Today I found myself thinking about the relationship between sacrifice and success, although perhaps the word success is too limited to describe what actually happens when a person decides to pursue something that is still far out of reach. There is an idea that appears constantly in human stories and that Joseph Campbell ended up systematizing under what we know as the hero's journey: someone leaves a known reality, crosses a territory that forces them to confront their own limitations and, after a succession of trials, returns as someone who could no longer inhabit the world in exactly the same way.
The journey begins with a call, although it rarely arrives as a particularly comfortable invitation.
Look, you're in the country of dream. Wake up. Come on a journey. There's a whole aspect of your consciousness, of your being, that hasn't been touched. So you're at home here? Well, there's not enough of you there. And so it begins.
In The Hero with a Thousand Faces, Campbell observed that myths belonging to very different cultures seemed to repeat a surprisingly similar structure: there is a known world, a rupture that forces one to leave it, a threshold that must be crossed, trials for which the protagonist is not yet prepared and, eventually, some kind of return. What mattered was never only defeating the enemy or obtaining the treasure, because what is gained at the end usually matters less than the person one had to become in order to reach it. The hero returns to the same place and, even so, is no longer exactly the same person who left it.
I think something similar happens with any sufficiently important goal. Each person ends up building their own journey, with ambitions, risks, and difficulties that can hardly be compared from the outside, while discovering that wanting something also means accepting the possibility of not getting it. Entering an adventure voluntarily requires recognizing that from the beginning, because there would not be much merit in pursuing a goal whose result was guaranteed; it is precisely the uncertainty that forces us to develop judgment, tolerate mistakes, and keep moving forward even when there is still no evidence that all that effort will end up working.
That is also why I no longer believe sacrifice has a mathematical relationship with success. Suffering more does not mean deserving more, and working until you destroy yourself does not automatically make a decision intelligent. We can strive enormously for the wrong thing and lose, while someone else can find a considerably more efficient path to the same result. The value of sacrifice appears when it has purpose, when what we are giving builds capacities we did not have before, and when we are able to recognize that persevering and knowing when to change direction are, at times, different expressions of the same maturity.
Fighting seriously for something also ends up working as a fairly uncomfortable form of self-knowledge, because it is easy to imagine our strengths while they have not yet had to prove anything. It is during the process that we discover how much we actually endure, what our favorite excuses are, what we do when no one is watching, and which parts of us still need quite a bit of work. Some strengths appear precisely because they were necessary, while certain weaknesses can no longer hide behind the idealized version we had of ourselves; perhaps growing consists less in eliminating all of them than in learning which ones we must correct, which ones we can compensate for, and which ones simply belong to the human being we are trying to direct.
This year I have fought more than before, and I have also started to look with some distance at the idea of becoming an entirely new version of myself. I do not really believe there is a “new me” waiting to appear after enough discipline; I am still the same person, though with different decisions, some new skills, and mistakes I can now recognize more easily. I have seen results that excite me, I have also made fairly avoidable mistakes, and I have learned something I used to understand intellectually but did not always accept when it happened to me: fucking it up does not necessarily mean the process is failing. Sometimes it simply means we are finally trying things we are not yet good enough at.
I suppose my journey is still quite far from ending, and I actually hope that is the case. There are still too many things I want to build, learn, and find out about myself to wish for a definitive arrival. I go at my own pace, although I try not to use that sentence as an excuse to move more slowly than necessary; I keep learning, even if I still repeat mistakes; I keep improving, even if some days it is hard to prove it, and I continue facing an adversary who will probably appear at every stage of the path in different forms: myself.
