Recently I watched watched a fantastic movie called Finding Joe. It is inspired by the lifetime work of Joseph Campbell. Campbell was a Mythologist, a prolific author and a teacher who was known for the message “Follow your bliss” and the concept of the Hero’s Journey.
The movie got me thinking about how the word Hero has evolved in popular culture and in my life. I was obsessed with sports at a young age, athletes were my main heroes. Athletic prowess and success were enough. Character, integrity and sacrifice were great but not really necessary for my heroes. Gain a lot of yards, hit a lot of home runs and you were in. So I had heroes like Joe Namath, OJ Simpson, and Michael Jordan.
Let’s look at Jordan. I see how he could be a hero. He was almost superhuman physically, overcame hardship—cut from his freshman team—and was ruthless in his pursuit of winning. Is that enough to be considered a true hero? Hmm.
Moving outside of the sporting world, a generation of financial types seemed to look at the Gordon Gekko character in the movie Wall Street as a hero. Character, Integrity and Sacrifice were overshadowed by Greed and Effectiveness. In the business world being rich was the new yardstick, Machiavellian thought was king.
In the recent presidential election, when Trump said that McCain was not a hero because he was captured, the future president was making the case that outcome is the key factor in being a hero, winning is the yardstick.
This newer interpretation of Hero is a far cry from what Joseph Campbell envisioned.
More recent pop culture heroes do not have the #1 attribute or ingredient that Campbell’s heroes had. That ingredient is selflessness. Campbell’s heroes had a cause they were fighting for that was bigger than themselves. They were fighting for their families, the realm or even broad themes like justice. This, in Campbell’s view, was what made a Hero’s Journey: getting to that level of consciousness and maturity where they let go of self-preservation and me-first thinking and gave themselves over to the cause.
These two quotes from Finding Joe bring the point home:
A hero is someone who has given his or her life to something bigger than oneself.
When we quit thinking primarily about ourselves and our own self-preservation, we undergo a truly heroic transformation of consciousness.
When the words hero or heroic are used, we tend to think really big, like saving your village from marauders or saving a baby from a burning house, but hopefully, those opportunities will not come around often.
This got me thinking about how we approach things in our lives.
The smaller, micro-hero opportunities do come around often, several times a day. Let’s look at a common situation and lay the hero consciousness over the top of it.
When you evaluate whether you are going to go to an event or social gathering, the tendency is to start having an internal dialogue like this:
Will I like it?
Will I be comfortable there?
What will I get out of it?
Will it be worth it?
It is all about what you are going to get out of the deal.
A slight change of perspective moves you into micro-hero territory.
Maybe the thought process changes to:
How will my energy add to the mix?
Whose day can I uplift in some way?
How can I best serve the whole and not just me?
Changes the nature of the experience, doesn’t it?
Look at this final Campbell quote and play around with the two meanings of the word ‘our’:
One way or another, we all have to find what best fosters the flowering of our humanity in this contemporary life, and dedicate ourselves to that.
—Photo Credit: Flickr/Julen
Thank you for this thought provoking piece. It may take practice to change how I approach (and see opportunity for) micro hero moments throughout the day, but I know the choice I’d like to make.
That is the beauty of the micro practice. The smallest decisions build up the muscle