Joseph Campbell’s The Hero With a Thousand Faces is required reading in the humanities.

His central thesis is that almost all stories follow the structure of the same story, just with different circumstances and characters.

He called that story The Hero’s Journey.

The Hero’s Journey goes like this: the unsuspecting hero leaves their ordinary world behind, having been called to adventure by someone or something. They face trials, gain allies, confront enemies, and, at some point, experience their dark night of the soul, where they are put to their ultimate test.

Having passed that ultimate test, they restore order to the world they left and return with newfound self-knowledge and power.

Star Wars is the classic example.

Think Luke Skywalker, innocent farm boy, who stumbles upon R2D2 and C-3P0 and learns of his Jedi destiny.

Three films, a severed arm, a kissed sister and a dead dad later, he dances with the Ewoks, having destroyed the Death Star and restored peace to the galaxy; the same man, but irrevocably changed.

Now, my favourite part of the Hero’s Journey is always the first part.

Which is tough, to be honest, because I then have to get through the remaining two-thirds of whatever it is knowing things can only get less exciting for me.

And I mean, very specifically, the part that Christopher Vogler—who made a fortune repackaging Campbell’s ideas for wannabe Hollywood scriptwriters—called “meeting the mentor.”

It’s where the naïve hero meets a twinkly-eyed old man who suddenly pulls out his dusty old lightsaber (that isn’t a euphemism) and tells him that his humdrum existence has all been the prelude to something far more exciting.

That he is destined for greatness.

Think Morpheus, feeding Neo the red pill and showing him that his reality is nothing but an illusion. Think Michael Caine explaining to Matthew McConaughey that NASA still exists and has been waiting for him to fly through a mysterious wormhole and save humanity. Think Gandalf thrusting Frodo’s ring into the fire and showing him its strange markings as they glow devilishly in the heat.

As Campbell and Vogler point out, this is a pivotal moment even in our oldest, most enduring stories.

We see it in the Old Testament, when Moses receives his orders from God at the burning bush. And in the Gospels, when Jesus of Nazareth, lowly carpenter’s son, is baptized—conveniently—by John the Baptist (we should be glad he managed to avoid ‘John the Lakeside Killer’) and the Holy Spirit descends to declare him the Son of God.

I think these moments are probably so enthralling because we all secretly suspect that we are actually the main character in some sort of epic drama; we just don’t know it yet.

I’m sure there are grown adults out there somewhere who are still convinced their acceptance letter to Hogwarts is winging its way to them via owl.

We’re all waiting to meet our mentor.

I suppose that for some, this takes the form of religious epiphany.

They have an encounter with Christ, or God, or something else miraculous happens, and suddenly their life takes on that cosmic significance we all yearn for—they realize finally that they are the beloved creation of the all-powerful consciousness behind the universe, and that their eternal soul is at stake.

Sounds pretty good, to be honest.

If God reads these emails, I’m very open to an intervention.

Because otherwise, frankly, modern life can feel a little aimless.

Once you’ve figured out how to make enough money to keep things ticking over, there isn’t really much of a Hero’s Journey that naturally presents itself.

We sit in comfortable numbness a lot of the time: warm, well-fed, and passably entertained until death.

Which makes that yearning for adventure all the more acute.

What I wouldn’t give, some days, to be recruited by a shadowy figure into the secret service. Or to find out that I’m of the bloodline of ancient Númenor, and that the Dark Lord is rising again in the east.

Otherwise, it’s back to wondering where my Deliveroo grocery order is and toying again with the idea of reformer Pilates.

(NB—I actually did give the latter a go; it’s basically just 45 minutes of being emasculated by strong, flexible women on something that loosely resembles a medieval torture device.)

I suppose that leaves us with only one other option: to invent a Hero’s Journey of our own.

I’m guessing for some people this might involve becoming a parent, starting a business, or reinventing yourself as one of the other things people tend to reinvent themselves as these days—a dropshipper, a cryptocurrency trader, a social media consultant.

It just doesn’t quite have the same sense of drama.

Or, and this is key for me, being my favourite part of the story, the twinkly-eyed mentor. The Obi Wan.

My own Hero’s Journey began, I suppose, when I left my job as an underwhelming secondary school teacher to become an underwhelming songwriter.

But I wasn’t prompted.

It’s not like the ghost of Tom Petty appeared to me in my dreams and told me I was earmarked for greatness by the Seven Muses.

I just sort of decided to give it a go.

Probably because I couldn’t stand the idea of being so ‘normal’ for the rest of my life.

Which, I suppose, says something about my ego and something else slightly more revealing about the human condition.

Campbell’s notion, inspired by Carl Jung and taken up later by people like Yuval Noah Harari, is that the monomyth—the universal story—is indelibly imprinted on the human mind.

We think in stories.

We are narrative creatures—unlike our simpler animal cousins, who live in an eternal present tense, we understand that our very existence is a story; a linear sequence of events from cradle to grave.

And, for me, that brings a sort of pressure—you have to decide what that story’s going to be about, and then get to writing it.

You don't get a second draft.

And there’s no guarantee it’s going to be a bestseller. It might not even be one of those self-published Amazon eBooks.

And finally, unless you’re very lucky, it’s unlikely that Sir Ian McKellen, the ghost of Alec Guinness, or even God, are going to intervene and tell you what the remarkable plot-twist should be.

You’re just going to have to make one up, get busy, and hope that it ultimately pays off.

In the meantime…

Keep dreaming.

Rob