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Welcome to “Money Hero Blog”
Welcome back!
What is a hero and what is a hero’s journey about money?
According to Joseph Campbell and his work on the hero’s journey, the hero is anyone-male or female-who perceives that something is wrong in the hero’s world. The hero chooses to act to solve the problem, motivated by a sense of responsibility to restore the hero’s world to its balance. Usually the decision to act requires the hero to overcome initial reluctance.
The journey requires the hero to leave what is ordinary and familiar, to set out into a special and unfamiliar world. Along the way, the hero meets mentors who provide gifts for the task, as well as allies and adversaries, and finally must come face to face with the ultimate cause of the problem. The hero must act in spite of fear, persevere in the face of all obstacles, and do whatever is required to accomplish the task. If the hero defeats the adversary, the hero returns to the ordinary world. While the hero’s actions solve the problem for the benefit of the hero’s ordinary world, the hero is forever changed as a result of the journey.
In short, the hero chooses to act in the face of fear to solve a problem, persists in the face of obstacles, and confrons the real source of the problem, for some larger purpose than the hero’s own benefit.
Although most of us don’t think about the connection between money and heroism, this blog is based on the idea that the real solution to the problem of money in our world is to be heroic about money.
What I propose is a vision of money that combines the commitment to justice with a commitment to claim personal power over money.
This is my invitation. Commit yourself to your own hero’s money journey. Whatever your own experience with money, whatever you learned about money from any source, including your parents, your teachers, your religious leaders, the question is: Will you be heroic about money?
What sets heroes apart from most of us is that the hero accepts the challenge of the hero’s journey. In real life, most people do not choose to be heroic. They choose to stay in their ordinary world, unwilling to face the challenge.
To be heroic means that you would have to leave what is familiar and enter into a special world. For many of us, that means moving from powerlessness, helplessness, and ignorance about money into the world of financial literacy. It means to claim the power of money in a world where money is the fundamental instrument of power separating the haves and the have nots. It’s no surprise that people with power want to keep other people ignorant about money. Power is money and money is power.
It would also require you to take seriously that we live in a world of extreme differences between the rich and the poor. Money is too important to be left to those who have no concern for justice.
When you have money, you have the power to have a greater impact in the world. Most of us are used to playing small roles, partly because we don’t have enough money.
In contrast consider what money can do when you have a lot of it. When a multigazillionaire, such as Bill Gates, decides to commit millions of dollars to a systemic approach to an endemic illness, such as eradicating malaria in Africa, it is the difference between small gestures and the possibility of real social change.
Why would you accept a hero’s money journey? One of the most alluring claims of our age is that money ought to come easily. We live in an era of get rich quick promises. Lotteries lure us with the dreams of striking the jackpot. “Business-In-A-Box” offers tempt us with the idea that we can rake in profits without doing any work.
Instead, the hero’s journey is not easy, not quick, and has no guarantees of success. Why accept the hero’s call to adventure? Jim Rohn claims that the best reason to set a goal to become a millionaire is not because of the money, but because of the person you must become to accomplish the goal. In other words, when you set out on a hero’s journey, the journey itself will change you.
When you make a commitment to a hero’s journey about money, you are committing yourself to discovering power that you never knew you had, in service of something bolder than simply acquiring more “stuff.”
Money is power. When you commit yourself to your own hero’s journey about money-whatever form that will take-you can make a difference in this world divided between the haves and the have-nots. You can also make a difference in your own life, to create abundance instead of constant struggle over money.
If you are struggling with religous beliefs about money, I have written a book about 8 sayings of Jesus about money, based on the idea of the hero’s journey, Going Broke With Jesus:How Heroic Stories Intended To Liberate The Poor Become Biblical Urban Legends About The Evils Of Money. This post is a revised excerpt from the final chapter. You can get your copy at www.GoingBrokeWithJesus.com
