The Journey Begins and Ends with Your Story

Not to be too harsh on the curriculum of our educational system, but did you ever actually spend a semester learning how to be great? How about the fine points to becoming an honest to goodness success? How to be a true hero? How to actually love someone (no, not the mechanics of ‘doing it’, which any animal readily figures out)? How to fall in love with life and all the incredible possibilities it offers to you, if you don’t let the day-to-day details bog you down?  I thought not.

So here then is a quintessential guide – well, as essential and life changing as you want it to be - to standing outside the box of ‘going-nowhere mediocrity’. The experts are very much of the 21stcentury, storytellers whose wisdom is the end result of building blocks that have been carefully assembled over thousands of years.

The Quest for Success is the core of the famed Hero’s Journey. If you look at the classical myths of the hero’s journey, you find the hero must always head out somewhere, leave home, travel into unfamiliar territory, go out into the deep mysterious world. On his own! In search of what, he doesn’t really know as yet, but somehow in finding it he will emerge heroic. Sound familiar Frodo Baggins… Luke Skywalker… Harry Potter?

Ask most people today to name their ‘heroes’ and you get a list of the Dalai Lamas and Mother Teresas, Bill Gates and Martin Luther Kings who reach celebrity status that lands them somewhere in the midst of a mass of superstar athletes, movie stars and pop singing idols. Yes, the world is always in need of heroes, people we can look up to and emulate, but this cult of celebrity, this intoxication with ‘reality’ TV and paparazzi ‘revelations’, has blinded so many to the fact that each and every one of you has your own heroic path that you must walk, a path you must walk to live your life, regardless of whether you will ever waltz down the red carpet, or even care to.

As one wise woman (Anita Roddick, founder of The Body Shop) reminded us before her premature death, this life you are living right now is no dress rehearsal. You are on, live! What are you going to do?