Storytelling in Business Part 4: The Hero's Journey
This is the fourth part in my Storytelling in Business series. View previous parts here. (*Reprinted from 2020 on my other website!)
As I mentioned last week, there’s a simple structure you can use to frame storytelling for your business origin story, About page, social media posts, case studies, and more. It’s this: Everything was going fine until a problem arose, and then the hero solved the problem. But this is based off of an age-old framework that our mind and hearts just resonate to, called the Hero’s Journey. It’s a framework derived from looking at ancient myths, but that we can see in movies, stories, and books today.
Joseph Campbell and Myth
People started studying the structure of storytelling of ancient tales in the late 19th century, but in 1949 Joseph Campbell codified the Hero’s Journey — or the monomyth, as he called it — as a framework that many, if not all, stories use: Once upon a time, an everyday person is called from their environment to go on an adventure to an unknown world, where they face trials and ordeals, make new friends, find a mentor, and battle an enemy, before vanquishing evil forces and returning to their world changed.
There are seventeen stages of the Hero’s Journey that Campbell describes in his book The Hero with a Thousand Faces:
Departure:
The Call to Adventure
Refusal of the Call
Supernatural Aid
The Crossing of the First Threshold
The Belly of the Whale
Initiation:
The Road of Trials
The Meeting with the Goddess
Woman as the Temptress
Atonement with the Father
Apotheosis
The Ultimate Boon
Return:
Refusal of the Return
The Magic Flight
Rescue from Without
The Crossing of the Return Threshold
Master of the Two Worlds
Freedom to Live
I’m not going to go through all of these, but I’ll go through a few, so you can see how the framework works in movies and stories, and so that you can use the key parts of the framework going forward.
The Call to Adventure
“Once upon a time…”
The story begins with the hero living in “the known world” — a hometown, or a status quo — going about life as usual, in the city, in the Shire, on Tatooine. Suddenly, a call to adventure happens, which is also known in fiction writing as the “inciting incident.” Something happens to trigger the action of the story.
This call to adventure is to an unknown world, either a new galaxy or a new experience for the protagonist, or, as Campbell describes it, to “a forest, a kingdom underground, beneath the waves, or above the sky, a secret island, lofty mountaintop, or profound dream state; but it is always a place of strangely fluid and polymorphous beings, unimaginable torments, super human deeds, and impossible delight.”
The invitation to Gatsby’s part is Nick Carraway’s call. Neo’s call in The Matrix is seeing and following the White Rabbit; Luke Skywalker’s call is R2D2 delivering Princess Leia’s message. The call to an unknown world for Scout in To Kill a Mockingbird is Atticus’s taking on the case of Tom Robinson. Jack’s extended hand to Rose as she’s about to throw herself off the back of the Titanic is another call.
But the hero may not yet be ready.
Refusing the Call and Meeting the Mentor
Ironically, the hero will refuse the call at first, whether due to fear of the unknown, or discomfort, or a desire to stay within the world they know. Neo on the ledge of the building refusing to follow Morpheus’s voice is his refusal. Frodo doesn’t want to leave the Shire.
But once they commit to the journey, a mentor appears: Haymitch for Katniss in The Hunger Games, Athena for Odysseus, Gandalf in Lord of the Rings, Hagrid in Harry Potter, or Mr. Miyagi in The Karate Kid. The mentor usually convinces the hero to accept the call to adventure, and guides them through the unknown world, providing guidance, wisdom, and training.
Crossing the First Threshold and the Belly of the Whale
The hero leaves the world they know behind to set off on the adventure in the unknown world, alongside their new mentor. It can be as fantastic as Neo taking the red pill and exiting the Matrix for the “desert of the real,” or as exciting as Nick stepping foot into Gatsby’s parties, or as internal as the main character of The Bell Jar entering into the unknown world of mental illness.
Now, the hero is forced to learn their way in this new world, with new rules, new relationships, and new challenges that will ultimately change the hero. Campbell calls this the “belly of the whale” stage, referring to the Biblical story of Jonah.
Ordeals, Sacrifice, and Fighting the Dragon
In this unknown world, the hero is faced with trials and ordeals that will challenge them to learn new things about themselves, or set up obstacles in the way of getting something they want or need.
As Campbell writes, “This is a favorite phase of the myth-adventure. It has produced a world literature of miraculous tests and ordeals. The hero is covertly aided by the advice, amulets, and secret agents of the supernatural helper whom he met before his entrance into this region. Or it may be that he here discovers for the first time that there is a benign power everywhere supporting him in his superhuman passage. The original departure into the land of trials represented only the beginning of the long and really perilous path of initiatory conquests and moments of illumination. Dragons have now to be slain and surprising barriers passed—again, again, and again.”
The hero continues to face greater trials and ordeal, both external and internal, until they get to what Campbell calls “the ultimate boon,” or the greatest test of all: slaying the dragon in front of them, or inside of them.
Refusal of the Return
They’ve won! The hero has overcome the last challenge and slain the real or figurative dragon. But they may have become such a master of their new world, or so accustomed to it, that they may not want to journey back to the known world — like the Pevensie children becoming kings and queens of Narnia, or Neo conquering the Matrix to become the One.
If the hero doesn’t want to return, sometimes the hero is plucked out of the world (Frodo being taken away by a giant eagle), or the hero must flee (Thor escaping with the people of Asgard before Ragnarök destroys the planet), which is what Campbell calls “The Magic Flight.” Ultimately, the hero decides to return to the known world, bringing with them what they learned and gained on the journey.
Master of the Two Worlds
The hero finally returns from their journey, but they’re changed forever. They’ve been through an adventure, and gained knowledge or revelation that they can bring to others or keep to themselves. Think of the Wedding Guest in “Rime of the Ancient Mariner” or Ismael in Moby-Dick, having survived their ordeals to then tell their tales to the rest of the world. Campbell refers to this final stage like a kind of enlightenment: “The individual, through prolonged psychological disciplines, gives up completely all attachment to his personal limitations, idiosyncrasies, hopes and fears, no longer resists the self-annihilation that is prerequisite to rebirth in the realization of truth, and so becomes ripe, at last, for the great at-one-ment.”
The Big Idea for Your Business
Now that you have a great grasp of the Hero’s Journey, you can use this framework in your business writing. Since people resonate with this kind of story, use it in your materials by telling your own business origin story with this framework, like how the folks over at Intelligentsia Coffee, Toms, or Warby Parker do it. You can almost follow the Hero’s Journey in their stories: We were in our known world, but then we faced a problem. We then went on a journey to solve that problem. We eventually did solve that problem, and now we’ve brought our knowledge to you to help you solve that problem too.
