Joseph Campbell was a world-class athlete and PhD candidate at Columbia who walked away from his doctorate just before the Great Depression, spent five years reading and playing jazz, and later reflected on that decisive break as the true start of his heroic path. The call to adventure comes before the plan.
You have a unique idiosyncratic path. In the book, we learn about Joseph Campbell. Campbell's story is phenomenal. He was getting his PhD at Columbia. He was a world-class athlete. He almost qualified for the Olympics as a track star at Columbia University, was in the process of getting his PhD, went to Europe, studied some stuff. His mind expanded and opened. He came back to the US 2 weeks before the Great Depression, and he went to his advisors in his PhD program and said, hey, everything opened up for me. What I was doing before isn't quite what I feel called to do now. I want to do this. And he said, "No, to hell with that," is what he said. And instead he dropped out of his PhD program. The hero had a call to adventure, dropped out of his PhD program, and spent 5 years reading during the Great Depression. He saved up a little bit of money. He was a jazz musician in college and he read literally all day, every day. This book features some reflections he shared in his 80s, what he did 50, 60 years before, what he did as a young man.
