My favorite show of all time has got to be 24. I can still remember the first time I watched the show. It was 2001 and I was sitting in my apartment flipping through the channels when I happened to land on a show with a badass federal agent named Jack Bauer who was having one hell of a day.
Back then, having a TV show addiction was terrible. You couldn’t discover a new show on Netflix and binge-watch it all weekend long. No, in those days you had to wait each week for the next episode and deal with all of the commercial breaks during the show like a caveman.
What I didn’t know in 2001, I now understand a little bit better, as I’ve been studying the art of writing fiction and putting the finishing touches on my first thriller that I’m close to releasing.
The reason 24 was so addicting to me was because of the hero’s journey, a pattern identified by Joseph Campbell who said that every hero in virtually every story throughout history followed.
The hero starts out as an average person in their ordinary world. Then something happens and they’re given a call to action. They accept the challenge, face their fear, and in the process the hero dies a metaphorical death, only to be reborn in some way. The result is that in the end, the hero returns back to the ordinary world, transformed and not quite the same.
In 24, Jack’s daughter goes missing. Then his wife gets kidnapped. Before you know it, the Jack that we were introduced to in the first episode starts to completely change before our very eyes.
By the end of the first season (and every season after that) Jack becomes a very different person than who he was when the adventure started because of the challenges he faced and accepted.
That’s because when a hero accepts a challenge and sets out on a new adventure, the quest changes them. When they return home, they’re no longer the same person that they were before they left. They may be right back where they started, but now they’ve outgrown their old life.
Here’s what I’m starting to realize – that the adventures and misadventures of our own lives follow the very same pattern that we find in the hero’s journey.
The truth is, we’re not separate from the heroes that we watch in our shows or movies or read about in our favorite novels. Every one of us is living the same story as the heroes we admire.
We may not slay dragons or chase bad guys, but we have our own quests to go on that life likes to give us. But if we want to be transformed, we have to be willing to go through hell to get there.
In his book Deep Change, Robert Quinn says, “Change is hell. Yet not to change, to stay on the path of slow death, is also hell. The difference is that the hell of deep change is the hero’s journey. The journey puts us on a path of exhilaration, growth, and progress.”
If you’re going through a rough time in your life right now and are feeling defeated, realize that you’re not at the end of your story. You’re smack dab in the middle of it.
But this is the very moment where you need to accept the challenge, even if the change will be hell, so you can reinvent yourself and be transformed into a better version of yourself.
Will you answer the call to action? Are you ready to outgrow your old life and be forever changed?
If your world has been turned upside down, if you’re going through a rough time right now, understand that this is the beginning of a new adventure for you. But you have a decision to make.
Are you going to die a slow death of mediocrity? Or will you answer the call to action, accept the challenge, and die an intentional death so you can be reborn into a different season of your life?
Only you can answer that. And how you respond will either make you the hero or the antihero.