To Feel Good About Life, You Have To Feed This Hero Inside Of You
This leadership expert swears it’s the path to happiness.
There’s a powerful insight that the famous leadership guru, Robin Sharma, shared on stage:
“I believe that the reason we don’t have energy, the reason that we are not as creative as we want, the reason why we’re not as productive as we want is because we have betrayed our talent and the deep, wise primal hero within knows of that self-betrayal. And we start to hate ourselves.”
The idea here is that much of our disappointments in life are a product of our betrayal of what the primal hero within us wants from us. That we are somehow going about life in misalignment to what the hero wants, and that eats away at us.
Who Is The Primal Hero And What Does S/he Want?
The primal hero is the instinctual nature of you. It is the amalgamation of the cellular learnings of millions of evolutionary years. It is the foundation of what your twenty thousand genes and thirty trillion cells have come to realize as the basic requirement for your prosperity.
So what is this requirement? If we take Robert Wright’s perspective from The Moral Animal: Evolutionary Psychology and Everyday Life, then the answer to “What kind of perceptions and thoughts and feelings guide us through life each day?” is “the kinds of thoughts and feelings and perceptions that helped our ancestors get genes into the next generation.”
If the primary goal is to get genes into the next generation — and we assume that it would have to be the best genes possible to keep the movement going across generations — then what exactly is the algorithm to being successful at that? Mind you, what we know today about how our lifestyles influence the DNA we pass down (through epigenetics) suggests that simply procreating isn’t going to get you there.
If the primal hero is keen on getting genes into the next generation then I can only think of one thing that the hero wants in order to keep this genetic transfer of survival and prosperity going: growth.
Growth in every facet imaginable is how we learn, how we stretch our brain cells, our muscle cells, and our skillsets to thrive above most. It’s how we change our environments into nurturing ones. When we grow, we become better than others. When we grow ahead of the 95th percentile, we improve our chances of passing on genes into the next generation.
And it’s instinctual. Growth is ingrained in our biology. Think about your curiosities as a child. You touched everything; you broke apart everything to understand it at it’s core; you chased novelty and ran into the unknown because it might reveal something worth exploring. This is why we are so happy when we reflect on how much better we are today than we were yesterday. Nothing will ever ignite your soul at a deeper level than the recognition of your own growth.
In the adult world, the primal hero wants nothing different. He or she wants you to be creative, boost your intelligence, be experimental, seek new experiences and above all else — to have fun.
A World Where The Primal Hero Is Just An Observer
Yet, something happens to this basic desire of the primal hero as we grow out of our childhood. The curiosity stops. The asking of questions stops.
Our intuitive pursuit for growth clashes with the cultural norms of life. We are told to be obedient, to stop asking questions and follow the ‘templates’ of growth. We fall prey to the demands set forth by our cultures to make the grades, choose the safe careers, ‘netflix and chill’ and wait for retirement to explore anything different.
Somewhere along the way we transform the definition of growth to attributes such as grades, jobs, salaries, houses, swimming pools, luxury cars, stocks and retirement funds. There’s a mischaracterization of these outcomes as growth instead of what they really are — side effects of actions that may or may not have to do with personal growth.
Tap Into Your Primal Hero
Break the shackles, at least imaginatively
Sit down with yourself and discover the walls that are perhaps limiting your inner primal hero from being fed: fears, past experiences, dependencies (like a job you hate but need in order to satisfy a lifestyle you’ve created). When you drop all the walls, there’s a potential that you find opportunities to climb over them. Maybe you discover that by downsizing your lifestyle, you could do an easier job that pays less but gives you the time to grow your talent for writing. Maybe you discover that it’s completely crazy that you’d let the past failure of your Dad’s entrepreneurial experience keep you from starting your own business.
Look for growth opportunities in your current life
There is no requirement that you significantly shake up your life in order to feed your primal hero. A sensible approach is to take your situation in life (the job you have or your family situation) and find ways to feed your primal hero with creativity, intelligence, novelty and exploration within it. When you sit with yourself to seek these practices, you’ll identify the growth opportunities that exist in every corner of your current life.
Try things simply cause you can
Draw a painting. Build a book shelf. Create a video game. Write a book. Start a Youtube channel. Learn about real estate. The things we can dip our toes into are limitless.
Trying things is how you throw a ball at your primal hero and see if it sticks. It’s how you know whether you walk away physically tired but spiritually energized. You can’t just think about these things to know whether they’d feed your hero; you have to actually try them.
Final Thoughts
Your primal hero awaits your call to create, explore, and learn from the vastness of our world. Drop chasing the titles and status labels that culture decided will bring you happiness. If you don’t, you’ll remain in the trap where you ignore the primal hero’s ‘diet’ and focus all your life’s energies (often to significant exhaustion) consuming a diet that will never resonate with your hero.
Thanks for reading and I love you all.
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