The Artist’s Journey

First we have the hero’s journey.

We’re called to adventure. We answer the call. We enter the forest of the unknown. We face obstacles. We get support. We persevere. We win the battle with our dragons. And we return to the normal world transformed.

Then what?

Then we live the artist’s journey.

We find our unique voices. We dedicate ourselves to mastering ourselves and our craft in service to the world.

We’re all heroes. And we’re all artists.

How are YOUR journeys? :)

Alright. So… We go from the hero’s journey to the artist’s journey. Got it. Then what?

Then we need to get REALLY good at sitting down and opening our pipeline to our Muse.

What’s that mean? Well, the micro-chapter that wisdom is from is called “The Artist’s Journey Is about Accessing the Unconscious.” After establishing the importance of stepping up and living our artist’s journey, Steve spends the rest of the book teaching us how to open that pipeline.

He upgrades the idea of “unconscious” to “superconscious” later in the book—establishing the fact that the REAL mojo doesn’t come from us and our everyday brains/consciousness. It comes from something MUCH bigger and more powerful than us. (More on that in a moment.)

And… He says that we need to get REALLY good at “shuttling back and forth” between our normal awareness and that superconscious realm of our Muse. In fact, helping us do THAT is what the book is about.

We’ve talked about this basic idea quite a bit. Stephen King tells us about his man-muse in On Writing. (Remember the guy in the basement with the bowling trophies?)

Elizabeth Gilbert tells us that her real job is to simply show up and make sure the conditions are right for her inner Muse (or Genius) to show up and do its work.

All those algorithms we’re writing to Optimize our lives?

Those are just invitations to our superconscious.

When I read the part about the wildebeests and the Monarch butterflies, I immediately thought of Maxwell Maltz’s Psycho-Cybernetics.

He calls Pressfield’s “superconscious” the “subconscious” but points to the same power within each of us. Here’s how he puts it: “A squirrel does not have to be taught how to gather nuts. Nor does it need to learn that it should store them for winter. A squirrel born in the spring has never experienced winter. Yet in the fall of the year it can be observed busily storing nuts to be eaten during the winter months when there will be no food to be gathered. A bird does not need to take lessons in nest-building. Nor does it need to take courses in navigation. Yet birds do navigate thousands of miles, sometimes over open sea. They have no newspapers or TV to give them weather reports, no books written by explorer or pioneer birds to map out for them the warm areas of the earth. Nonetheless the bird ‘knows’ when cold weather is imminent and the exact location of a warm climate even though it may be thousands of miles away.”

I’m also reminded of Heidi Grant Halvorson’s reflection in her book Succeed: “Metaphorically speaking, if your unconscious mind can hold information equivalent to a NASA supercomputer, your conscious mind can hold roughly the contents of a Post-it note.”

Yep. That sounds about right. Our jobs? Shuttle back and forth between that normal Post-it note world and the internal NASA supercomputer that is our superconscious.

How? We’ll talk about that in a moment. But first we need to chat about our daimon.

As you know if you’ve been following along, I’m a bit obsessed with Aristotle’s idea that the whole point of life, the ultimate target, the SUMMUM BONUM (the highest good!!) is to have a “good soul”—to be a eudaimōn.

We have a guiding spirit—the BEST version of us is whispering in our ear and guiding us to our destiny. We just need to high five our inner daimon moment to moment to moment and, voila! We experience eudaimonia.

Somehow, along the way, I forgot that the Romans had their own word for the Greek word daimon. The Latin word for daimon? Genius. <- Love that!!

Our job? High five that inner genius.

Then we have that acorn. Think about this for a moment: “The totality of the full-grown oak is contained—every leaf and every branch—already within the acorn.”

That’s ASTONISHING. What’s even more astonishing, if you believe Pressfield and Hillman, is that WE each have the same potentiality contained within our inner souls.

Alas, as Rollo May says in The Courage to Create: “The acorn becomes an oak by means of automatic growth; no commitment is necessary. The kitten similarly becomes a cat on the basis of instinct. Nature and being are identical in creatures like them. But a man or woman becomes fully human only by his or her choices and his or her commitment to them. People attain worth and dignity by the multitude of decisions they make from day by day. These decisions require courage.”

Which leads us to HOW we high five our souls.

Unfortunately, we often want to make the whole process of tapping into our inner genius super complicated—waiting until “inspiration strikes” until we get down to work. The best among us? The Professionals? They know that’s a joke. They just sit down and get to work.

In the chapter right after the above passage, Pressfield tells us how renowned choreographer Twyla Tharp does it. He quotes the same passage we referenced in our Notes on her epic book The Creative Habit.

Here’s the first Idea from that Note: “I begin each day of my life with a ritual; I wake up at 5:30 A.M., put on my workout clothes, my leg warmers, my sweatshirts, and my hat. I walk outside my Manhattan home, hail a taxi, and tell the driver to take me to the Pumping Iron gym at 91st street and First Avenue, where I work out for two hours. The ritual is not the stretching and weight training I put my body through each morning at the gym; the ritual is the cab. The moment I tell the driver where to go I have completed the ritual.”

How do YOU begin each day?

With a ritual that invites your superconscious to get to work? Or by rolling over and hopping into Reactiville by looking at your phone? These little choices matter. A lot.

I repeat: “Want the goddess to show up for you? Show up for her.”

So, you showed up to do your Deep Work. Now what?

Now get ready for about 10,000 micro-hero’s journeys EVERY DAY.

The best within you (call it your daimon, your genius, your soul; I call mine Optimus) will beckon you to express the best within yourself—whether that’s writing 500 words or crafting a new HR program or taking a deep breath during a challenging conversation with a colleague or kid or turning off your phone so you can get a good night of sleep or any one of the near-infinite little moments in our day in which we’re called to be our best.

EVERY SINGLE ONE OF THOSE MOMENTS are micro-hero’s journeys. -> “Ordinary World to The Call to Refusal of Call to Threshold to Extraordinary World and back again.”

Watch yourself today. Listen to your inner voice.

<— What do you say to that other than, “What he said!!”?

You are called to a great adventure. That impulse to express the best version of you is “more alive inside you than your own blood.” (Which reminds me of Maslow’s soul’s oxygen.)

It’s what nature created you for. (Which reminds me of Emerson’s classic line “When nature has work to be done, she creates a genius to do it.”)

The hero’s and artist’s journeys “come with the promise of change, of passion, of fulfillment and of self-actualization, and they come with the curse of Eden… which mandates unrelenting toil and labor. The struggle never ends. It never gets easier.”

<- If that doesn’t make you slightly uncomfortable (or even slightly nauseous!) then read it again because you haven’t fully grasped the magnitude of its truth and the heroic, INCESSANT call to relentless action demanded of us.

Ready or not, you’re called to give us your Optimus best. Relentlessly. And, so am I.

Let’s play this game all out and change the world together, my friend.