The hJ is the monomyth - the common template that all stories share throughout the history of mankind. Every story is essentially about a hero, a call to adventure, and ultimately a transformation.
I made the 12 steps in Emoji’s…
Joseph Campbell's most famous work, 'The Hero With A Thousand Faces' established the theory of 'The Hero's Journey,' or the 'HJ' as I like to call it for short.
Earlier in the year I tried to recreate the 12 stages of the HJ using Instagram stories (@cbkunk), and if you ask me - I succeeded. We're gonna use that project to talk about some stuff over the next bunch of weeks, or until I get bored.
Without further ado, the HJ..
Before any adventure ever takes place there is a status quo. You can't have an adventure without it, by definition.
It's the thing the hero would keep doing if not for the story. Luke Skywalker would still be chilling on that dessert planet, Lonestar would still be cruising the galaxy in the Eagle 5, and I'd still be in 12th grade and would have never been tricked into 'taking pot'.
The ordinary world is not a place we leave once, it's the starting point before every new adventure. The end of one is the beginning of the next. You've experienced an ordinary world at least once - life before joining this newsletter. What a drag.
Perhaps you find yourself in an ordinary world again and don't even know it. That's probably the most exciting thing in life, knowing there's an adventure ahead.
Working on this heist is like that. i have two competing thoughts I am finding useful so I thought I'd share:
Thought #1. once this thing is complete it will go on to sell millions of copies, and probably become a movie, and likely a Netflix series in which I have a cameo that morphs into a recurring guest role.
Thought #2. it's probably going to sell a couple hundred copies (due to the fact that I'm going to send out a couple hundred individual text messages once its finished, ahem)
If you asked me which one I believe more, I believe both, 100%. Not 50/50. Not 51/49. 100/100. It's my head and I make the rules, got it?
#1 is the heart of the entrepreneurial spirit. 'Knowing' that we're different is what allows us to dig in on a long-term project. #2 is critical because it lets us be objective about our level of craft without getting sad.
I have to publish the heist so that I can reconcile where this project will actually fall between the two. The only way I'll find out why it didn't sell a million copies is by putting it out there and then applying that knowledge to book #2.
On that note, I've also realize that while every story is a Hero's Journey, every story is also a heist. We'll talk more on that some point down the line. Put that in your pipe and smoke it
Here's a quote to carry you on into the weekend:
"It's not 1-in-a-million chance you'll do something great, it's 1-in-a-million people who actually give themselves the permission to try." - Me
And trying is what it's all about. Be delusional. It's very exciting.
Next week we'll start to talk about HJ#2 - The Call To Adventure. There's two basic ways to get launched into an adventure: deliberately & by chance.
When I got a literal call during the spring of my senior year to come over and work on an economics project on a Friday afternoon, that was an example of 'by chance' (and a great example of needing to be more suspicious about things that sound to good to be true). But that's what best friends are for, right? Earthquakes, alien invasions, and kidnappings also fall into this category, 'by chance'. We'll start peeling it all apart next week.
For this week I'll leave you with one final question - what ordinary world might you be living in? And what's the next step? That' and more, next week.
Fire up the Eagle.
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gallery preview of all 12:
Have some thoughts? Feel free to drop a comment or hit me up: charlie@charleskunken.com
Other Posts In The HJ Series:
My underwear drawer consists mostly of blues and grays but on days I pull out the reds, I know we're in for something special.