Most men in self-help chase healthy routines and pep talks, but struggle to get deeper confidence. It’s because real confidence isn’t built by habits alone; deep confidence is earned when you survive real risk and conquer real-life challenges.

Skip that trial by fire and you stay a boy, not a man.

In this post, I’ll show you what a man’s hero’s journey actually is, why it works, and how to start one without gambling away your life.

Intro: What’s A Hero’s Journey

A hero’s journey is a phase of life that pushes a man beyond comfort and safety, forcing him to face real risk, struggle, and uncertainty that change his psychology and mindsets

A hero’s journey is high stakes, both mentally and practically.
Failing the journey carries real costs, so the psychological intensity, including fear, is well-motivated.

If the journey is successful, the hero acquires agency, wisdom, competence, and confidence.

What’s not a hero’s journey

Here’s a table to help differentiate general self-help advice vs. a hero’s journey:

Another important difference is between real-life heroes’ journeys and mythical journeys. Myths and movies often entail a fight for a good ideal, or for the well-being of others (Campbell, 1988).
While these stories make good myths and movies, many real-life heroes’ journeys are about individuation, growth, and self-advancement. In more extreme cases, also about survival.

Standard Self-Help vs. Hero’s Journey

Good habits are crucial: they make you disciplined, healthy, and effective.

However, by themselves, habits seldom give you advanced skills and unshakable, antifragile confidence.
Normal self-help is also easy advice because it’s safe: gym, sleep, no booze, meditation. These are all undoubtedly good for you, and everyone approves of them.

Unfortunately, they’re also all comparatively easier than a true life test, so they’re not as effective for inner growth. No matter how much money you make or how much you bench, if you haven’t truly been tested, you are fragile.

This is why pursuing a hero’s journey is important for the most ambitious men.

Modern Men Are Missing a Hero’s Journey

For most of history, life forced the test. When life was tough, simply surviving was a hero’s journey that required boys to become men.

Even until recently, army drafts, early marriages, and little social safety provided external stressors and responsibility.

Today, those built-in trials are gone.
Modern society solved survival — and accidentally removed the developmental pressure that used to turn boys into men.

Today, only men who actively pursue a hero’s journey may get to experience one.

🔎 Example: My Father Forced Into The Journey

I used to think my father was so attached to his service because of over-romanticism and some old-school nationalism/conservatism.

Today, I see it differently. Service was my father’s hero’s journey.

My father shared more than once when he mentioned to my grandmother that he might go back.
His mother didn’t deny him, but told him that ‘there was nothing back home for him’.
That letter was his mother’s ultimate gift: she severed the umbilical cord with the truth: Montefion, his tiny boyhood village, was a dead end for an ambitious man. The only way forward is not backward, but through the storm.

My father left at 17. An inexperienced boy, including, I suspect, sexually.
Through rough seas and seasickness, he graduated from boyhood to manhood. And he was then ready to go talk to my mother and form a family.

My Hero’s Journey

Much of my early life was a subconscious craving for a hero’s journey.

I was a different kind of rebel.
Instead of resenting non-existent control, I resented their support.
I resented a too-easy life that wasn’t allowing me the tough tests I craved to grow and earn my own self-respect.

My fantasy of the ultimate test was being a dumpster baby. The real-life equivalent of being alone at the foot of the mountain. No tools, no oxygen, no help. Now climb.

Solo travels, hitchhiking, and risky experiments were all smaller-scale attempts to test myself and earn my own respect.

Movie Example: ‘I Must Go’

This scene from Fellini’s work always struck me hard:

Kid: Where are you going

Him: I don’t know, I go <— It’s not about the destination, it’s about the journey of growth

Kid: What are you going to do

Him: I don’t know, but I must go <— It’s not about knowing what to do, it’s about the experiences and hardships along the way

Kid: Weren’t you OK here? <— The different mindset of those who stay: ‘if you’re fine, then you stay’

Him: … <— Doesn’t yet understand his own inner drive. He was OK there, and he’s afraid to go. But he must go to become the man he wants to be

(scenes of those who stay) <— The small reality he felt he had to outgrow

It was such a powerful scene, even when I didn’t fully understand it. The movie was a light-hearted movie about enjoying a fun life in the periphery.

This scene seemed odd in that context. But it stuck with me the most from the first time I saw it.
It took me decades to truly understand the significance behind it. That man was looking for his hero’s journey. That man was me.

Starting & Enduring

Despite my subconscious cravings for life tests, my strategic predisposition made life too effortless. But eventually, finally, the test I craved found me.

I found myself struggling, alone, and desperate.

I was renting a small guest room from a gay couple, and even that was temporary.
I’m still grateful one of them was nice to me. But his niceness may have caused his partner’s hostility. He avoided eye contact and refused to speak English with me.
One day I heard him call me ‘asshole‘ for putting his laundry out, something he’d always do with mine. And I had to take it because I needed their cheap room.
The internship I had taken hoping to turn it into a job ended without an offer. I was jobless and struggling with accommodation, employment, money, social life, and life direction.

I remember one day I just wanted to talk to somebody, and thought of my parents. I took the phone, I looked at it… And I put it back down (this was a key moment similar to my grandmother’s letter to my father).
I was worried I couldn’t manage to fake that all was OK, and didn’t want to put that worry on my parents.

Another day, after another job rejection, I just crouched down on the floor, and cried.
I looked at the window, and I got scared. For the first time in my life, I truly worried about myself and my future. For the first time in my life, I wasn’t sure I’d find a way.
Maybe I still had a glimmer of optimism, but on that day, I could barely see any light at the end of the tunnel.

But one good thing I did is that I never stopped trying and moving. I kept going. And slowly, I climbed back up.

The Transformation

That experience changed me.
It was the watershed phase: I went in a boy, and came out a man. In truth, some of that boy in me died. But it was for the better.

This is the part some men miss.
Not the suffering, but what suffering produces when you don’t escape it, or numb it.

1. Upgraded Confidence and Self-Trust

Before, I had a naïve, boyish optimism, kind of “Yeah, it’s going to work out, because… Why not”. That optimism was empty though, it wasn’t backed by any life test.

After that journey, my agentic self-belief evolved into a more realistic, resilient, and antifragile self-trust.
Today, I accept and embrace limitations. Neither I nor anyone can guarantee success. Only boys believe in assured victory.
I’m comfortable with uncertainty and the possibility of failure.
And while I accept that, I also deeply trust myself that I would at least give it a fucking good shot. And if I were an outsider looking in, I’d never bet against myself.

That combination of life-tested self-trust and outcome independence is the foundation of my self-confidence.

2. Upgraded Self-Respect

I always had a good opinion of myself.
But before, it was only based on certain traits I had.

After, it evolved into life-tested self-respect.
I respected myself as a man who found himself at the bottom of the mountain of life, on his own, and managed to climb back up.

3. Upgraded, Honorable Mindsets & Work Ethics

My mindsets also shifted.
In the past, my idea of a good life meant little input, for maximum outcomes (highest ROI). Coasting through life like old royalty.

There is a book by a French employee who had a life of no work, for a good salary.
I wanted that, but better. Doing little, but while advancing. And the scariest thing is that I may have succeeded.

Fortunately, my hero’s journey taught me to put hard work front and center. Today, I swung the opposite direction and seek maximum contribution.

How to Start A Hero’s Journey

1. Set A Life-Relevant Goal, and Aim High

Aiming high will naturally place challenging demands on your life.

Life-relevant means that it must be central to you and what you want out of life. A hero’s journey must have consequences for your present and future self.
Controlled environments don’t cut it.

2. Move Physically

Moving uproots you, removes your social support, and forces you to build a new life on your own.

Paradoxically, ambitious country boys have an advantage because they must move. Circumstances quickly separate journey-takers from safety-seekers.
Urbanites, with opportunities nearby, may miss this opportunity.

🙋‍♂️Lucio’s Experience: The day I realized I was gone for good

Lucio:
I remember when my dad drove me to the bus stop.

I had already left for university, but I was still close and supported by my parents.
My first job felt different. I knew I’d seldom come back. And when I did, it wouldn’t be going back ‘home’ anymore.

My father took a camera. He probably knew as well.

Once the bus took me out of sight, I got misty-eyed.
I was leaving boyhood behind me. Then, I stopped looking back and started looking forward to the new life chapter. Prague, here I come.

3. Go Solo

A hero’s journey is a path of self-discovery.
But not so much about ‘who you really are’ like many think. It’s more about discovering of what you’re really capable of.

You can have a team if you’re the leader taking responsibility for all.
But bar that, go solo.

4. Remove Family Support, Rely On Yourself

You’re safer in your tribe, but too safe is the enemy of the hero’s journey.

This is not to say you must cut contact, of course. But it is to say that your problems are yours only to face. And never bring your struggle to your parents: it’s not honorable.

🙋🏼‍♂️ Lucio’s example: my brother stayed, I went
And the difference is stark. Also, as much as I like him, respect, well… That’s another thing.

5. String Journeys For A Hero’s Life (Infinite Game)

The main hero’s journey takes you from boyhood to manhood. But you can string several journeys that add new skills, and bring new challenges.

The ambitious man’s life is often a series of overlapping and sequential journeys.
Looking at my life, besides moving and pulling myself back up, there were also ambitious dating goals that kept testing me. And then entrepreneurship with TPM and PU as my missions.

🙋🏼‍♂️Lucio’s take: I see civilization as a string of great men who move us forward.
Men who made their whole lives a hero’s journey. Our job is to join them, and do our part.

6. Strategic Risk-Taking: Limit the Downsides

Even successful journeys can be costly.
And some failures can cost mental health, and potentially more.

Here are five steps for a challenging, but not stupid hero’s journey:

1. Have a ‘safety valve contact’ if things get dark. A good friend or a therapist, if you can afford
2. Have an emergency fund for food or medical emergencies
   • Emergency roof to avoid homelessness
3. Learn power dynamics and social strategies: these are the main skills that provided me a lifeline and boosted my climb. And once you acquire them, nobody can ever take them away from you

How Power University Prepares You

This is why Power University isn’t about motivation or routines. It’s about building personal power, strategy, and social competence that keep you functional even when life gets tough.