Explaining the hero's transformation arcfrom @kolbykirschner

Transcript

There's something strangely intriguing about disappearing for a long period of time and then coming back almost unrecognizable. It's one of the oldest transformation arcs that exists and it almost always follows the same path. Bruce Wayne disappears for years, mastering his mind, his body better returning to Gotham as someone completely different. Edmund Dantes gets put into prison as a naive young sailor, then emerges years later educated, calculated, and unrecognizable as the Count of Monte Cristo. Different stories, always the same pattern. First, you become dissatisfied with who you are. You realize that the life you're living and the person you're capable of becoming are two completely different things, so you withdraw. You stop needing to be everywhere, talking to everybody, constantly consuming what everyone else is doing. And suddenly, you have something that most people never have. Time to actually study yourself. So you start mastering worse. Your mind, your body, your habits, your emotions. And once you start gaining control over yourself, you start building skills. You read obsessively. You write. You build. You study people who have already become who you want to become. Eventually, all that knowledge has to go somewhere, so you create something. A body of work, a business, an invention, a philosophy, a completely new life. And eventually, you return. Except the person who comes back isn't really the person who left. And fortunately, you don't have to go train with monks or spend fourteen years in a torturous prison to do this. You just need a season of your life where you stop trying to become seen and you become somebody worth seeing.