What makes a hero? Why are we drawn to stories of these lone figures, battling against the odds? In the podcast, The Hero’s Journey, TED speakers Dame MacAuthor, Jarrett Krosoczka, George Takei, and Ismael Nazario explore what makes a hero’s journey.
Humans have told stories for thousands of years of heroes boarding on epic journeys. Guy Raz focuses in on mythologist Joseph Campbell who was the first to identify this hidden blueprint buried within these stories. According to Campbell, stories follow three acts and 17 specific substages. It’s a formula that can be found in everything from “Star Wars” to “The Wizard Of Oz,” to “The Matrix” to Homer’s “Odyssey” etcetera. Campbell’s basic three-act formula goes like this. The first stage is the departure, the next stage is the initiation, and the third stage is the return.
You can find these substages from beginning to end of most heroic stories. Let’s look at “Star Wars A New Hope.” This narrative all starts with our hero Luke Skywalker living a normal life on the planet Tatooine. The first stage is a call to adventure, in the film this where Princess Leia asks for Obi-Wan Kenobi’s help. Obi-Wan Kenobi is old and can’t take on the challenge, so he gives it to luke which alters Luke’s destiny and leads him to the second stage, refusal of the call. Obi-Wan Kenobi then shows Luke his fathers lightsaber, and that brings the tale to the third stage, a supernatural aid. Luke takes the lightsaber which brings the story to the fourth stage, the crossing of the threshold or leaving home. This formula continues throughout the whole flick, and you can look up Campbell’s hidden blueprints and see how the story follows so closely to his cycle.
The last question is why? Why does it follow this pattern so closely? According to Campbell, the hero’s journey wasn’t a pattern that had just happened to occur in so many of the most popular stories. It’s the entire reason these stories became popular in the first place, because the journey of leaving from home, overcoming challenges, searching for your true calling, that’s something that everyone seeks out at some point. It’s a journey of listening to yourself, figuring out what you want in life and then leaving your comfort zone and finding it.
I like this because I so many people don’t listen to themselves and what they want to become, and how they want to achieve it. People insist on a way of life that everyone goes down, This formula relates to that, I believe if you follow the norm you’re going to have a mental freak out at some point. A person needs go off-center, and not aligned themselves with a programmatic way of life.
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