With Great Power Comes Great Responsibility
-Spiderman
This past year I’ve become acquainted with the work of Joseph Campbell, who studied story. In his work, The Hero, With a Thousand Faces, he outlines the pattern. that all great stories follow. If you’d like a summary of his work, please contact me here (https://achatacoaching.com/contact-me/)
The pattern goes like this: A normal person sets out on a journey to attain a goal. Something happens that makes his adventure exciting until things go tragically wrong. The hero enters into a time of darkness and question until he meets a mentor or gains a secret elixir. Knowing what he knows now, should he return to the normal world or stay in the special world he has discovered? Alas, he returns with his magic gift. With this gift, he lives among the ordinary world offering his knew, secret knowledge as a benefit to humankind.
Spiderman works like this. After going through a huge physical transformation and battling evil, the movie ends with him saying “With Great Power, Comes Great Responsibility.” This was his magic gift. He now had power and he had learned to use it responsibly.
You too have a magic gift. You’ve been on a journey. Whether it was a personal one or with a team. You’ve gone on quests before and come out of them knowing something you didn’t know before. Perhaps you gained a new skill or a new worldview. My point is, you have a magic gift. What is it?
What separates the heroes from the villains is how they use their magic gift.
Once I was in a comic book shop and asked the pimpled face teenager behind the counter what made the heroes and villains different in comic book stories. He replied, “that’s easy. Both heroes and villains had tragedy happen to them. But one came out of it using his new power for evil, the other for good.”
Dave Logan who wrote Tribal Leadership, says what separates the good companies from the great ones is a noble cause. Just like in the good stories, great leaders and companies aren’t interested in spending their lives on behalf of something that isn’t noble. They know if they don’t contribute their magic gift to their noble cause, the world will be at a loss.
Knowing the answer to these two issues (What’s your magic gift? & What’s your noble cause?) could be at the core of the problem you are trying to solve. Need more help? I’ve done this work with a variety of people from small business owners to worldwide organizations.
No matter what your setting, the principles still apply. Answer these two questions and make the world a better place.