You are living a myth right now, whether you know it or not.
Your brain is a storytelling machine. It runs a story about who you are and what winning looks like, the same way your lungs run on air. You do not get to opt out. You only get to choose whether you wrote it.
Here is where it bites leaders. The story that built your success will not carry the next stage. The rock that got you here is not the rock for what comes next.
Most people keep pushing the old rock anyway, because setting it down feels like failure. Setting the old rock down is wisdom. The story simply finished its work.
So ask yourself two things. What is the story that gets you up in the morning and moves your people forward? And is it still true, or did you outgrow it three years ago?
At some point you set the old rock down and go find a new hill.
Which rock are you still pushing out of habit?
Transcription:
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, 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. 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, 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 also want to leave you with some of this, and these are the five learnings about myth, story, and leadership, because remember, 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.