The Year I Answered the Call (Except for the One Part That Scared Me)
A year ago I was let go from my job as creative director at a start-up.
It wasn't the first time this has happened, and honestly it may not be the last. I typically roll with these punches as they come. I'm stunned and dejected for about twenty-four hours, then I pick up the pieces and I'm ready to go. Monday was the day I got my notice. By Tuesday I had already formulated my plan.
What I didn't understand at the time was that I'd spend the next twelve months doing almost everything my new life required of me, and carefully avoiding the one thing that actually scared me.
The call to adventure
In the hero's journey, it all starts with the call to adventure. Something within and without sends a signal to your brain that it's time to go. Time to get started.
We all hear that clarion call, and we hear it throughout our lives. We experience the hero's journey again and again. It takes us from home to kindergarten, from grade school to middle school. We leave our homes. We leave our jobs. We get married. We start that creative project. We begin something new that we're called to do.
I love that part. It's exciting, and it holds something in it for all of us. It's what every good story starts with. And your life should be, among all else, a good story.
But that's not the part that interests me
What I find interesting is the first instinct to refuse it.
I'm not talking about Odysseus, or Luke Skywalker, or Katniss Everdeen. I like those heroes as much as the next person. What I'm interested in is you. Real people in the real world, making decisions, trying to live a life of meaning and value and purpose.
And when I ask this question, I'm really trying to answer it for myself. Why do I hesitate? What do I fear? Why won't I do what's being asked of me?
The easy answer is fear of change, fear of risk. That's true, and it's also too general to be useful. People hate change. Humans hate risk. Fine. It doesn't explain why this particular thing, the one specific step, is the one I keep walking around.
The hero's understanding of his own size
Here's what I think is closer to the truth, at least for me.
The refusal isn't only a fear of failing. It's a fear of finding out how big you actually are.
If you never take the step, you never learn your true potential, and there's a strange safety in that. Because if you turn out to be smaller than the story you've been telling yourself, that's a disappointment you have to live with. And if you turn out to be bigger, that's worse in its own way. Then you have to go be that person. You have to rearrange your life around a self you've only theorized about. The comfortable version ends.
Not knowing your size keeps you exactly where you are. And where you are is usually held in place by good things: family, friends, people you love, a life you built on purpose. The comfort zone isn't a prison. That's what makes it so hard to leave.
A lens for your own life
I use the hero's journey, the monomyth, as a lens to understand my own choices and actions, and then to help the people I come into contact with.
It turns out this isn't just a nice idea. Research published in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology found that people who frame their life story as a hero's journey report significantly more meaning in life, and that you can teach someone to do it. Participants who were guided through "restorying" their own lives in that structure showed measurable increases in meaning and resilience afterward.
That tracks with everything I've experienced. When you see yourself as the protagonist of your own story, failures and setbacks stop being verdicts and start being chapters.
And the most powerful part of the hero's journey as a metaphor for our own lives is this: what's happening externally is mirrored by what's happening internally. As we grow and change physically and mentally, we're growing and changing spiritually to match.
What I did with my year
I heard a clear call to adventure and I got started in earnest and with fire. I knew what I wanted to do because I'd been thinking about it for years. I had written down every thought I ever had on creativity, every workshop idea, every book idea, every product I ever had a crazy idea about.
Here's a short (very short) list of what I did in those first weeks:
Reworked my résumé and professional positioning
Rebuilt and strengthened my LinkedIn presence
Refreshed my personal website
Established a more consistent social media practice
Started sharing my ideas publicly around creativity, identity, storytelling, and meaningful work
Created a new vision board for my life and career
Wrote a personal manifesto
Developed a business plan around my creative ideas
Established a clear five-year vision for building a significant creative enterprise
And here's what came out of the year that followed:
Returned seriously to writing my book
Consolidated years of stories, creative philosophies, exercises, lessons, and personal experiences
Won a publishing deal by November 2025
Expanded Identity by Design into a complete college-level course
Created Identity by Design: Building a Personal Brand Through Story, Strategy, and Craft
Developed it as a sixteen-week, four-credit graphic design course
Developed a fifty-two-card creativity prompt deck
Clarified my speaking topics around creativity, identity, storytelling, and meaningful experiences
I thought I had done everything under the sun to chase down my dreams.
The most sophisticated way to refuse the call
Read that list again, though, and notice what isn't on it.
Every single item is real work. None of it is procrastination. I wasn't avoiding my calling. I was executing on it, hard, for a year. But I was executing on it in every direction except the one that frightened me.
That's what I've come to understand about the refusal of the call. It rarely looks like refusal. It almost never looks like sitting still. For ambitious people it usually looks like tremendous, visible, genuinely valuable productivity that happens to route carefully around a single point.
The vision board was easier than the camera. The business plan was easier than the camera. A sixteen-week course was easier than the camera.
Because the last part of the call was video. A YouTube channel. Me making my own videos. My own voice, just talking about my ideas, sharing something that felt personal and intrusive, and that I dreaded with all my heart.
So I told myself I could grow my presence and my ideas without it. Even though everyone I spoke with who I admired, and every podcast I went on, said the same thing: video is the best way to communicate and reach an audience.
I had answered the call. I had just left out the part with my face in it.
Two journeys at the same table
This is also arriving at a strange and specific moment in my life.
My wife and I are about to be empty nesters. Just as my kids are leaving to start their own hero's journeys, I'm starting mine. It's an uncertain and unknown future for all of us, at exactly the same time, in opposite directions. They're crossing a threshold out of the house I built. I'm crossing one out of the career I built.
I find that fascinating, and a little bit staggering. Theirs will be wildly different from mine, and full of wider discoveries and growth. But I think both will be hugely impactful.
So I'm going to document it. I'm going to ask my kids, Jackson and Parker, four questions each, the same four questions for both, and then ask them again in a couple of months when they come home for winter break. I want to see what a threshold does to a person over a single semester. I want to see what it does to me over the same stretch.
Well, here we go
This week I shoot my first video.
I'm going to follow the stages of the hero's journey and use them as a framework for my own life: this creative journey I'm on, and the failures and setbacks I'm sure to encounter along the way. I'll try to be thoughtful in my approach to every video, and post three to four times a month.
Being on camera was the biggest part of my refusal. It took me a year to get here. But I'm doing it now, and that finally completes the call to adventure.
Which, of course, is only step one.
Your turn
So, what's been your call to adventure?
And more importantly: what does your version of the camera look like? What's the one step you've been walking around while doing everything else beautifully?
I'd like to know. Tell me in the comments. I'll be reading them.
Follow along
The first video goes up next week, and I'll be posting three to four times a month as I work through the whole framework: the calls, the refusals, the setbacks, and whatever my kids have to say about their own.
And if you'd rather get it in writing, I send a newsletter called Stack the Wins. It's the ideas behind the videos, the things that didn't make the cut, and the small compounding moves that turn a call into an actual journey.
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