Written by JoyGenea with supporting help from Claude Code AI
Myths are old. Older than religion. Older than psychology. They are the first thing humans built to explain ourselves to each other, and that is not an accident.
We run on story. The brain is built for it. You can’t talk yourself out of that any more than you can talk yourself out of needing sleep. This isn’t a nice idea from a self-help book. It’s core wiring. DNA-level stuff.
That is why Joseph Campbell’s Pathways to Bliss has been sitting on my desk, marked up, for weeks. Campbell spent his life studying the stories humans keep telling, across every culture, in every era. Read him as a leader instead of a student of mythology and something shifts. You stop reading it as history. You start reading it as instructions.
The symbols change across cultures. The human questions underneath do not. Science took apart the old explanations, we lost the shared stories that once gave the work meaning, and people still go looking for that meaning anyway. Leaders included.
Here is what I pulled from the book, how I used AI to help translate what I was reading, and the myth I rewrote for unconventional leaders, like myself.
Five key learnings from Joseph Campbell
- “Follow your bliss” was never about chasing pleasure.People hear it as permission to do whatever feels good. Campbell meant something harder. Find the work that matchesyour actual nature, and organize your life around that instead of around approval. That is the difference between someone else’s hill and your own.
- The dragon youhave toface is named “Thou shalt.” Campbell describes a dragon covered in scales, and every scale reads thou shalt. That is the collected rulebook of how you are supposed to do it. For a leader, the dragon isn’t a competitor or the market. It’s the carved rules you never agreed to.
- You are living a myth whether you chose it or not.Society hands everyone a story about what a good life and a real leader look like. Most people nevernotice they picked it up. The adult task, Campbell says, is to stop living the inherited myth and author your own.
- Refusing the call keeps you stuck.There is always a moment that asks you to change. Campbell calls it the call to adventure. Refuse it and youdon’t stay comfortable, you go numb. You live a competent life that isn’t yours.
- Every stage of life needs a different myth.The story that built your success will not carry the next part. Campbell was blunt about this. At some point you set the old rock down, not because you failed, but because it finished its work.
How I used AI to learn and implement this
Reading a dense book is one thing. Changing how you lead because of it is another. The gap between those two is where most good books go to die on a shelf.
I closed that gap with AI. Not by asking it to summarize the book for me. That would defeat the point. I used it the way I use a good thinking partner.
First, I had Gemini and ChatGPT create infographics for each section of the chapter. That boosted my retention and made it easy to apply to my own goals.
I talked through each section out loud [I’m a verbal processor, so this is how I actually learn]. I had it ask me questions back. When Campbell named a pattern, I asked, “Where does this show up in how I run my business?” and worked the answer until it was specific to me, not general. When I got stuck writing my own myth, I used AI to hold the structure so I could focus on the truth of it.
The book gave me the raw material. AI gave me a way to process it at the speed my brain actually moves.
The myth I rewrote
Campbell says the work is to stop living the inherited story and write your own. Here is a place to start. I can relate to this one.
The Myth of Right-Way Leadership
Inspired by the myth of Sisyphus
The gods of the Right Way built a hill and called it Success.
Some of them had sacrificed their families to climb it. Others had sacrificed their health. All in the name of success.
Then they carved the rules into stone. And the reason they carved them was to make sure everyone else sacrificed too. They had made the ultimate sacrifice, and they believed so must you.
It was by design.
They said: wake earlier, push harder, do it the proven way, carry it alone, and one day the rock reaches the top and stays.
So the leader pushed the rock up the hill, because they’d been told this was the only honest way up. Because everyone they admired was pushing too. Because they believed the top was real.
And every time the rock rolled back over them, they thought: I’m not strong enough. I’m not doing it right. Everyone else must be reaching the top.
Years of this.
Then one gray morning, the leader didn’t want to get up. Didn’t want to push the rock up the hill to success, just to be rolled over and have to start again.
And a quiet, dangerous thought arrived:
“I don’t think I’m supposed to feel like this all the time. Like I never get anywhere. Like I’m failing, all alone.”
That last word snagged. Alone.
They walked down to the rock and looked at it closely for the first time. There were initials carved into it.
Not the leader’s initials.
This rock had belonged to someone whose leadership was criminal. Someone who sacrificed their family, their health, their people, and called it success. Crimes this leader had never committed. They’d spent their best years serving a stranger’s sentence.
So they did the thing the gods swore was quitting. They stepped off the hill from hell, the one designed for defeat, where help from others only made you a failure.
And they sought out and found their own hill. One shaped like the thing they were actually here to build.
The rock was still heavy. From time to time it still rolled back, but now for reasons that were theirs. Real ones. Their own.
And they weren’t alone on it. Hands landed on the rock beside theirs. People who believed in where it was going. On the right-way hill, needing help made you a failure. On your own hill, it makes you a movement.
The rock went up. And this time, it mostly stayed.
What the symbols mean
The hill: A definition of success. Which version of making it you strapped yourself to. Not the work itself, but the shape of winning you accepted.
The rock: The daily work. Your effort, your business, the thing you push. The rock was never the problem.
Pushing it up: Chasing that definition of success. Believing the top is real and reachable if you just push right.
The roll-back: When the work doesn’t stick. Progress that undoes itself. On the wrong hill, this is designed in, not a sign you’re weak.
The gods of the Right Way: The people who built the proper way to run a business. Not villains, but martyrs who sacrificed their families and health, and now can’t bear to see you refuse the same.
The carved rules: Conventional business wisdom. Wake earlier, push harder, do it the proven way, carry it alone. Carved in stone so no one questions it.
Carry it alone: The lie that real leaders don’t need help. The most expensive rule on the hill.
The gray morning: The moment of honest exhaustion. When you finally think, I’m not supposed to feel like this all the time. The start of waking up.
The initials in the rock: Proof it was never yours. The sentence belonged to someone else, someone whose leadership was actually criminal. You’ve been serving a stranger’s punishment.
Stepping off the hill: The move everyone calls quitting. It isn’t. It’s refusing a definition of success that was never yours to want.
Your own hill: Success shaped like your real mission. Still steep. The rock still rolls back sometimes, but now for reasons that are yours.
Hands on the rock beside yours: The right people. On the borrowed hill, needing them made you a failure. On your hill, they make you a movement.
Five learnings about myth, story, and leadership
- Story is the format truth travels in.The braindoesn’t hold a bullet list the way it holds a story. If you want a lesson to actually change how someone leads, including yourself, you put it in a story. That is not soft. It’s how the wiring works.
- A myth makes an invisible pattern visible.Youcan’t fix what you can’t see. Naming your struggle as a hill, a rock, and a roll-back gives you something to point at. Suddenly the exhaustion isn’t a flaw in you. It’s a wrong hill.
- If youdon’twrite your myth, you inherit one. Leading yourself starts with noticing whose definition of success you strapped yourself to, then choosing on purpose.
- A shared story is how people actually follow you.Nobody puts their hands on the rock for a spreadsheet. They do it for a story about whereit’s going that they want to be part of. That is the whole job of a leader worth following.
- Rewrite the myth and the daily choiceschange.When I rewrote my story from push harder, alone to my own hill, with the right people, the small decisions changed on their own. Change the story and the behavior follows.
Same human experience, different symbols, across every era. The leader’s job in the bottom row: people unite around meaning, not facts. Every organization runs on a story that shapes behavior. Your role is to help people make sense of their own.
One question to sit with
Walk down and look at the rock you’ve been pushing. Whose initials are carved in it?
Video Transcription:
Pathways to Bliss: Lessons from Joseph Campbell for Unconventional Leaders. I recently read through Pathways to Bliss by Joseph Campbell, and by reading, I mean I dissected it, took this poor thing apart, underlined, scored, used AI in so many incredible ways to make me infographs so I could really take in the information and start to apply it, because I realized right away that this had incredible value for unconventional leaders, and incredible value overall for people.
So let me start out by this. Myths are as old as anything else. They are older than religion. Myths have been around for a very long time. They’re older than psychology, and they’re a critical reminder of the human psyche and how we as humans work. For as long as we can kind of tell, since we have had communication, we have used myth to pass along stories, and those stories were about how best to live, how best to survive.
They always circle around life, the experience of life and death, because those are areas we have the greatest questions. And people, humans, have a lot of anxiety and fear around that. Myth was about anchoring in stories. Brene Brown often talks about the fact that the human brain is a story-making machine.
Anything that happens, it builds a story, and if it doesn’t have enough details, it really doesn’t care. It fills in and makes up crap because it doesn’t like the gaps and it likes a story, and we have to watch for that and be so careful of it. So knowing that, as I was reading through this book, I really appreciated how that applies to leadership.
What are the stories that we are sharing with our employees? What are the stories we are telling ourselves that are happening in between those ears? Are we being clear about those stories and about the myths that we believe and that we are using to govern our life? Are we communicating them? Are we connecting with other people that share those myths?
Those are some of the really important things that came out of Joseph Campbell’s book for me, and that’s why I’m sharing it with you. One of the other things that came out of what I was reading was the fact that we as leaders need to understand that people are always telling that story.
And I had five key learnings from Joseph Campbell that I wanted to pass along. One is when he talks about following your bliss, he was never talking about chasing pure pleasure. It sounds like it, that’s today’s terms for bliss, but really he wants people to have permission to do whatever for the most part feels good.
And it is not always going to be easy. It sometimes will be hard. But he’s talking about finding that thing that you were put on this earth to do, or why you are here, your purpose in that. He also talks about the dragon you have to face, and it’s named Thou Shalt. And he talks about how we come across this dragon, and it’s covered in scales, and every scale says, “Thou shalt.”
There is this collective notebook of how you are supposed to do life, how you are supposed to do things. And he reminds us that we are going to need to actually pursue our dreams. We’re going to have to slay that dragon covered in thou shalt, covered in society’s thou shalt do this and thou shalt do that.
Number three on the list, and I think this is really important for unconventional leaders, is you are living a myth whether you choose it or not. Like breathing air, like sleeping at night is necessary, your brain is a storytelling machine, and you are living in some type of myth, whether you recognize it or not.
I would encourage you to explore and figure out what your myths are. It’s very important. Number four is refining the call that keeps you moving forward, making sure that you understand what it is that moves you forward, that story that you’re telling yourself that gets you up in the morning, that helps you lead other people.
Because you need to anchor in it more often, or you need to adjust it to better fit who you really are, the mountain and the hill that you are climbing. And then number five is every stage of life needs a different myth. The story that you built for success will not carry you into the next part, and this is true on so many levels.
You do have to build a new character that you’re going toward. You have to build a new story. Campbell was blunt about a lot of things if you read the book. And he was blunt about this. At some point, you set the old rock down, because you can feel it and you know it, and it is time to seek out a new mountain and a new rock and do things differently.
As I was reading this book, it was so dense with imagery, and I wanted to connect those things, and rich with text, that I did go out to Gemini and ChatGPT and had it create me infographs for particular sections of each chapter. I have at least 12 infographs for each chapter.
That’s how intense some of them were. This happens to be a ChatGPT one. The one I showed you before was a Gemini. It was really necessary for me to take away from this book and to make my time worthwhile. If you’re going to put in the time, why not make sure you’re getting out the return on that investment?
For me, that was really important, and AI and those infographs, because I am a visual learner, really helped out immensely. Another thing I did to help myself out, and I’ll share it with you, you can go on my YouTube channel and see it a little later, but I actually took an old myth and had it rewritten into a current modern-day myth about unconventional leadership, and about this process of thou shalt, as Joseph Campbell talked about bumping up against those thou shalts and how you push away from that and how you might even recognize it.
And it was a lot of fun. I will definitely tell you that. I also want to leave you with some of this, and these are the five learnings about myth, story, and leadership, because remember, I told you, we’ve been telling myths for a very, very long time. It is in us to tell story, and that’s part of what I’m doing here even.
I’m passing along the story of what it was like for me to read this book and have conversations with a book club and to grow my own leadership and myself in that process. So number one of the five learnings from myth is that story is the format truth reveals. And number two, a myth makes an invisible pattern visible.
When I rewrote the myth of Sisyphus, I used a variety of different symbolisms, and those patterns made it easier for me, but I’ve read it to a few other people, and they’re like, “Oh, wow, I did that in my life, and I don’t know that I’ve totally gone out and found my hill yet and invited my people to come and help me. I need to do that.”
So that’s what he’s talking about in there. It makes invisible patterns actually visible. Number three, if you don’t write your myth down, you inherit someone else’s. You’ll be given someone else’s. Remember I told you at the beginning, they’ve proven this now with science to back up the fact, DNA-wise, we came into this world as little storytellers.
We are going to tell stories about everything, and we’re going to fill in the gaps that we don’t know. You will inherit somebody else’s story if you are not careful and if you do not write your own story. Particularly as you want to grow and expand, it’s so important to push up and back against those other things.
Number four, a shared story is how people actually follow you. So again, you’re leading all of these people. How are you leading them, and are you sharing the story of why you’re showing up to work every day, why you love what you do, why you believe in them? That story can’t be told by anybody else. That story is for you to tell, and you tell it very, very well.
So don’t hold it in. You need to build more on story. Absolutely. And number five, rewrite the myth, and the daily choices change. I know this. I know it’s true for myself. When you rewrite the myths, when you push back on those thou shalt scales, when you push back on what society has told you is the one way, as unconventional leaders, you are doing this naturally.
I’m just reminding you, you’re doing this, and it’s a right thing to do. I’m JoyGenea, unconventional leadership coach, international neurodiversity coach, and champion for storytellers everywhere. Put clarity in your story and make sure it’s your story that you’re passing on and not someone else’s that doesn’t fit you and isn’t a right story for you to be living through or in. Thank you so much. Bye.