Hero on a Mission: A Path to a Meaningful Life

by Donald Miller

This book covers the four primary characters we played in life: victim, villain, hero and guide. When we understand this we realize we can be the authors of our own stories and shape our life into something meaningful. To create a life that’s meaningful take Viktor Frankl’s advice and 

• Take action creating a work or performing a deed. 
• Experience something or encounter someone that you find captivating and that pulls you out of yourself. 
• Have an optimistic attitude toward the inevitable challenges and suffering you will experience in life.

In stories, there are four primary characters: 

1. The victim is the character who feels they have no way out. 
2. The villain is the character who makes others small. 
3. The hero is the character who faces their challenges and transforms. 
4. The guide is the character who helps the hero.

• In my life I play all four characters every day.

How to Create a Life of Meaning 

1 The Victim, the Villain, the Hero, and the Guide: The Four Roles We Play in Life

• For practical purposes, it is my position that the author of our stories is actually us. Perhaps the single greatest paradigm shift I’ve had as a human is this idea: I am writing my story and I alone have the responsibility to shape it into something meaningful.
• I agree with James Allen, who said in his 1902 book As a Man Thinketh, “Man is buffeted by circumstances so long as he believes himself to be the creature of outside conditions, but when he realizes that he is a creative power, and that he may command the hidden soil and seeds of his being out of which circumstances grow, he then becomes the rightful master of himself.”
• If we are tired of life, what we’re really tired of is the story we are living inside of. And the great thing about being tired of our story is that stories can be edited. Stories can be fixed. Stories can go from dull to exciting, from rambling to focused, and from drudgery to read to exhilarating to live.

THE VICTIM: THE ONE WHO FEELS LIKE THEY HAVE NO WAY OUT

• You cannot have a lead character in a story that acts like a victim.
• The reason a hero that acts like a victim ruins the story is because a story must move forward to be interesting. The hero must want something that is difficult and perhaps even frightening to achieve. This is the plot of nearly every inspirational story you’ve ever read.
• A victim, on the other hand, does not move forward or accept challenges. Instead, a victim gives up because they have come to believe they are doomed.
• If you think about it, then, a person who surrenders their life to fate is the essence of a victim.
• The point is this: even before we ask ourselves what our story is about, we have to ask ourselves what character we are playing within that story. If we are playing the victim or the villain, no amount of editing can help us.
• When we shame ourselves for acting like a victim, we’re manifesting a conversation in which the villain inside us attacks the victim inside us. This kind of inner dialogue does not create a great story either.

THE VILLAIN: THE ONE WHO MAKES OTHERS SMALL

• What separates a villain from a hero is the hero learns from their pain and tries to help others avoid the same pain. The villain, on the other hand, seeks vengeance against the world that hurt them.

THE HERO: THE ONE WILLING TO FACE THEIR CHALLENGES AND TRANSFORM 

• What I learned over time, and what this book is about, is that playing the hero improves our stories dramatically. If we want to take control of our lives and bend our story toward meaning, we can surface more hero energy and less victim and villain energy.
• A hero wants something in life and is willing to accept challenges in order to transform into the person capable of getting what they want.
• This is one of the questions I would certainly ask myself as I edited a story that wasn’t working. 
  • How is the hero responding to their challenge? 
  • When they are insulted, how do they react? 
  • When they are rejected, how do they treat the person who has rejected them? 
  • When they feel that all is lost, are they able to find a light in the darkness? 
  • Do they try? 
  • Do they move forward against all odds, and do they get up again when they are knocked down?

• If the hero responds with purposeful action and a sense of hope, our story will move forward and become interesting. But if they respond with a sense of hopelessness like a victim, or if they lash out at others like a villain, the story will break down.

THE CHARACTER WE PLAY WILL DETERMINE THE QUALITY OF OUR STORY

• What we’re really talking about when we talk about what character we play in the story of our lives is identity. Who do we believe we are?
• Heroes rise up with courage to change their circumstances. Fate may send us challenges, but it does not dictate how we respond to those challenges.
• We have the power to shape our own stories. Fate may throw us sunshine or rain, but it does not determine who we are.
• When we look at a perfectly capable person who sadly sees themselves as a victim, there’s a temptation to judge them for not having discipline. But discipline isn’t their problem. Their problem is in their identity. They do not know they have heroic energy within them.
• The journey began with curiosity about who I could become.

Transforming from victim mindset to hero mindset started with a question: Who could I become? 

• Just knowing there was a possibility I could become a writer, that I could accomplish something meaningful, gave me the courage to take a risk and try.

Heroes have help. Lots of help. There are people in our lives who show us a better way to live. A hero gets help from a guide.

THE GUIDE: THE ONE WHO HELPS THE HERO

• To help the hero out, the storyteller sends a guide. Yoda helped Luke learn to be a Jedi. Haymitch helped Katniss win the Hunger Games.
• Guides are the characters in the story who have empathy and confidence, and as such are equipped to help the hero win. The confidence guides have comes from their years of experience honing in their own hero’s journey.
• The empathy guides have comes from their pain. As you’ve likely guessed, guides have backstories of pain too.
• Pain, then, is often the teacher that transforms the hero into the guide. That is, if their attitude toward pain is accepting and redemptive.
• When you watch a story, the story itself is not about the guide; it’s about the hero, and yet the guide is the strongest, most capable character in the story. They are also the most caring and compassionate. We may root for the hero and hate the villain, but our utmost respect is reserved for the guide.

“We do not live this life to build a monument to ourselves, but to pass our understanding of life on to those who come behind us so that their stories can be even more meaningful than ours.”

• What if the story of our lives is less about what we build and more about who we build up?
• If life is teaching us anything, it seems to be this: it is a meaningful thing to sacrifice ourselves for the sake of another. 

TO LIVE A STORY IS NOT A CHOICE 

• The hard truth about life is not that it asks us to live a story, but that it forces us to live a story. We have been forced into this life by the breath of God. We come out crying and gasping for air, and what we do with that air is what constitutes the quality of our story.

A PATH TO MEANING 2 

A Hero Accepts Their Own Agency

• Again, heroes are not as strong as you think. They are usually unwilling to act, in need of help, filled with self-doubt, and often incompetent in the very area in which they are given a challenge.
• The journey, of course, changes them. Still, the hero must participate. They must decide to take the journey.
• The hero becomes the hero only when they decide to accept the facts of their life and respond with courage.
• At no point in my twenties was I an actual victim. I just wanted to think of myself as a victim, so I wouldn’t have to try. I often wonder if people pray for rescue and then resent God for not helping them, only to realize, in time, that God did not rescue them because they did not need to be rescued. They were not actually victims. (This is not referring to the actual people who are facing grace atrocities in life and are actual victims) 

THE LOCUS OF CONTROL

• Psychologists have a name for the act of surrendering power to outside forces. It’s called an “external locus of control.” It means that the person surrendering power believes external forces are in charge.
• An internal locus of control means we believe that, to a large degree, we are actually in control of our own destinies. But an external locus of control means we believe we are helpless to outside forces.
• Psychologists have associated an external locus of control with higher levels of anxiety, higher rates of depression, lower wages, and troubled relationships.
• An internal locus of control, on the other hand, has been shown to correlate with a stronger sense of belonging, less depression, higher wages, and more fulfilling relationships.

AGENCY

• Social scientists use another term to explain the dynamic of personal control and power: agency. Agency refers to the ability we have to make our own choices. And all of us have agency.
• In fact, very happy people know a secret: a human being has a ridiculous amount of personal agency. A person’s reaction to a set of circumstances dramatically affects how their story plays out.

Viktor Frankl

• Instead of taking his life, though, he realized his life could still have a purpose. He accepted agency over what he could still control and somehow, even in the camps, began rewriting the manuscript in his mind. Even amidst the forced labor and death that surrounded him, he continued his work, not allowing his captors to take what remained of his agency.
• “Our stories will be told and when they are told,” Frankl explained, “the world will know there is an evil which must be protected against. Even if they kill us, our lives serve a purpose. Our lives have meaning.”
• Viktor Frankl would go on to lecture about how life offered a deep sense of meaning to any person who accepted the challenge.
• He encouraged the world to understand that, in all its light and dark, life was still beautiful, and we could contribute to the growth of that beauty.
• Paramount to Frankl’s ideas is personal agency. He argues that it is our choice to believe life has meaning and that we can choose to experience that meaning if we structure our lives to serve a greater purpose.
• But if a hero does not experience setbacks, the story gets dull. Setbacks and challenges are the only elements in a story that change us. But I didn’t know any of that then. I just thought I’d failed, and I got mad about it. I’d done my part, after all. I’d shown up and disciplined myself to get the words down. Fate owed me a bestseller and dinner with Oprah. Haha! 
• Essentially, though, it was to throw yourself into a story in which you try to accomplish something important. You accept the challenges and overcome them if you can.

MEANING

• Meaning is the same. You accept your own agency. You move your locus of control from outside yourself to inside yourself. You go on intentional adventures, and you get to experience meaning. You have a goal, you overcome challenges, you put another page in the typewriter. You wake up each day and you push the plot forward. The more I lived intentionally, and the more focused my life plan and daily structure became, the more I transformed.
• To experience meaning, you have to accept the fact of your own agency and move into your life with intention. The point is that life feels like it has meaning if you structure your life so that you experience it.
• If we don’t want something, face our challenges, and try hard things, our life stories don’t work, either.

WHAT IF LIFE IS NOT MEANINGLESS?

• “What if life itself is not meaningless? What if just your life is meaningless?” You need to give your life meaning. 
• And it all had to do with dreaming up a story and living into that story. It all had to do with living as a hero on a mission.
• The term I now use to describe the restlessness of sitting in the theater of our minds waiting for something to happen is narrative void. No longer being interested in your own story, mainly because the story isn’t interesting: that’s how many people live.
• In stories, characters who try hard things transform. They have to. The person they were is not enough to overcome their challenges. They have to get stronger, humbler, more tender, smarter. They have to change in order to get over the wall. And in the growing pains that come with transformation, there is an experience of meaning.

3 A Hero Chooses a Life of Meaning

FOR A LONG TIME I believed “meaning” was a philosophical idea that you experienced only when you agreed with a set of beliefs. I no longer believe this is true. In fact, I don’t think meaning can be experienced by believing a set of ideas at all. Instead, I believe meaning is something you experience in motion.

• To experience meaning, a person simply needs to rise up, point at the horizon, and, with deep conviction, decide to venture out toward the hope of a meaningful story. Meaning is something you experience while you are on an adventure.
• I spent years studying theology and philosophy. They were good years, but I was mistaken to believe that the study of meaning would give me a sense of meaning. Studying love does not cause you to fall in love. Falling in love happens under a certain set of circumstances.

A FORMULA TO CREATE MEANING

MEANING HAPPENS WHEN YOU GET A STORY GOING

• I could hear the still, small voice of the ghost: Meaning is only experienced in motion. On the flight home, Viktor Frankl gave me a name for the restlessness. He called it the “existential vacuum.” Frankl said man did not have a will to pleasure, but a will to meaning. And when man couldn’t find meaning, he distracted himself with pleasure.
• Why are we so restless? Because ice cream is distracting but not fulfilling. Because alcohol offers a fabricated sense of peace. Because lust is not love. Frankl was right. We distract ourselves with pleasure when we can’t find a sense of meaning.

THE FORMULA FOR A LIFE OF MEANING 

• • Frankl’s formula to experience a life of meaning was pragmatic and threefold: 

• Take action creating a work or performing a deed. 

• Experience something or encounter someone that you find captivating and that pulls you out of yourself. 

• • Have an optimistic attitude toward the inevitable challenges and suffering you will experience in life.

• But the big revelation for me came when I realized that just because you experience meaning while living a story doesn’t mean it sticks around. If any of those three elements are removed, you stop feeling a sense of meaning and return to the existential vacuum.
• Many people live in the existential vacuum without realizing they can easily experience meaning again. They just have to get a little story going and lean into that story.
• Think about the most restless, uneasy seasons of your life. Were you fascinated by a project that demanded your attention? Were you mesmerized by the beauty and the people around you? And were you able to reflect on your suffering and identify how, while it was certainly painful, it was also enriching your life?
• But for me the big revelation came when I realized we could cause meaning to happen any time we wanted. In other words, human beings have the ability to make meaning. If we choose a project to work on; if we open ourselves up to the beauty of art, nature, and even other people; and then if we can find a redemptive perspective for our inevitable pain, we will experience a deep sense of meaning.
• Meaning feels like purpose. When I experience meaning, my life feels as though it is playing an important role in an important story.
• How many people sit in church pews hearing lectures about God only to return home and feel restless? And why? Perhaps it is because we do not experience meaning by studying meaning. Rather, we experience meaning by taking action. Even Jesus said follow Me rather than figure Me out. What if the experience of meaning requires action?
• Meaning is not an idea to be agreed with. It is a feeling you get when you live as a hero on a mission. And it cannot be experienced without taking action and living into a story.
• Not only this, but they also combined their ambition with an appreciation for challenge. They were not victims. They knew that pain was part of life, and they knew they could use pain to help them transform into better versions of themselves. After all, we are all going to experience pain—why not allow it to improve our character and our outlook on life?

WE CAN DECIDE TO EXPERIENCE MEANING

• What I noticed, then, is that life tends to meet you as you get moving; and the more you move, the more opportunities life throws your way.
• I created the life plan I’ll lay out for you later in the book. I also created a simple daily planner to keep me on track. The way I viewed the life plan was similar to how a writer views the outline of their story. They plan their book, then they write it. If the outline needs to change because the book flows differently than they thought it would, that’s fine, but by creating an outline they established a direction and cultivated the inspiration to start writing. The daily planner, then, became my little secret to staying disciplined. If I filled out my daily planner page on a given day, I was always, always more in tune with my own story than if I didn’t.
• To create a work or do a deed. Life invites us to be important and necessary. If we wake up each day and have a task to accomplish, especially a task in which other people are involved or without which other people might somehow suffer, we become necessary in the world. We sense we have a purpose (because we do). By requiring a work or a deed, I think Frankl was saying: Get yourself a great reason to wake up and get out of bed in the morning. If you do, it will help you avoid the existential vacuum.
• To experience something or encounter someone. We should acknowledge that we are not alone in the world and in fact the world and the stories unfolding upon it inspire awe. We all know the greatest experiences we have in life are dramatically enhanced if they are shared with others. According to Frankl, to experience meaning, we should get involved with a small group of people we love and who love us, or we should find something that invites our focus beyond ourselves to the beauty of the world around us. A lone walk through the forest is good for the soul just as a trip to a gallery can offer inspiration and a sense of mental expansion. The point is this: encounter something that pulls you out of yourself so that your world becomes larger.
• To have the ability to choose a perspective toward any set of circumstances, including challenges and suffering. While I’ve found each of the three elements of Frankl’s formula helpful, it’s this last one that helped me transform the most. Essentially, Frankl argued there was no negative event that could happen to us that could not be somehow redeemed. “Redeemed” is my word, not his, but I think it’s fitting. By redeemed I mean that, as humans, we are able to take the most painful of tragedies and turn them into something meaningful. Frankl believed that while tragedies should be acknowledged and grieved, they can also produce something beneficial. This doesn’t mean tragedies are good. Nobody wants or should have to experience a tragedy. It only means that from the ashes of our tragedies we can create something beautiful, and by creating something meaningful with our pain we begin the process of healing our wounds.
• The benefits of pain should not be overlooked. In stories, pain is the only way heroes transform into better versions of themselves.
• Sitting and processing your own challenges and realizing how much they have transformed you should be a necessary exercise in every high school. When you sit and think about what you’ve been through and how strong your challenges have made you, you enter into an improved identity. You realize you are stronger than you knew and you also realize you are interesting.
• I still haven’t found what I’m looking for either, but having discovered a deep sense of meaning I am now uninterested in the search for anything else. I am fulfilled, even in the unknowing. I do not want to live life looking for something I don’t have. I want to become more and more interested in the opportunities I’ve been given.
• When something difficult happens, victims accept defeat but heroes ask, “What does this make possible?”