What aligned with my thinking about shapers or Heros has given me powerful insights about the heroes/shapers we all know today the inventors, inspirers, leaders etc. Understanding some of the patterns in their own lives, I got to learn that a "hero" isn't a perfect person who always gets things right. Far from it. A hero is someone who "found or achieved or [did] something beyond the normal range of achievement," and who "has given his life to something bigger than himself or other than himself."
I have met a few such people and probably meet more. What is most interesting about each of their work is how they got that way. Heroes don't begin as heroes; they just become them because of the way one thing leads to another. They typically start out leading ordinary lives in an ordinary world and are drawn by a"CALL." This leads them down a"road of trials" filled with battles, temptations, successes, and failures. Along the way, they are helped by others, often by those who are further along the journey and serve as mentors, though those who are less far along also help in various ways. They also gain allies and enemies and learn how to fight, often against convention.
Furthermore, they encounter temptations and have clashes and reconciliations as they overcome their fear of fighting because of their great determination to achieve what they want, and they gain their"special powers" (i.e., skills) from both "battles" that test and teach them, and from gifts (such as advice) that they receive from others. Over time, they both succeed and fail, but they increasingly succeed more than they fail as they grow stronger and keep striving for more, which leads to ever-bigger and more challenging battles.
Heroes inevitably experience at least one very big failure (an "abyss" or the "belly of the whale" experience) that tests whether they have the resilience to get up and fight smarter and with more determination. If they do, they undergo a change (have a "metamorphosis") in which they experience the fear that protects them, without losing the aggressiveness that propels them forward. With triumphs come rewards. Though they don't realize it when they are in their battles, the hero's biggest reward is the "boon," which is the special knowledge and Wisdom that the hero has earned through his journey.
Late in life, winning more battles and acquiring more rewards typically becomes less exciting to heroes than passing along that knowledge to others to also be successful "returning the boon". Once the boon is returned, the hero is free to live and then free to die (in which one is free to savor life until one passes away.
I saw that heroes, like Septimius Severus, and shapers like Steve Jobs, come in varying sizes-there are big ones and small ones that they are real people, and we all know some are alive today. Being a hero is typically not all it's cracked up to be-they get beat up a lot, and many are attacked, humiliated, or killed even after they triumph. In fact, it's hard to see the logic for choosing this hero role, if one were to choose. Today I see and somewhat relate to how a certain type of person would start and stay on that path drawn by their CALL to battle.
