Ryan Larson - Mark Twain and the Hero's Journey

 In the previous blog I brought up the idea of how an external failure in a journey (my example was from the Epic of Gilgamesh) can lead to an internal discovery. This made me think of Mark Twain's Roughing it, that I read a few months ago.

In each part of the book, Twain sets out to accomplish something and eventually fails at it and moves on to something else. He moves out to the gold rush, for instance, with the hope of striking it rich, but he quickly realizes that he won't be successful as a miner. He moves to a settlement out in the wilderness with the intent of setting up a long-term outpost, but a fire burns it all down. 

But each of those failures brought Twain closer to what he eventually became: a writer, arguably more successful in a retrospective view than he would have been otherwise. My takeaway from this is that even if our goals are unrealistic or even bad for us, they can guide us closer to an eventual secret thing we didn't even know we wanted.

This has been on my mind because I'm going to try and make it as a musician, which is something with a very low success rate. I don't have high hopes that I will become famous, but I think that this journey will lead me closer to something else. At the moment, I wouldn't want to be on any other path.

Maybe this will resonate with you. Maybe it won't. I dunno.

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