Not diagnosably crazy. Just — off. Eccentric. Beyond the pale of what your strategic mind can sanction. It troubles you. It doesn’t fit the persona you have been creating. It is subversive to who you think you have to be in the world.

That’s the part I want to talk about.

I decided to become a pastor before I decided to become an engineer. The engineering came second, on purpose. A five-year slog in the school of engineering in Croatia, chosen deliberately, as a ticket into a graduate program in the United States where I could train for something entirely different. My crazy gave orders to my strategic mind.

That was thirty-odd years ago — one shape the crazy took. I'm not a pastor now. There have been several more since.

Back then I told my father about my adventure into faith. “I hear the music,” I said. He looked at me with a painful smile. Years later I said the same four words to Vesna’s parents, the day they sat me down to find out who their daughter was about to marry. The same painful smile.

Around that same time, Sonja — my first girlfriend and first kiss from middle school — watched me go through the ring of fire that becoming religious put me through. When I was down, beaten, about to give up, she told me: “Samir, there are some things worth standing for against the whole world.”

At that time, Vesna’s family and mine could not occupy the same room. We had two weddings. Two ceremonies. Two best men and maids of honor. Four roasted lambs, twice. Two sets of “I dos.” Each family pretending the other did not exist.

When we went to the airport to fly out to America, both families stood there together for the first time, to send us off. There is a photograph from that day. Vesna studies family photographs — where people stand, who’s touching whom, what their bodies are signaling — she says it tells you everything about the power moving through the relationships. In this one, both families are standing together, dumbfounded. Most of them are crying, or about to. Vesna and I are smiling, and neither of us could say why, except that we heard the music, and were ready to venture out.

The world is wild. Fierce, indifferent, larger than your agenda. And so are you. The wildness out there is symmetrical to something in each of us. You were not made for a tame world because you were not made to be tamed.

This wild part of us is the holy part of us. Forget that; they are the same. To be holy is to be wild!

That’s why you cannot name your crazy too early — the moment you name it, you have it under control, which means the wild is slipping away. You mostly encounter this crazy as a surprise — when someone sees it, they resonate, you resonate, as you feel the shock of being seen.

Some people say they believe in God. Some say they don’t believe in God. God says, “Who cares whether you believe in me or not? I don’t. I care whether you are paying attention and living alive.”

You have probably figured it out by now: You are not special. So get over it — but know that you are irreplaceable in your particularity.

You hear something we don’t hear. You imagine something we don’t imagine. You embody something we don’t embody. I am not giving you or me a compliment. It is a fact about your particularity; it means we are missing something without you.

If you have something to add to our conversation as humans — and you do — we need you to come out.

You owe us your crazy.

My patron saint David Bowie sings: turn your face to strange.

Including the strange in you. I know — you turn away from it because it feels like too much. I know — people gossip about your too-muchness. Turn your face to it anyway. Respect it. Offer it.

My Irish poet friend Mícheál Ó Súilleabháin wrote a poem called The Virtuoso about refusing to apologize for your own gift.

I don’t care if you’re sorry,
nor do you even, anymore.
Why atone for your gifts?
Express remorse for
your ability, begging
pardon in public? 

Be instead, the
unrepentant virtuoso!
For you choose to stand
showing us the spirit stir,
then fill and overflow
within you.
 
The spirit does not
ask forgiveness,
nor permission.
And upon your stage
You can do no wrong.
 
Get out of the way,
we love what you have
and need no reminder
of our sentence here
on earth, please,
just set us free.

We don’t care if you are sorry.

We need you.

What is your virtuosity?

My friend Melissa Hefferlin, who is a professional painter, whose husband is a professional painter, and whose stepson is a professional painter, says everyone is an artist, and everyone deserves fans. Playfulness, she believes, is as profound as seriousness, and creativity is the defining gesture of being human.

We also receive wildness from a story larger than us. In my case, cooking found me before I found it — my parents were fanatics, and life gave me ten thousand kitchen hours before I was sixteen. I did not choose it. It chose me. But it was mine, my epic ordinary to keep.

Now. About cringe. Cringe is how we experience visibility. We would rather show up cool, because cool keeps us invulnerable. It commits to nothing. We have built an entire culture around making fun of earnest people. To believe in something, visibly, to want something, openly, to try something grand — that is cringe.

I often think, courage feels like fear. Equally, passion feels like cringe.

When I was a teenager in Zagreb, a few of us would cram into a beat-up car, smoking oregano (dealer convinced us otherwise) and dreaming of walking on the wild side in New York City. Ridiculous. Whoever does anything they see as significant has to outlive the embarrassment. You want what my friend Jordan calls a New Renaissance? It starts in mud, he says.

Get ready to be ridiculous to both yourself and others.

My friend Viji Sarah Boloico just did exactly this. Recently, she spent three days alone in total darkness — no phone, no clock, no light — a new single mother from a conservative religious background, and then she published all of it: the weeping on the floor, the old hymns she didn’t know she still knew, twerking on her yoga mat in the dark, and a vibrator she’d named Joey. She could have written the tasteful version. She wrote the true one instead. Viji is paying her cringe tax here, not to get your attention, but to take a risk of being herself.

My friend Rod manages fortunes for the wealthy and gives away nearly all of his own. Franciscan cross under the suit, sandals on littered asphalt far into the fall, a hug made of words for everyone who walks in. His crazy is a conviction he won't file down — that joy, kindness, and justice are the only sane response to life. He believes the world can be changed, and he lives as if it already is.

There was someone — maybe when you were young — who came to you and spoke in a way that cost them something. They paid attention to you, gave you time, and spoke in the epic language to your ordinary life. They told you what they saw in you. And you hid those words or that smile or that caring touch inside. They did not have to do that — say significant words — but they did. They paid their cringe tax to give you something you still carry inside. (I am 60 and my crazily kind friend Matt Stone still dares to do it for me.)

Now go be that person to someone else. That’s a good excuse to take these risks.

Go out of your way, find new words, dare to say to others, “I see you.”

The worst thing in the world is not to cringe. The worst thing in the world is to hide.

The best thing in the world is not to be successful. The best thing in the world is to see and be seen by the world.

So live alive. Be too much.

MORE

Reading about being seen is one thing. Here’s an hour of the real thing.

An Hour To Be Seen — we talk, and we write you a one-page story of this moment in your epic ordinary life at www.epicordinary.com.

A version of this piece becomes a chapter in my forthcoming book, SEEN: The Story of Your Epic Ordinary Life. Subscribe to The New Glossary, and I’ll keep you posted.

But first — as part of my work with Epic Ordinary, Jordan and I are offering something new: An Hour to Be Seen. One unhurried conversation — on Zoom or in person — and within forty-eight hours you receive The First Portrait, a one-page story of this moment in your life, written by a human who actually listened. Something AI can never do. And something you can reflect on, read aloud, or share.

Fresh story matters most at a threshold. A career ending, or a new one beginning. A divorce that’s turning your story in a new direction. A health diagnosis. A death, a birth, a loss, a joy. A stuck place. A breakthrough. These are the moments we need to hear our lives speak to us (as Parker Palmer put it). That story is pivotal — worth the hour, the effort, and the cost.

There’s a sample on the page too — a portrait written for our associate Viji — that you’ll enjoy. Worth a click before or after you read on.

Now, here’s the page from the manuscript of the book that is finding itself.

A Common Misconception

It was a morning like every other, me, happy with myself, walking down Frederick Douglass Boulevard to the coffee shop, when a man crossed the street to intercept me.

As he came close, I expected him to start with, “May I ask you a question?” It is how people who need something often begin because the only decent answer would be, well, yes. I knew that once the conversation started, he would ask me for money.

He stood before me calmly and stated, “I need a cup of coffee.”

He was a black man with a well-framed haircut, elegant, in worn-out clothes that had once been classy. Late forties, maybe fifties.

“OK,” I said, looking down. “I’m headed for coffee too.”

We walked a whole block together.

“I’m Keith,” he started.

“Good to meet you, Keith. I’m Samir.”

“Do you know the meaning of your name, Samir?”

I was glad he asked. My name made me proud. Growing up in Croatia, I don’t remember meeting anyone with my name. Samir is Arabic, quite out of place in a Slavic Catholic country. I would tell anyone who cares to know that Samir means Storyteller — more literally, companion into the night, the person you end up talking with for hours after the stars come out. In the old times, Samirs were traveling culture and memory keepers of sorts, migrating from tribe to tribe, carrying news and telling stories around the fire. It was a name for a calling.

So, I told him: “My name means Storyteller.”

“That is a common misconception about your name,” he said.

I stopped walking. I turned to him. “What do you mean?”

He stopped walking and turned to me, “Your name actually means Listener.”

“Really?” I said.

“Really,” he said.

“How do you know that?” I said with a worried smile.

“I was stationed in Jordan for six years. A lot of Samirs there, you know.”

“Aha,” I said.

“It was a real discussion in the region — the actual meaning of your name. Companion into the night means Listener.”

I nodded my head and looked down to buy myself some time to absorb the revelation.

My story of being a storyteller goes a long way back. I first published an article in the newspapers in Croatia when I was in elementary school. I started a theater. Storytelling is how I wooed my wife Vesna. Telling is my work. The New York Times said, “Selmanovic is a storyteller,” an exact quote.

And now Keith shows up.

We came to the coffee shop. I opened my wallet to get money, saw my photograph on my ID, and thought to myself, “Who are you?”

“Would you like breakfast?” I asked Keith while waiting in line. “Anything you want.”

“I need a cup of coffee, thank you,” he stated again.

He took the cup, nodded politely, and was gone.

I thought he might have been an angel. Showing up like in the old times when the world was enchanted.

I knew he wasn’t an angel. An angel would never say, “I’m Keith.”

That whole day, I kept talking to myself, “How is this possible? Listener?”

Late at night, I dug through the caverns of the internet following the etymology of the word I have been called since the first day when my family drove me home without a ready name, when, the legend goes, my five-year-old sister said, “Until we come home, let’s call him Samir.” I stared at the computer until my eyes hurt and, damn, Keith’s theory held up.

Listener?

Listener.

That day, life gave me a command to shut up. No — an invitation. And I felt lighter in the world.

If any part of you recognized yourself in that story — holding a tired story about yourself and perhaps waiting for someone to help you see yourself again — that’s exactly what An Hour to Be Seen is for. Use it for a fresh LinkedIn bio, your artist statement, a letter to your family, or woven into a talk, a sermon, a workshop — wherever your story needs to do the work only your story can do.

Subscribe now

Paid subscribers to The New Glossary get $100 off. If that’s you, reply to this email, and I’ll send you the code.

Let your epic ordinary life be seen,

— Samir

1. Register for a Book Salon: When We Walk By. Soon, the dumb evil we are dealing with will be brought down, and we will dance on the streets. Let’s give substance to our joy by learning how to better care for each other. Order a printed, audio, or e-book copy and dive in right away!

2. Join me for Renaissancing hour. I know you wonder what this might be.

3. Download 5 Principles of Telling Your (or Your Loved One’s) Life Story. We tested these with hundreds of people who found the nerve to say their lives out loud. It can change the way you think about the most important story you’ll ever tell.

And now, to the article “A Nifty Lil’ Drawing You Got There: Which life do you want to live?”:

Five years ago, my older daughter Ena walked into my office asking, “Dad, what do you actually do?”

She was applying to a graduate school in social work. My wife has been a social worker her whole career. Me? With years as an engineer, a pastor, a management consultant, and a life and leadership coach, I was operating in a blurrier area. Transformation? That sounded really blurry.

I felt caught by her question, with no direct answer or explanation about the many ways I have been helping people over the past thirty years.

No, really, what was I doing and who was I? The word “impostor” came to mind.

For decades, I had a question growing at the center of my life for which I couldn’t articulate an answer. It has been following me like a stray kitten, as a fire in my brain, and as a dream waking me up at night, sometimes with dread, sometimes with laughter.

Years passed like this. Decades. I couldn’t name the riddle that has organized my heart. All the while, the experience hadn’t been frustrating. Instead, it has been magnetic, pulling me forward and connecting me with people I needed to meet and experiences I needed to have. Tortured and happy, I was in love, obsessed with something I couldn’t name.

To name it at any point earlier in my life would have been too early. But now, when Ena stood before me with her gorgeous, young curiosity and power, I sensed the moment had come to face what I couldn’t face for so long and name it right there and then.

As I have done a thousand times before, I picked up a pen and one of the 3 x 5 cards I always carry in my pocket and said, “This is what’s going on.” Holding the pen in my right hand and pressing down the card with my left, I still did not know what I was going to draw or say.

This conversation was an improvisation, a loving play between a father and a daughter, so I drew and said what I had never drawn or said before.

I said, “There’s life you can control, and then there’s life you can live. I help people live a life greater than what they can control.”

Years of personal struggle and professional experimentation came to this moment of release, an answer birthing itself within the safe space held by the pure, loving presence of my daughter.

“The way I see it, crossing this line and learning to live this greater life is the most important journey a human being can take. I help people do that.”

I sensed an archangel in the room with wings spread over us, as a surge of new clarity and fresh energy for the years to come rushed in.

She said, “Oh, okay.”

She walked from the doorway to where I was sitting, put her elbows on my shoulders, pointed her index finger toward the table, said, “That’s a nifty ‘lil drawing you got there,” and left.

I looked at the stick figures. One person, a hero of their domain, in a power position with their arms on their hips, declaring, “I can do this!”

Across the line, the other stick figure, a person with arms extended up in wonder and faith, saying, “How exciting!”

Which life do you want?

Whom do you want to become?

I looked at the card the next morning and many mornings after that, beginning to realize how different, difficult, and utterly delightful this larger territory is. It is, veritably, the greater life.

I first began using it to help others. Then, in assisting myself in my times of despair, and when I needed to let myself experience joy. When isolated and when connected. In my prayers and in my writing. Turning my attention from my maps to the landscape of life.

As I went, the territory changed, like those restored ecosystems that wide-eyed entrepreneurs adopt and nourish, where flora and fauna return to health and entirely new forms of life appear.

Again, an invitation to participate in what I’m doing:

1. Register for a Book Salon: When We Walk By. Soon, the dumb evil we are dealing with will be brought down, and we will dance on the streets. Let’s give substance to our joy by learning how to better care for each other. Order a printed, audio, or e-book copy and dive in right away!

   

2. Join me for Renaissancing hour. I know you wonder what this might be.

   

3. Download 5 Principles of Telling Your (or Your Loved One’s) Life Story. We tested these with hundreds of people who found the nerve to say their lives out loud. It can change the way you think about the most important story you’ll ever tell.

   

As I half-know myself down the path into each of the 18 chapters, some sentences are ahead of me. They say what I don’t understand yet. Other sentences are behind me, still catching up to what I mean. You write the first bad, bad, not very good draft to deal with what you find about yourself. Eventually, an editor will get to it next and do the painful, beautiful work of making it better. But before that happens, I want you to see it like this — unfinished.

The book is a book about trusting oneself and the wonderful reluctance we all have to be seen and known by the world. The working title is The Visible Life: A Guide for Those Who Fear Their Story, and I’m writing it with wonderful Jordan Soliday. It’s about the fear of being seen, the cost of staying hidden, and what becomes possible when you let yourself be visible by articulating your life story. It’s the most personal thing I have ever made.

Here are eighteen passages, one from each chapter, in order. No explanation or setup, arriving at you the way I hope the whole book arrives: experience first.

If something lands, tell me. If something pulls, pushes, or puzzles you — I want to hear it. The comments are open. Your response can help me find my voice and shape the book! Thank you.

The Visible Life: A Guide for Those Who Fear Their Story

Samir Selmanovic with Jordan Soliday (18 Excerpts)

Part 1: The Unstoried Life

Chapter 1: The Fear of Being Seen

This Eastern Bloc car held us the way a fist holds dice or seeds — tight, dark, shaking with something it couldn’t contain. We were boys who couldn’t yet live the life we could already feel. We sensed life the way you sense a sound before it reaches you, in the bones first and then the ears. What can one do with all this glory bursting inside?

Chapter 2: Larger Than Your Life

I know this when I wake at three in the morning, caught in a recurring dream of the same shape. Usually, there’s something I want to prove. Or there’s something that has to be a certain way. Sleep returns only when I let the world have a story larger than mine. The joy I’m talking about here is in experiencing the world not being the way I want it. It is the joy of participating with, and often being defeated by, the forces greater than the life of my body, my emotions, and my oh-so-important ideas.

Chapter 3: Your Epic Ordinary

You go to work, you are at work, you come back from work. You eat, sleep, and talk with friends. You kiss him, he kisses you back. You say sorry. You say thank you. You say things you regret and say sorry again. All of it — the mundane, the repetitive, the Tuesday of it — is more magical than fiction. The other world is in this world.

Chapter 4: Living the Whole Time

An experienced heart surgeon and his apprentice are hunkered over an open heart when the teacher says, “Now you have to perform this sequence of actions before the heart gives up and the patient is gone. You have 60 seconds.”

“So, take your time,” he adds.

Hurry is not the same as urgency. Hurry keeps you on the surface, away from the depths where life quietly springs.

Hurry will slow you down. Hurry will force you into hiding.

Chapter 5: Harvesting on Time

Our lives change gradually, then all at once. When the time is right, they turn abruptly and completely, whether we can name the turning or not. Every four to six years, something recalibrates. When we miss the harvest of these seasons, we let the fruit die on the vine.

Chapter 6: Creating an Artifact

Between subway cars, when the train is running, the noise can swallow whatever you bring into it. I would step into the gap between cars, hold onto the chain, and scream with full lungs. Everything. When I walk back into the car to find my seat, my face is calm, and, at times, I catch a glance from a seated passenger, a small nod that says: I get it. What I was doing between those subway cars, without knowing it, was making an artifact.

Part 2: The Epic Ordinary Way

Chapter 7: The Act of Coming Out

This time, I was in a national park in Colorado, in the middle of my adult life. This time, the forest said nothing. It listened to me instead. After everything that had happened in those twenty years, after all the becoming and unbecoming, the moving and the staying, the years when I could not trust my own story, I spoke back to the forest. I am. So there.

Chapter 8: What Makes You Beautiful

The polished version of you is hard to see. The explained version of you is harder to hear. The version of you that has been carefully kept is, by that careful keeping, slightly out of reach. On the other hand, people experience your honesty as presence, the felt sense that you are actually in the room, no longer manipulating the distance between yourself and the world.

Chapter 9: The Decoy of Knowledge

Knowledge protects us from the danger of being seen before we believe we are ready and from the experience of showing up unfinished, uncertain, mid-sentence in our story. As long as we are still figuring things out, we have a perfectly reasonable explanation for why now and here are not the time and space to risk being seen. Knowledge is never complete. Knowledge is a room with very good locks.

Chapter 10: The Decoy of Happiness

The cruel irony of the Western world today is that it forces you to want to be happy. If you’re not happy, you are under suspicion. “How are you?” has never been a question. You’d better be fine. For my first five years in the United States, this kept me from experiencing sorrow in public. I began to miss the sorrow.

Chapter 11: The Decoy of Meaning

We are meaning-seeking creatures. As far as we can surmise, animals don’t ask why. The stone does not ask why. We can’t help it. We wake in the morning, and the first thing the mind does, before coffee, before language, is reach for the thread.

Chapter 12: HEAR (Stop Talking)

About a million years ago, we invented fire. 780,000 years ago, we began cooking. We could rest. We could gather together and stare into the flame. With the scent of charred meat in the air, and in the hush after the communal chewing, we encountered something that later civilizations would treat as a problem to be solved, and the first doorway into human depth: boredom. Blessed boredom.

Chapter 13: IMAGINE (Enchant Yourself)

We imagine what is. Not merely what was or could be. We imagine what is. Say you’re watching a film with no sound. The same film, the same images, the same faces — twenty people watching together. Ask them afterward what they saw, and you will get twenty stories. Not twenty opinions about the same story. Twenty different stories, each internally consistent, each entirely plausible. Imagination is the way we receive reality.

Chapter 14: EMBODY (Make It Happen)

It is like a morning Catholic mass. But holier. Like a Protestant prayer. But holier. Like bowing down together in a mosque. But holier. Like a shaman dancing around the fire. But holier. This is the liturgy of ordinary life. Not a metaphor for it, but rather the thing itself, happening in a Harlem apartment, between two people who chose each other in a moldy basement in Chicago and have kept choosing their lif.

Part 3: Living Alive

Chapter 15: The Visible Life

The Solingen knife is in my kitchen. Gnarly but still cutting. When I pick it up for a special occasion, my father’s hands are on it. My mother’s hands. My sister’s reluctance to hand it across the ocean. The tomato salad and the amber light of a sunset on the Adriatic Coast, everything that was ever held by the thing that held it, all there. This is what the visible life makes possible. Not a monument, but an artifact that carries love into the future long after the initial lovers have passed.

Chapter 16: Give Us What’s Yours to Give

You have walked in the dark and sat on a chair that holds you. You have made a truce with fear. You have learned that, over time, your honesty becomes your story. You realize that your story is not a decoration of your life. You may have said to yourself: I want it all. Good. Have it all. Now here is the part you did not expect: your life story is not about you or your life.

Chapter 17: You in the World

Most people change their story when they get tired of it. That’s not a failure. That’s the organism doing what organisms do — growing past the container that held them long enough. The old story goes slack. You feel something is off before you can name it. You start thinking: I can’t keep repeating this story; I don’t like who I am when I’m telling it; others are tired of it; I am tired of it. All the while, you don’t even notice that the bigger and more honest story is already here. Its current is already floating you out.

Chapter 18: Lifelong Skill

Now close the book and test it: one scene, one conversation, one choice. The smaller the step, the better.

May you find the courage to let yourself experience being different. Count on undignified moments, welcome some humiliations, and discover you are made equal to it all. May you dance more so that the angels in heaven will find themselves lucky to work with you.

—

If something in you wants to tell your own story or a loved one’s, start by downloading our 5 Principles of Telling Your Life Story guide at www.epicordinary.com. It’s free, but you won’t feel like it.

I was in Tillamook, Oregon, picking up an eight-week-old puppy named Lucca, and the trip was fifty years in the making. As a self-employed, screen-facing, wannabe writer, I needed the companionship of a sentient being. I remembered: when I was six, my dad brought a puppy home, and six months later, she was too much, and he took her away.

Now pushing sixty, I was six again.

Ahead of me was a two-hour evening ride to the airport, a six-hour flight, and two hours of local transportation to Harlem, New York City. I wasn’t worried. I had a lot of love to give. And a strategy. When she wails, I will be silent. When she stops wailing, I will talk to her.

I readied the car for her and hopped behind the wheel. Lucca directed her eyes at me from behind the mesh on the other side of the carrier screen. The wailing, honed by evolution to be unbearable, began. I waited until she stopped and started by introducing myself.

“Hi, pup. I am Samir, and I am human. As a result of millions of coincidences, you and I are here now, just the two of us. A two-species encounter in a black rented Kia. You’ve just lost your mom, dad, siblings, and a loving home here in this beautiful Cheese Country. Now, love, we are heading into the night.”

She was terrified, I could tell, and I was helpless.

While thinking of what to say next, she slipped back into the unbearable mode. The woman told me to consider her wailing a survival trick. It wasn’t a trick. Lucca was lost.

I told her about the new home awaiting her in Harlem. “It’s the most recognizable neighborhood name in the world!” I exclaimed. I described each room, each family member, and the streets awaiting her. When I stopped, she took it to another level with quieter, cuter, and far more unbearable sounds.

“I hear you, I really do,” I said, mirroring her voice. “You know, when I was six, my dad brought a puppy home to my eleven-year-old sister and me. We named her Lola, and it was one of the happiest days of my life. We did not know how to potty-train her or stop her from chewing my schoolbooks and my mom’s new white high-heeled shoes. My dad, without telling us, took her away. My sister stayed in her room for three days, my dad behaved as if the abduction didn’t happen, and my mom kept herself busy.”

This realization about my six-year-old self felt like the dark green night descending over us as we drove through Oregon. I became quiet. Lucca did, too.

Two creatures in a black rented Kia, heading into the night.

“Since I was six, a part of me has been sad and mad,” I told Lucca, “Until now. Now I have you. Would you have me?”

She stayed silent, and I took it as a yes.

At the end of the green night ride, Lucca and I got on the plane in Portland.

I had a problem. No matter how much I tried to cajole or coax her to go, she would not go. Hours were passing, and I thought that if I failed in making it happen, she was going to explode.

In the middle of the flight, I took her to the bathroom, spread a pee pad on the floor, and assumed a position with one leg planted at the door to prevent anyone from pushing it open and hurting the puppy, and the other planted behind the toilet.

When I lowered Lucca onto the pad, I was 100 percent sure that she would relieve herself on that damn pad.

She lowered herself onto the pad. And fell asleep.

After about thirty minutes of hovering over her like a drone, my leg muscles started twitching, and the flight attendant knocked. With my nose out the door, I described my predicament. People in line pitied me, and since there was another bathroom across the aisle, I was given a pass. But no business was done in our place. I tried the damn pad routine again at the Newark airport. To no avail.

A two-hour car ride, two hours at the airport, a six-hour flight, and one hour on the subway resulted in nothing.

Twelve hours after I picked her up, we came to our apartment, I took her out of the carrier, and while I was distracted with unfolding that damn, damn pad for her, she relieved herself on the wood floor, then the rug, then on the kitchen runner. This one-minute, three-stage shit show erased my idea of having an acceptable measure of control over a puppy.

Four weeks had passed. I didn’t sleep. I didn’t exercise. I met my work obligations, but only barely. I showered only when absolutely necessary. This was a standoff between the will of a grown man and the bladder, intestines, and teeth of a baby canine.

Further collateral damage came in the form of a stressed-out, late-for-work wife. She was completely exhausted just by watching me do this.

I looked out the window at the city streets and despised the dog owners prancing around with their perfectly tamed bags of shit. Why wouldn’t these neighbors have stopped me? Maybe put me in a kennel until my dream of having a puppy dissipated.

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Four months into it meant four months of our lives lost forever chasing a barking, biting, chewing, diaperless devil’s own baby, destroying everything she senses to be precious to us.

I wanted to sleep, I wanted to stand under the hot water in the shower. I wanted to cook a meal. I wanted to get back to my work. I wanted to, in peace, think about the meaning of life. And maybe, if the cosmos would have mercy, be happy again.

Then one day, I was cooking, just cooking. I was taken away by my thoughts for the first time since Oregon when I spotted her in the middle of the room and was startled by a realization.

“Oh gosh. I am a dog owner.”

She was sitting with her butt on the ground, front legs straight, tall back, fully alert, with those eyes of hers—not beady, but rather with enough white in them that you can’t help but believe there’s a person in there.

I had forgotten I had her. One sliver of a moment, the first in four months, of not watching her.

She was now watching me.

She was watching me with a patient steadiness I had earned. And in that gaze, without a word, without even knowing she was doing it, she said:

“I see your effort. I see how these months have cost you. And I am telling you: I am worth it. I come to you with a gift you do not yet understand. But you will.”

I went back to cooking.

She kept watching me for so long; her gaze became the gaze of life itself. The steadiness of her eye contact told me we are not talking about the costly months here, but years, decades, all the way to the beginning. Life said to me:

“I see your effort. I see every story you’ve told yourself. Every year you’ve spent becoming who you thought you needed to be. Every drop of sweat or blood, every scream and silence, every year of love and loss. I see it all. And I am telling you: I am worth it. Every bit. You don’t understand it all yet–but you will.”

On her first birthday, I calculated that she had taken me out for 1,000 walks I would not otherwise have taken. A million steps I would not otherwise have made. I am a self-employed, screen-facing, home-office man with excellent reasons to stay inside.

She gave me the street.

And the window.

We live on the third floor of a building on Frederick Douglass Boulevard in Harlem, with one wall entirely made of glass. From up here, you are part of street life without the city staring in or you staring out. It is the best place in the apartment.

Half Border Collie, she sits in front of that window like an old shepherd dog on an Irish hill. Frederick Douglass Boulevard in Harlem is her valley, her domain, her responsibility. Every hour of the day brings something different, scurrying adults, children horsing around, yellow taxis, slow buses, the morning crowd, and the night crowd, all of them hers to watch over.

From up here, I began to notice the oak tree I had never seen before. It grew so big so fast. I began to see the people I had never paid attention to before. Working alone from home for years, I had given in to a quiet, private illusion: that I was essentially alone in the world.

Lucca took it away without an argument.

She just sat at the window. And the world was there.

She became a portal. Not into a philosophy or a revelation, but into the actual world, the one that had been outside my window the whole time. And in the subway, and in the tired, crowded veterinarian waiting room in the Lower East Side.

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She didn’t change my mind. She changed my radius. And inside that radius, I could see I was never, actually, alone.

I spent thirty years helping other people wake up. And now this.

I trained her with discipline. I disciplined myself to do it.

Sit. Down. Come. Stay. Four sessions each day, patient and consistent, everything the books told me to be. She didn’t understand what any of this choreography was for. But she knew I was engaged and that was enough for her. She was happy just to participate, happy to make me happy.

Though on the fourth sit, sometimes, she would look at me with those person-eyes and I could see the question forming, “Is this really necessary? Are you genuinely asking me to sit again, or are you now just asserting your power over a creature who loves you?”

Still. She sat.

I have spent years reading and thinking about transformation–how people change, what actually moves along our journeys of becoming. One night during those four months, I wrote a note to myself: if it were possible to open our skulls and use pliers to rewire ourselves into who we want to be, it would be a way inferior method of changing ourselves than having a puppy in your lap every day.

And then I hit her.

I lost patience. I was exhausted and frustrated, and I hit her. Once. And she looked at me with complete bewilderment in her eyes — not anger, not withdrawal, not fear. Bewilderment. As if she simply could not locate the logic of what had just happened.

I looked at my hand in horror.

How can I be capable of this? What gives me the right?

I have been learning about shame. Grappling with whether it can be something useful, something life-giving, something that protects rather than destroys. In that moment, looking at my hand, I had my answer. Shame arrived not to punish me but to help me. To say: this is not who you are. This is not how this works.

Because here is what I know about training a puppy: punishment takes you nowhere. Shame, yes, the shame that makes you look at your hand. But punishment? No. Only kindness moves anything. Only communication, only gentleness, leads anywhere real.

A dog doesn’t carry the verdict of every failure into the next moment. A dog does not need to earn its place in the room.

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Lucca trembles with delight. She quivers in her readiness to do everything she possibly can. She stands in one place and waits, and waits, and waits.

And asks a question I could not unhear:

“What would happen if you treat yourself like you treat a puppy?”

Not as sentiment. As a method. The same presence, the same return to the moment, the same gentleness after every mistake I make. What would it be like to say sorry to yourself, to forgive yourself, to respect and delight in yourself like you respect and delight in me? How about that, Mr. Transformation?

I should tell you about my wife.

She was bitten by a dog once — a chained, frightened animal outside a store, a crowd pushing it towards her. She agreed to Lucca the way you agree to something you have researched and accepted, but do not yet believe. “The studies are clear,” she said, “Dogs are good for your heart, good for your mental health, and good for your longevity. Fine. You can have your dog.”

Lucca’s greatest happiness, it turned out, is my wife’s arrival home.

In the morning, when Lucca has not seen us all night, she bypasses me entirely and leans into my wife. I have trained her, cleaned her, medicated her eyes, and done every undignified thing a dog owner must do. And still. She goes to her.

I don’t know what to make of this. I have decided not to.

Now let me tell you about the city.

I think about what would happen if, by some rapture, every dog in New York City disappeared overnight. I have come to believe the city would not survive it. Not the buildings — but the people. The mental health would collapse. The loneliness would become unbearable. The physical health, the order of daily life, the ten thousand tiny blessings people get when they leave their apartments and nod at strangers — gone.

In a city of asphalt and screens, dogs are our contact with the wild. There is still a wolf in them. A wolf who chose to adapt, to change, to come inside and learn our strange human ways and live in our cement buildings and walk beside us on our leashes.

That wolf looked at us and said: I am all in with you, my human.

There is a verse in Ecclesiastes — the book of Solomon, supposedly the wisest king ever — in which he grapples with how little we humans actually know. We are so deeply in the unknown, he says, so surrounded by uncertainty, that everything we live is essentially a hunch. A conjecture. A beautiful, vain, and desperate guess.

To illustrate this, at one point he says, “We humans do not even know whether dogs will inherit eternal life.” Whether they will go on and live forever.

The wisest king. And this is what kept him up at night.

I have been thinking about this.

What if this whole planet is not about us? What if the entire story — all of our religions, our philosophies, our self-importance, our civilizations built and collapsed and built again — what if none of that is the point? What if, in the witty and slightly insane way of the universe, in a genuine mystical twist, dogs are actually the species around which we evolve and revolve?

They are not destroying the planet. They love without condition. They are all in, always, for whoever wants them. They adapt to our world without losing their wildness. They tremble with delight at our returns. They dream their vivid, urgent dreams and make small, tender sounds in the night that awake your heart.

They do not carry shame past the moment that earned it. They do not shame us. They do not need to earn their place in the room.

Just because we know calculus, quote Shakespeare, and practice Zen Buddhism does not mean we are the point of all this.

What if our dogs go to heaven?

What if heaven is for dogs — and we are invited because we loved them?

Lucca is asleep beside me as I write this. She is going through something in her dream — I can hear it, small urgent guttural sounds, her legs twitching gently, a whole movie playing behind those closed eyes. Full of life.

Dark green Oregon night is a distant memory now.

Now we have each other, and life is all in.

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Every dog owner has this moment.

HAVE A DOG? Show us your dog (share a pic below) and/or finish this sentence: the moment I knew I was theirs, not the other way around, was when…

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Some mornings, it feels like walking on a cliff edge. Other mornings, like resting in a harbor and making up my mind about what this life is all about.

Into this mix of ver…

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We all know how it feels to be muted by other people, by ourselves, or by life’s circumstances. We cannot breathe. On the other side, there’s no greater joy than releasing our story into the world. Something magical happens when we let our lives speak.

Yet there’s more to it than our joy of telling. Your story does not belong only to you. It is sacred. You owe it to the world. Articulating your story—whether in the family, at work, or in a larger community—is one of the most potent and necessary catalysts for human transformation.

You might have a story about your diabetes, or about a daughter, or about a river, or about a place inside of you that you don’t even know how to name yet.

Looking back on helping hundreds of people tell a story that matters about a life that matters to people that matter, while they are still around to enjoy it, has taught me something.

Most of the time, when people “introduce” themselves, they hand over a headline: a role, a company, a city, lines that fit neatly on a screen or a slide. Leaders do it in boardrooms. Elders do it at family gatherings. Meanwhile, the actual story—the early chapters, the near-misses, the ordinary Tuesdays that secretly changed everything—remains unspoken.

Friends miss the origin story. Children never learn what happened before they were born. Colleagues see only the public pages. It all seems efficient and responsible. But there is a quiet cost: an enormous amount of meaning and beauty disappears.

I am one of the co-founders of Your Epic Ordinary Life. We are on a mission to turn life experience into a source of inspiration, connection, and purpose for others. We focus on the stories people are actually living, in all their contradictions, fears, humor, and grace.

Telling your present story—on purpose—is more powerful than any strategy, course, or framework you could buy.

Here are ten truths I’ve learned sitting with people at thresholds of change—leaders, parents, elders, grown children, people between chapters—who are ready to gather their lives into a story they can live from, live out, and share.

Which one of the ten truths resonates with you?

1. Your life is not a list.

Most of the tools we use to “capture” a life are list-shaped: résumés, bios, obituaries, LinkedIn profiles, family religious holiday letters. Sorted by achievement rather than meaning, they reduce a person to a list of bullet points.

A list can tell us what you did. In the breathing realm where we live, however, far more important things are happening.

Honestly, none of us is that interested in what you have accomplished. Whether in your family, your company, or a larger community. Have a list of values you uphold? Not interested. Your good deeds? Not interested. Your bad deeds? Not interested.

Here is what we are interested in instead: what you have done with what life has dealt you.

Tell us how you kept showing up at work while your marriage was falling apart in private, and what the cost was. Tell us about the late nights when you sat in a car outside the hospital, trying to decide whether to go back in. Tell us about the time you told your team the truth when a safer lie was within easy reach. Tell us about the ordinary evenings at the sink, when you chose to unpack your teenager’s half-formed anger instead of scrolling on your phone in avoidance. Tell us what you don’t want to tell us, and then we will hear everything you do.

That is the fierce heat of living. And of leading, and of loving. When you speak from there, we will all pull up a chair.

We want to know what courage looks like when your voice shakes in the boardroom or at the kitchen table, how responsibility feels when everyone is looking to you while you feel lost, how love behaves when the prognosis is bad, the deal falls through, or the person you trusted does not come back. However awkwardly, give us the moment, the tension, the small choices you made.

2. Silence is already writing your story for you.

We like to imagine that if we don’t tell our story, it simply remains untold. That’s not what happens.

If you don’t tell your story, your habits will. Your anxieties will. Other people will. Systems will. You’ll still be living inside a narrative—“I’m the responsible one,” “I’m the one who messed up,” “I’m replaceable,” “I’m the hero who holds everything together,” “I’m an impostor,”—you just won’t have chosen it.

In organizations, silence turns into lore: “She never talks about that time,” “We don’t ask him what really happened.” At home, silence turns into guesses: “I think Grandma was just always like that,” “Dad never really liked to spend time at home.”

When we don’t tell our story, we don’t keep it neutral. We leave it exposed and vulnerable to distortion. Silence makes it inevitable.

Telling your story is not self-indulgence. It’s the stewardship of your life. It is how you take responsibility for the experience and meaning your life has gifted you with and wants you to carry it forward—into your family, your team, and even your own future decisions.

3. The story decides what is possible.

We think we make decisions based on data: the behaviors, the outcomes, the budget, the calendar.

We stand on those things, but underneath those things, there’s always a story, and the story invariably surprises us with its power.

The story you believe about yourself and your people quietly decides:

• Which risks are you willing to take

• What outcomes can you even imagine

• How much of your actual self do you feel allowed to bring into the room

The same is true at home. The story you hold about your family shapes:

• Which conversations “aren’t worth starting”

• What gets celebrated and what gets quietly buried

• Whether your children inherit a to-do list and advice, or a sense of rootedness and life-giving values

You can redesign your life plan, org chart, or mission statement every year, but if the underlying story doesn’t change, the same dynamics will keep repeating.

Working directly with your story is one of the simplest, most leveraged moves you can make. Change the story, and the field of possibility changes with it.

4. If you feel stuck, you’re stuck inside a story, not a circumstance.

We say, “I’m stuck.”

Stuck in a role. Stuck in a relationship pattern. Stuck between eras of my life.

From the outside, however, the circumstances are rarely as fixed as they feel. There are options, experiments, and conversations that haven’t been considered yet. There are feelings that haven’t been allowed yet.

What is usually stuck is the story:

“This is just who I am.”
“This is more than this organization can do.”
“This is how this family has always been and will be.”

When you work with a good guide, you begin to see the story itself. You notice where it hardened too early. You notice where someone else’s fear became your script. You notice the places where you were braver than you remember.

You realize, “Oh. I’ve been acting as if this chapter were the whole book. It isn’t, and I have a greater story to tell!”

A recognition like that alone can loosen something in you that’s been seizing for years.

5. Only a story lets you harvest your transformation.

Most of us quietly become different people every 3–5 years.

We go through a crisis, a move, a birth, a loss, a promotion, a diagnosis, a burnout, a new love—something shifts outside our ability to grasp or even be aware of. You look back, and you realize you are not who you were before.

But unless you consciously revisit and re-story your life, you keep operating inside the past narrative.

My favorite poet, David Whyte, sometimes says, “Your inner life is about six years ahead of you.” Fascinating.

This means I might still be making decisions as if I were the younger, more fearful, more ambitious, more wounded, more invincible version of myself—while life is asking something new of me and, with it, offering me what I need to respond.

Telling your story is how you harvest the change life has already grown in you.

You get to say, “I used to be that. Then life happened. Now I am becoming this.” Not as a slogan, but as a hard-won recognition that organizes your choices from now on.

Without that harvest, the fruits of change dissipate. Harvest turns hard work of change into a legacy—for you, and for the people watching you navigate your life.

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6. You can’t see your own life clearly without a witness.

There is a reason you can’t see your own face without a mirror.

In the same way, you know how your life feels from the inside. But you don’t necessarily see the patterns, hear the echoes, perceive your quiet courage, notice the humorous, or experience the beauty of the whole.

That’s where a witness comes in.

A paradoxical truth: You alone are responsible for telling your story, but you cannot tell it alone.

In our work, Your Epic Ordinary Life is not just a project of helping people tell their story. It’s a relationship. It is a series of unhurried conversations where someone like me sits (or walks, or swims, or eats) with you—not to interrogate, research, or fix you, but to be present and curious in a way that draws out your story.

Important side note about AI here. It is the ear of the listener that makes the story alive. If you let AI do the witnessing of your story, your story will sound like AI.

A good listener is someone who can hear the story beneath, above, or within the story. They notice:

• The memory you almost skipped past

• The side remark about “that one person”

• The way your voice shifts

They help you hear your own life in a new key.

This is why trying to do deep story work entirely on your own never works. Left by ourselves, we tend to perform or minimize. With an unhurried and unconditional human witness, you don’t have to advocate, decorate, or defend. You tell the truth, and the real story begins to take shape.

7. Being deeply listened to is itself a turning point.

People often assume the value of a life story lies in the final “product”—the digital record, the audio, the beautiful leather-bound book on the table.

With Your Epic Ordinary Life, we do that. Those things matter. These artifacts become touchstones, life’s reminders, and ways of staying in touch with the sacred.

But again and again, I’ve seen that the experience of being listened to in a way most adults almost never are is a threshold of its own.

No rushing. No multitasking. No angling for a soundbite. Just time, attention, a few good questions, and space for being safely lost, for laughter, for grief, and for surprise.

When someone receives that kind of listening, something shifts:

• They stop trying to make their lives sound better than they are.

• They start telling the truth.

• They hear themselves say, out loud, what they’re actually living.

You can feel the room change when that happens. People sit back differently. Their shoulders drop. Their story stops being something that happened to them and starts being something they are in conversation with.

That alone can mark the beginning of a new chapter—before anything is written down.

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8. A simple story can transfer more wisdom than years of advice.

Advice evaporates.

We give our teams speeches about culture, strategy, and accountability.

We offer our children lectures about work, love, money, faith, and risk.

Most of it doesn’t stick. If you ask almost anyone what has actually shaped them, they will tell you about a story they have heard, witnessed, or been a part of. It will be a story behind a scar, a move, a business decision, a divorce, a reconciliation, a sunrise, or a storm.

Your stories travel within people who hear them. They come back to them in the moment they need them the most, long after your presentation or your relationship advice has been forgotten.

When you gather your life into a clear, honest story, you give people something sturdier than instruction, a lived pattern they can adapt in their own way. Instead of pushing a universal map on them, you gift them with your experience of the landscape.

That’s how wisdom actually moves between generations and teams, not through perfectly engineered messages, but through stories we absorb.

9. Your story is time-sensitive.

Memory is fragile.

Details fade. Voices blur. The “I’ll ask her about that someday” moment never arrives. The “I’ll write it all down when life calms down” season never comes.

Story work has quiet urgency.

We are not promised unlimited time to tell our lives. We will likely not be here next week, month, or year to enjoy the telling—to laugh at the ridiculous parts, to grieve what was lost, to praise what has been found, to share our life with the people who most need to hear it.

At the same time, the process itself does not have to be frantic or complicated.

The way we practice Your Epic Ordinary Life is intentionally simple: a handful of spacious conversations, some careful crafting in your own voice, and a tangible form for your story to live in. There’s no performance, no homework, and no need to “get it right.”

Urgent and unhurried at once.

We don’t know how long we have. But we can choose to use some of that time to let our life speak and matter—to ourselves and to the people who matter to us.

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10. You don’t need to be finished.

Some people assume story work is for the end of life—for retirement, or a hospital bed, or a farewell party.

In reality, the most potent storytelling happens in the middle. In transition. In reinvention. In an illness that isn’t terminal but is clarifying. In the messy middle years where you’re too old to pretend you’re just starting and too young to pretend you’re done.

You are not a monument. You are a living, changing human.

Telling your story is a small hinge that opens the large doors so that you can cross the threshold into your next chapter. It lets you say, “Up to now, this is what my life has been about. From here, this is what matters.”

It gives your family, your team, and your own future self a way to understand the moment, and the chance to be astonished by your own life while you are still in it.

Imagine! You get to enjoy the look on someone’s face when they finally hear the story behind your choices. You get to feel your own respect for the younger you who kept going. You get to bless the parts of yourself you once wished away.

You don’t have to be finished to be worth remembering. You just have to be seen.

The simplest work, the deepest impact

In a world that constantly tells us to do more, optimize more, effort more, the story can feel almost too simple.

Sit down. Talk. Listen. Share.

But in practice, telling Your Epic Ordinary Life is one of the most gentle yet radical things you can do—for yourself, for the people you love, and for the communities you influence.

If, as you’ve been reading, you’ve thought, I want this for myself, or I wish this existed for my mother, my father, my mentor, my boss, pay attention to that and make it happen in the way you can.

Some part of you already knows that your life is quietly epic, and that bearing the untold story within you is an agony. The invitation here is to unmute yourself, let your life speak, and trade a little time and vulnerability for becoming whole.

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When the holy days of All Saints, All Souls, and Day of the De…

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The people I love the best 
jump into work head first
without dallying in the shallows
and swim off with sure strokes almost out of sight.

Tha…

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“We don’t need another hero.” ~ Tina Turner

“Happy is the land that does not need heroes.” ~ Bertolt Brecht

If you are a leader in an organization, you will have heard it said, “You only need to focus on what you can control.”

It is not that simple, though. We cannot wall ourselves into a space where we are in control. And even if we could, that is not where the action is. Or fun. Or people. Or relationships. Or reality.

Learning to let go of control and lead from that space is not antithetical to leadership. Quite the contrary, when we know how to be out of control, we cease to be at war with reality and become better not only at making things happen but also at letting things happen as we participate in dynamics larger than the circle we have drawn around ourselves.

Control does matter, obviously, and we aim to get control of the shared reality by creating models, frameworks, and maps that help us manage what we think is going on.

“All models are wrong,” wrote statistician George E. P. Box back in 1976, “but some are useful.” We move to better ways of making sense when the previous ways become less useful in helping us predict, manage, and work with and through the new complexities we face. When a model does not work anymore, we move to those that work.

Myths that Work

One of the most powerful tools for living with complexity is choosing the myths we live by. Myth is a timeless truth poured into a story, armed with our values, and cemented into our experience.

We humans used to think we were above them. Fortunately, we have been coming to terms with the fact that we have over-reached in our myth-free confidence. We are not living in a merely complicated machine we can learn to control, but in a constantly changing system managing physical, psychological, organizational and other forces that we cannot bring under control. Life and, with it, change, is too wide and too deep to master.

There is always far more happening than what we can fully grasp. So, we have to relate to the unknown, befriend it, even delight in it, get things done in the middle of it, and get others to get things done. That is where the myths come in.

Myths that work hold our worlds together.

They are larger stories that hold smaller stories. Whether true or false, myth is a necessity for any meaning we hope to have as humans. Without the myth, we are all whirling subatomic particles, becoming aware that we are nothing, a realization that is itself a myth.

Now, the most crucial function of myth is to provide us with a perspective, and in today’s world of excess information, perspective is everything, or almost everything, depending on how you look at it. Myths we hold, whether we are aware of them or not, are that perspective.

Good Old Myth

There is a myth we are all quite familiar with.

Even if you don’t know it by name, you know it in substance. It is a pervasive and recognizable story format in the West, particularly in the United States, that has gone global. If you are unaware of it, use this ChatGPT prompt: Tell me about the Hero’s Journey. Then brace yourself.

You might also be familiar with the powerful work of Joseph Campbell, who brought the Hero’s Journey to public awareness. If you are a movie maker, marketer, coach of any sort, organizational psychologist, leadership trainer, management consultant, officer in the military, entrepreneur of any kind, or work in any industry that uses the power of the story, you are probably already overdosed on the Hero’s Journey. It is ubiquitous. So, I promise you, the rest of this article will not be just another Hero’s Journey drill and praise fest. We will go beyond.

First, a quick summary. (Feel free to skip this paragraph if you think, ya, ya, ya, I’ve heard this a hundred times already.) The Hero’s Journey is an archetype, an original and recurring motif or symbol behind many ideas and stories that shape our lives today and have also shaped the lives of humans since the dawn of human civilization. Campbell traced the Hero’s Journey through 17 universally traversed steps across culture and time. In its most fundamental form, the journey comprises a three-part cyclical structure: Departure, Initiation, and Return. The hero leaves the ordinary world responding to a call to adventure (Departure). The hero then enters a liminal space, where they face trials and achieve a climactic victory or revelation (Initiation). Finally, the hero returns to their ordinary world, transformed, and often with knowledge, power, or healing to share with others (Return). This cycle, we are told, represents a universal process of growth and integration that resonates across people and eras.

The Hero’s Journey has obvious advantages. It provides a framework for personal growth, fosters empathy for the experiences of others, and offers a roadmap to navigate life and leadership challenges, among other benefits. Its explanatory power has been felt by many of us. Do you remember the rush when, in the middle of a troubling life challenge, you first thought, “Is it possible I’ve been on a Hero’s Journey all this time? Is it possible I am on one right now?”

Living In a Monomyth

While Hero’s Journey is part of the truth, it is also less than the truth. It has its limitations, which, as we move into a world where our stories are colliding with one another, are becoming quite obvious and grave.

Our imagination has been taught to look for it, and now we see it everywhere. Often, it is the only thing we see. It is what we are told we want and what we learn to want.

When I engage with leaders who question this myth, the majority become defensive from the start, forcing every alternative idea into the existing perspective. They have experienced the monomyth’s power and now use it to construct the same explanations for new experiences.

However, life and leadership bring new experiences, and these are arguably the only forces capable of loosening the grip of our knowing and opening up possibilities for new explanations.

As poet David Whyte would put it in his corporate leadership training, we tend to name our experiences too early. We leaders, he argues, can find our way forward by first stopping the conversation we are having. By conversation, he means the tired and tiring ways of naming and reassuring ourselves, telling the same old story over and over again.

Stories, like humans, are alive. One model or myth gives way to another. That is how we change. As all living beings, our stories exist in ecosystems. In every complex system, whether biological, cultural, or organizational, a monoculture eventually, and always, spells devastation.

Historically, we humans are all exposed to the tyranny of one story. Like the former head Rabbi of the UK, Jonathan Sachs, argues in his book The Dignity of Difference, the more perfect we become as humans and the better we become as a global society, the more varied we will be in the way we see, understand, and experience the world.

Let that land. The more perfect we all are, the more different from each other we will be.

The drive to find the best way to finally get control over complexity, uncertainty, and volatility will sooner or later end in violence, he argues. Universality breeds death.

We have been driving the Hero’s Journey for so long, and so far, we are in danger of finding ourselves on the depleted soil of a monomyth.

Let's examine three constrictions of the Hero's Journey so that we can open ourselves to new experiences, explanations, and stories that might help us liberate ourselves from the monomyth's grip on our leadership.

Constriction 1: Hero's Perspective Only

The Hero's Journey requires tricking our perspective. It is the story told through the eyes of the hero and limited to the way the hero sees the world. It suffers from solipsism, a self-centered lack of awareness, and a single perspective to the exclusion of other perspectives.

Humans tend to suffer from the main character syndrome. We believe the main story is about us. We see our story, the story in which we are the protagonist, as the story. We have all met leaders who suck up the majority of the oxygen in the room and expect all participants to contribute to the story they have already written for themselves in their heads.

I am not being judgmental here. I am still in recovery from it myself.

In reality, where we actually live, there are other stories at play. If I see myself as being on a Hero’s Journey, however, I need others to play the roles I need them to play.

You know what happens next, right?

In a world where a hero monomyth shapes our imagination, everyone expects to be at the centre of the story. Even when there is every reason to agree, use opposing views to find a solution, or play only a supportive role to create a better world, we do not choose to do so. We are conditioned to feel like we are somebody only if we focus on our opinions.

We are drowning in opinions.

Not clarity, not inspiration, not shared values, but nauseating contrarianisms. It is a pyramid scheme of heroes. Heroes are taking over the heroes, who are taking over the heroes, where we eventually all lose—a contrarian hell.

But, deep inside, we know: other stories don’t exist to serve ours. To love and lead, we let others have their own stories in which they see us differently. Perhaps we are a villain in their story. Or a victim. Or, even better, we both live in a story that is different or larger than heroes colliding with villains, in which the same villains see themselves on Hero’s Journeys of their own.

As a human, I have the capacity to realize that my perspective is not the only perspective. My story is not the only story. Who I am is not only about me. It is also largely about how I am seen and experienced by others. As Spanish poet Antonio Machado puts it, "An eye is an eye not because you see it; an eye is an eye because it sees you."

There is nothing wrong with telling a story from the hero's point of view. A lot is cut out, though. Too much. Nigerian author Chinua Achebe says, 'Until the lions have their own historians, the history of the hunt will always glorify the hunter.' Everything, literally everything (including our planet), but the hero and his beloved story is expendable.

Constriction 2: Villains Wanted

Another limitation of the Hero's Journey is the way it creates tension in the story. Every story that commands our attention and draws our hearts needs a conflict or, at the very least, a contrast. Without a conflict, there would be no story. The issue here is how Hero’s Journey creates the story's conflict.

When leadership work becomes difficult or overwhelming, we have a favourite starting point: a villain. Someone, somewhere, is doing this to us. To regain control, we need to identify and vanquish the villain. We believe our world would be better without it.

Notice how in the Hero's Journey, the villain is expendable. There is neither redemption nor a future for the villain. There is an evil, a mistake, or a problem. It is the other. We do not have to understand, live with, or certainly not learn from the villain. God forbid we find the villain in ourselves.

And in the world where everyone wants to be a hero, everyone needs a villain of one kind or another. Stories in which the roles of heroes, villains, and victims are the only roles available push us apart and antagonize us. While everyone loves a hero, who wants to be the villain?

Or the victim? In these kinds of stories, victims are story extras or, to name them more directly, passives. Think of employees, consumers, the public, or the planet. They have to be conquered, saved, served, or entertained. The story offers them no agency.

“Show me a hero and I’ll write you a tragedy,” writes F. Scott Fitzgerald. The monomyth has left us in a perpetual cycle of conflict. Sometimes, it seems as if we live in a Groundhog Day scenario. The villain and the hero play a zero-sum game to the bitter end, setting the stage for the next cycle in the spiral of destruction. The result is an exhausting and increasingly tedious repetition of establishing the next king of the hill, cage-fight champion, or a winner who takes all. In many ways, modern history is a story that repeats itself over and over again, with heroes' departure, initiation, and return becoming three stages of not changing.

What if the world beyond the walls of the village is not villainous? What if that world just is? Like our world. What if the dark underworld is troubling but also kind and cooperative? What if the wild we fear is not evil or ungodly, and what if it does not need our hero to tame it or save it? What if the unknown is not only a source of danger but also a source of new and better questions and solutions we have been looking for all along? What if the unknown is reaching out to us in friendship?

Constriction 3: Superpowers Distraction

Over time, Hero’s Journey has become too predictable, a shortcut, really. One of the earliest and most notorious problems with ChatGPT has been how quickly it will make you into a hero. A hero has now become a tourist, with a curated journey into a liminal space. And that tourist now wants, nay, expects, a superpower.

In the Hero’s Journey, heroes used to be regular people who, among other things, discover their unique power. They stumble on it, or a mentor gives it to them, or they win it.

In the monomyth world, that is far from enough. We are all now talking about superpowers. Superpowers break the laws of ordinary life. They pull out an extraordinary sword and other feats that break the physical and every other aspect of our ordinary lives, but the ordinary life is where we all actually live. Superpower shrinks our larger, complex, and natural human abilities into a fetish. In other words, our pining for a superpower distracts us from what I would call commonpowers.

Commonpowers are powers that come from having an aware, curious, and courageous human experience. Coping, connecting, creating, relating, and contributing, to name a few. They are skills of human maturity. In other words, our ordinary lives can teach what no specialized book or training (even those on the topic of leadership) can. Developing our common powers is the most direct way to increase our leadership range, repertoire, and results.

We believe that superpowers will solve our problems “once and for all” and give us a sense of control. If we can wield fire at will, we can just incinerate those bastards attacking our walls. If we can make people laugh, we can bypass feeling uncomfortable by simply cracking a joke. You get the drift. Superpowers are a distraction.

Power is much more common. You have what you need, and others have what they need for us to do what we need to do. Hiding in plain sight, these powers are potent and available. If only we could let go of our paralyzing fascination with what we don’t have, and recognize what we already do.

I know, something is deflating about this.

You have probably walked away from a superhero movie exhilarated to face your own situation, only to realize there is no superpower in sight. Realizing that you are a common person, led by common people, who in turn lead other common people, can be a downer.

But if you stay with that difficult feeling long enough, the weather inside of you will change. You begin to feel the strength of something real arriving. Your ordinariness becomes a door into everything. To embrace yourself as ordinary is the way (perhaps the only way) to discover and live out one’s singularly unique calling in the world.

That deflating feeling is the experience of moving from fantasy (someone else’s journey) to a dream (of what is actually yours to do). Superpowers are for stories of control. Commonpowers are for stories of something greater: reality. And reality is better.

Done Pretending

As I came of age, I had three posters on the wall above my bed. The most idolized guru of my youth was David Bowie. Now, forty-five years later, I find his epic song “Heroes” prophetic. That anthem took me over the threshold of allowing myself to be different from other people and live a life I can call my own.

I remember singing it back then with my freshly colored turquoise hair, fantastical purple pants, and newfound freedom to be myself. His soaring voice declared, “We can be heroes, just for one day.”

Notice his qualifier, however, “Just for one day.”

That is it. Have your turn to be a hero, for a day.

That is plenty. More than that, would that really be sustainable for you? For others?

Okay, take a year, or, if necessary, ten years. But then go on with the task of finding stories other than the hero’s story you have inhabited for so long, no matter how awesome that story might have seemed when you first encountered it. There are different ways to see, experience, and act in the world.

What if you are not on the Hero’s Journey? What journey are you on? What else is out there?

The invitations to the good old myth will keep coming to each one of us from all directions: “Become the hero of your own story!” I hope that now you know, and cannot un-know, that for that to work, you need to pretend that your story is the only one that matters to you.

But we are done pretending. When we stop and think about it, we cannot, and we don’t want to, control the world, even the corner of the world that we lead. We want to discover, be turned around, and right side up. Leadership, at its best, is not a matter of control but of surprise, including the surprise of finding ourselves in a story we have never imagined before.

Don't Lose Heart

These are the times of myth-famine. Both religious and scientific myths have been steadily deteriorating, losing their potency to inspire and ground human thriving. Communism is dead. Its longer-living twin brother, capitalism, is on the deathbed, pretending to be the greatest hero ever. You might have a global myth that you see to add to this list.

The truths behind many of these myths no longer ring true. There is no timelessness and boundlessness to them. They are not useful anymore, too small to inspire and ground us.

Yet, in my daughter’s generation and among people from around the world, I notice that people come alive when someone tells a story that interrupts the tired patterns of symbiosis, ecology, revolution, friendship, pilgrimage, and magic, even in the stark worlds of business, economy, and politics.

When I immigrated to the United States, the most popular American phrases I encountered were startlingly violent. “You killed it.” “You are dead in the water.” Then there were also empowering (and less boring) ones, such as “You got this.” It assumes that you already have what it takes and witnesses to you that you are not alone.

So, let’s not lose heart.

We got this. While the loud and powerful are falling asleep at the wheel of imagination, in the clandestine places invisible to unsuspecting people like many of us, new and better myths are being born, like new stars. These myths in the making are so new, tender, and powerful that we cannot even recognize them yet. As our disoriented hearts are taking the necessary time to grieve the myths that are dying, away from our sight, new ways of being kind, strong, and wise are being discovered and practiced in thousands of communities of young, old, divergent, and inexplicably good and resilient humans in every corner of the world.

(originally published in Developing Leaders Quarterly, August 2025)

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