
Develop authenticity by creating a plan that aligns your daily decisions and actions with your vision for your life and your career.
Develop courage by focusing your attention and effort on the achievement of a meaningful goal.
Develop strong, personal accountability by focusing on skill acquisition and high standards.
Develop discipline by reviewing your goals and priorities on a daily basis.
Sacrifice appropriately by letting go of something meaningful so you can reach for what is most meaningful.
Master your craft so you can contribute something excellent to your community.
You have the opportunity to become a hero, and you have the duty to avoid becoming a villain. One day you will be too old and too sick to become a hero, and then your fate will be sealed.
The saddest thing in life is wasted talent because wasted talent leads to regret and despair, and that is the path to villainy. A villain is someone who gave up on their own potential. A villain is an enemy of potential and an enemy of excellence. A villain punishes courage and punishes authenticity.
You have a duty to begin your quest unleash your potential, and you have a duty to give it your best effort, because if you don’t, your life will become a tragedy.
If you step into the arena, and you leave all of your effort on the field, you’ll become a hero. If you work to develop your talent and unleash your potential so you can embody your most courageous, most authentic, most excellent self, you will become a credit to yourself and a credit to your community. You will live a fulfilling life, and you will find peace.
Take a look at every hour of your day, and find all of the hours that are not devoted to developing your talent and unleashing your potential. Is your activity for that hour more important than your potential?
Well, who are you, and what do you want to do about it? Will you sacrifice your potential for comfort and acceptance? Or will you sacrifice comfort and acceptance for your potential?
“Myths are clues to the spiritual potentialities of human life.”
Mythology becomes philsophy.
We need a philosophy because attention is the input that yields results, but life is complex, and human beings are easily distracted. Your philosophy keeps your attention focused where you want it.
The point of philosophy is to become a better person. Which philosophy is most effective in helping us do that? Probably the one handed down to us through the millennia by our ancestors. The foundational ideas of this project are based on insights handed down from our ancestors through our storytelling traditions.
Joseph Campbell was the world’s foremost authority on humanity’s tradition of heroic myths and legends. In his groundbreaking book “The Hero With A Thousand Faces,” he outlined an archetypal narrative pattern that was consistent in myths and legends from all over the world and throughout history. He called that narrative pattern “The Hero’s Journey Monomyth.”
The steps that narrative pattern follows are:
The Call to Adventure
Refusing the Call
Meeting the Mentor
Crossing the Threshold
The Road of Trials
The Ordeal
Apotheosis
Return with The Elixir
The pattern is cyclical. The completion of one cycle leads into the beginning of the next cycle. Upon receiving a new call to a new adventure, the protagonist begins a new Hero’s Journey.
If you’re looking for proof that The Hero’s Journey contains clues to human potential, you need look no further than the popularity of stories that follow that pattern. Hero stories have been retold, reimagined, and revivified for thousands of years. Hero stories have generated billions of dollars in global box office: “The Wizard Of Oz,” “The Lord Of The Rings,” “Rocky,” “Star Wars,” “The Matrix,” “Harry Potter,” “The Devil Wears Prada,” The MCU, and “Avatar,” are only a few examples of Hero’s Journeys that have captivated audiences around the world.
The reason these stories are so universally loved is precisely because they contain clues to our potential. Audience members imagine themselves as the hero, and walk away from the stories inspired by their own vision of courage, authenticity, and excellence.
Our philosophy is called “Heroism” because it is derived from the clues embedded in “The Hero’s Journey.” The practice of this philosophy is summarized most simply as “Be the hero of your own journey.”
The objective of our philosophical practice is to create a framework that allows you to align your decisions and actions with your conscience so you can develop the skills you need to unleash your potential for excellence.
“Do the best you can until you know better. Then when you know better, do better. ”
Myths are clues to your potential. The clues contain the following insights...
The Call to Adventure
This is your invitation to be the hero of your own journey.
A hero is born with the limitless potential for courage, authenticity, and excellence, and the desire to unleash that potential. The mission of the hero is to unleash their potential by embodying their conscience. Your conscience is the voice that invites you to be your most courageous, most authentic, most excellent self, and it is the voice that torments you when you don’t answer the call.
The questions that the hero must answer are:
Who are you? And what do you want to do about it?
Who are you when you are your most courageous, most authentic, most excellent self? Are you an artist, a warrior, an engineer, an entrepreneur, a craftsperson, a healer, a leader?
What is the biggest, most important problem you can solve with your gifts and skills? And what’s your plan to solve it?”
Refusing the Call
Your life is a wrestling match between your conscience, your ego, and your fear. Your conscience is the voice that calls you to unleash your potential by embodying courage, authenticity, and excellence. Your ego is the voice that invites you to sacrifice everything for acceptance. Your fear is the voice that invites you to sacrifice everything for safety
When your ego has the upper hand, you will sacrifice your potential for acceptance. When your fear has the upper hand, you will sacrifice your potential for safety. The saddest thing in life is wasted talent.
Meeting the Mentor
Everyone needs someone who treats them like they have the potential to achieve excellence, someone who says “I believe in your potential, and I can’t wait to see what you become. How can I help you develop the skills you need to get the result you want?”
If you are very lucky, you were raised by parents who treated you that way, you are surrounded by friends who treat you that way, you have a spouse who treats you that way, and you have a professional mentor who treats you that way.
We need a community focused on these principles because the most important thing in life is human potential. We need a community focused on these principles because the people you know who are burdened by regret or overwhelmed by despair never had anyone who treated them this way. We need a community focused on these principles because the saddest thing in life is wasted talent, and nobody wants to live the wrong life and then die filled with regret.
“My life has been a path at the edge of uncertainty… You don’t grow on a secure path… All of us should conquer something in life, and it needs a lot of work, and it needs a lot of risk. In order to grow and to improve, you need to be there a bit - at the edge of uncertainty.”
Crossing the Threshold
When you make the decision to align your decisions and actions with your conscience, you will sacrifice acceptance and you will sacrifice safety for your potential. You will cross the threshold from the ordinary world to the path at the edge of uncertainty.
The Road of Trials
In order to complete the mission, the hero must develop the skills they need to get the result they want.
Develop authenticity by creating a plan that aligns your daily decisions and actions with your vision for your life and your career.
Develop courage by focusing your attention and effort on the achievement of a meaningful goal.
Develop strong, personal accountability by focusing on skill acquisition and high standards.
Develop discipline by reviewing your goals and priorities on a daily basis.
Sacrifice appropriately by letting go of something meaningful so you can reach for that which is most meaningful.
Master your craft so you can contribute something excellent to your community.
The Ordeal
The ethos of the hero is: “Life is beautiful, and I love being alive, and it’s my soul that makes my life worth living. I want to enjoy my life for as long as I can, but I’d rather trade my life to save my soul than trade my soul to save my life, so I will never surrender to fear, self-doubt, or second-guessing”
The Ordeal forces the hero to confront their greatest fear, and that confrontation unleashes the hero’s true courage. This is an archetypal confrontation with mortality, and that confrontation poses a question to the hero - “Will you trade your life to save your soul, or will you trade your soul to save your life?”
This allows the hero to recognize that there is such as thing as “a fate worse than death.” If you surrender to fear of failure, fear of rejection, and fear of embarrassment, you will waste your potential. Once you realize you’ve wasted your potential, you will sink into a pit of despair, and that pit is bottomless. If you trade your soul to save your life, you will become a villain who punishes everyone around you, and you will do everything you can to drag them into Hell with you because the saddest thing in life is wasted talent, and their striving will become daily reminder of your of your cowardice.
Apotheosis
Once you let go of everything, you are free to do anything. Confronting your greatest fear unleashes your greatest courage. When you free yourself from the fear of death, you are free to truly live your life. Now you are willing to sacrifice everything to embody your conscience. Now you are a hero.
That understanding truly liberates the hero from fear, self-doubt, and second guessing, and that is the moment the ordinary protagonist becomes the hero. That is the moment when they truly embody the courage and authenticity that unleashes their potential to achieve excellence.
Return with the Elixir
Everyone needs someone who treats them like they have the potential to achieve excellence. Mentor others so that you may further develop your mastery by contributing to theirs. Find the others and liberate them by serving them - “I believe in your potential, and I can’t wait to see what you become. How can I help you develop the skills you need to get the results you want?”
“Everybody acts out a myth, but very few people know what their myth is. And you should know what your myth is because it might be a tragedy and maybe you don’t want it to be.”
The Dark Reality of Tragedy
Excellence or regret? Destiny or despair? Heaven or Hell? Hero or villain?
The glorious gift of life is the fact that you have the potential for excellence. The tragedy of life is that one day you will be too old and too sick to do anything about that potential, and some people wait too long. That is the reason that “most men live lives of quiet desperation.”
Hell isn’t someplace you go after you die. It’s the place you go before you die, when you look back on a lifetime of wasted potential and wasted opportunity. Your potential for excellence is much more than an opportunity. It is a duty. You have a duty to leave it all out on the field, because the saddest thing in life is wasted talent.
This is a dark reality that people are uncomfortable talking about, but you need to confront the reality of tragedy so you can make a plan to avoid living out a tragedy.. That is the reason the Stoics say “Memento mori.” “Remember that you must die” so that you can remember that you must live.
Becoming the hero of your own journey requires a leap of faith. The leap of faith is taken to avoid certain doom. You must become the hero so that you don’t become the villain. You must work to unleash your potential by embodying your conscience, because if you don’t, you will become the person who punishes others who try to embody courage, authenticity, and excellence.
Everyone acts out a myth, and if you don’t want your myth to become a tragedy, then you must be the hero of your own journey.