The Hero's Journey

It's a journey to authenticity

Author

Alex Gilliland
September 18, 2024

I’ve been thinking about this Tweet from Naval:

100%, but we tend to be our own impediment to making it happen.

Design Your Life

We are all on our own hero’s journey and on our death beds we’ll look back and see the thread running through it all.

In the meantime, our hero’s journey is starting to look very different because of the way our world is changing — it’s changing how we pursue life.

Jack Raines calls this the apathetic life:

They say that necessity is the mother of invention, but the luxuries of modern life have cured us of necessity, rendering the invention of oneself (through improvement, exploration, and/or the pursuit of a higher self) unnecessary.

No longer needing to struggle to survive, many of us relax, defaulting to the apathetic life.

Fewer people are in pursuit of a big goal. That’s partially because they do not know what they want and so they let society pick it for them. As a result we end up pursuing someone else’s vision and dream.

The status quo has pushed us toward constant stimulation to fill our time so that all we pursue is work, the gym, and TV shows.

Many find themselves in a feeling of malaise. Life isn’t bad, but it isn’t great either.

An audacious goal, cause, or mission can fix this. But most people don’t know what to pursue, they don’t even know where to start.

If you don’t know what you want the only road to finding it is action. Start doing things. And if you do some stuff that you don’t like — good. It’s bringing you closer to what you do want. And it forces you to…

Evolve or Die

The reality is we enjoy the chase, the challenge, the rally, and the reward. In fact, we need it. Each time we conquer something, we change. We become the person we needed to be to achieve that thing.

This is evolution. It’s becoming a better version of you (aka the hero’s journey).

But — as I mentioned — we resist hardship because we are resplendent with comfort. And even if we do have the courage to pine for something, we demand perfection. So much so that when it doesn’t happen precisely the way we envisioned, we give up, failing to realize that it’s in the messy failure that we get to the next level. We evolve or die. In many cases dying = complacency.

If we are brave enough to see failure as a redirection, as an opportunity to learn, grow, and improve, we develop…

Integrity

Perhaps one of the rarest traits, integrity — to me — is the reward for your sacrifice.

I feel like I’m virtue signaling when I write about integrity so let me say this: there have been many times when I did not act in integrity (hello ghosting). Over time, I’ve learned that this is a sign of immaturity, lack of accountability, and most importantly — that I was not operating as my best self. The person who ultimately suffers most in this situation is me — I fail to meet my potential and instead live under a veil of imitation.

Integrity is a game of you vs. you. When you act with integrity, you are usually the only person who knows. There is often no social benefit. It is laborious, uncomfortable work followed by patience that maybe, one day, you might reap the fruits of your discomfort. Or maybe not. Either way, it was the toil that mattered — the way the work shaped you.

Integrity is silence in the face of a culture that is loud. But if you work to cultivate it, you will know it when you see it — you will feel it in another. And that’s when you know you are safe. Someone who is not looking for your approval, society’s approval, but only their own cannot be beat, cannot be tricked, cannot be made a fool. They are an island and they have proven — most importantly to themself — that they are self-sustaining.

Didion would say that integrity is self-respect. I think about this essay from her at least once a week:

“In brief, people with self-respect exhibit a certain toughness, a kind of moral nerve; they display what was once called character, a quality which, although approved in the abstract, sometimes loses ground to other, more instantly negotiable virtues. The measure of its slipping prestige is that one tends to think of it only in connection with homely children and with United States senators who have been defeated, preferably in the primary, for re-election. Nonetheless, character — the willingness to accept responsibility for one’s own life — is the source from which self-respect springs.”

Joan Didion, On Self-Respect

Going back to Naval — if the only test of intelligence is whether you get what you want out of life, and integrity teaches you to be responsible for your life (every part, including what was done to you), all there is to do is to define the precise thing you want. And then go about getting it. It’s an infinite game and a deeply worthy pursuit.

But it requires uncovering who you are. Not who you idealize or who society tells you to be, but who you are at your core. Too many of us think we want the penthouse and the lambo, when it turns out we want the freedom to go to the beach mid-week.

Anyone can win, but being the best version of you — to me, this is the most valuable pursuit. In doing it, you discover that you had all along that thing which you sought in the form of material things, prestige, or the approval of others. You found it in yourself because you built it.

It turns out that the hero’s journey is a journey home, to the authentic self.

Few will go. Be the one who does.

My Swipes

“A man who has not passed through the inferno of his passions has never overcome them. They then dwell in the house next door, and at any moment a flame may dart out and set fire to his own house. Wherever we give up, leave behind, and forget too much, there is always the danger that the things we have neglected will return with added force.”

Carl Jung

Lol Tweets

Love you, bye!