Why the Sage’s Journey Fulfills You When the Hero’s Journey Stops Making Sense | (#048) Beyond Success: Psychology & Philosophy for Achievers, with David Tian, Ph.D.

What if the very story that got you this far to drive, to win, to prove, to conquer, is the thing now keeping you stuck? What if the voice in your head that pushed you to grind, to hustle, to keep climbing, is the same one that’s making it impossible to ever feel at peace? You’ve probably lived by that story your whole life, the one where you’re the hero, the fighter, the one who pushes harder when others quit, and sure, it’s gotten you some results, the job, the bonus, the degrees, maybe the money or the body, or the women or whatever symbol of success you’ve been chasing. [00:51.0]

But here’s the part no one talks to you about—it never really feels like enough, does it? Each time you reach one peak, there’s already another one waiting, higher, harder, more expensive, less satisfying, and the climb never stops. There’s no rest, no pause, just a constant whisper in the back of your mind, “If I slow down, I fall behind. If I stop pushing, I disappear.” So, you keep going. On paper, everything might look great, but on the inside, you’re exhausted, not physically maybe, emotionally, worn down by the pressure to keep performing, to keep up the image, to stay in the fight.

here’s the hardest part—no one around you sees it, because you’ve gotten so good at holding it all together, at looking confident, at pretending you’re fine, but the truth is, something is not right. There’s a kind of low-grade anxiety that never goes away, a numbness under the surface, a quiet sadness you don’t talk about because you don’t have the words for it. You start to wonder, Is this it? Is this what success is supposed to feel like? [02:01.2]

Here’s the twist most people never realize: that heroic mindset, the one that helped you climb so high, is the same mindset that’s keeping you from feeling fulfilled, because it’s built on the belief that you’re never enough, that you have to prove yourself over and over again just to be worthy of rest or love or peace.

But what if there’s another way, a quieter path, one that leads not just to more achievement, but to actual wholeness, not to proving yourself, but to becoming your True Self? This is the path of the sage and it might be the journey your soul has been waiting for.

I’m David Tian. For almost the past two decades, I’ve been helping hundreds of thousands of people from over 87 countries find fulfillment, success and meaning in their personal and professional lives. [02:53.8]

In this episode, I’m going to start with a story that we’ve all been taught, some of us, explicitly, most of us, implicitly. It’s everywhere, in our movies, in childhood books, in graduation speeches, in a lot of business podcasts, and the story goes like this. A lone figure hears a call. Often, it’s a challenge. Sometimes it’s a crisis. He resists it at first, but eventually crosses into the unknown. He fights through obstacles, slays monsters, suffers and grows stronger, and in the end, he emerges, transformed, wiser, more powerful, carrying some kind of reward, and he returns to the world to share that reward, now elevated above who he once was, and then it starts all over again.

That’s the hero’s journey, the monomyth as Joseph Campbell wrote about decades ago. George Lucas used it to structure the Star Wars series and movies. It’s baked into The Matrix, the Batman movies, Marvel movies, Pixar arcs, anime storylines. It’s even in your average TED Talk or startup founder’s origin story. [04:07.6]

But here’s what most people don’t realize—the hero’s journey didn’t just stay in mythology or film. It snuck into how we think about our lives, especially for those of us drawn to achievement. The hero must conquer, must evolve, must prove, and we buy into this early. School teaches us to win gold stars, to compete, to climb. The self-help world tells us to slay our limiting beliefs, crush our fears, dominate our mornings, hack our performance, win the day. Dating advice, same thing, master attraction, close the deal, be high-status. In business, it’s scale, expand, disrupt, dominate, overcome resistance, push past fear. Be the hero in your own story. [04:54.0]

This is the water we’ve been swimming in for years, maybe decades. I know because for most of my life, I’ve tried to live up to this journey of being a hero, and for a time, it works. We learn to fight through discomfort, to perform under pressure, to accomplish what others won’t, and there’s something undeniably energizing about that, even noble. It’s the warrior. But let’s slow down for a moment. What’s this story really saying?

If you peel it back, the hero’s journey rests on a few key assumptions. First, that life is a problem to be solved, something to master, something you must wrestle into submission. Second, that you are not yet enough, not until you’ve suffered, not until you’ve proven your worth, not until you’ve emerged victorious, and third, that meaning comes from what you do, what you win, what you overcome. This story says only through adversity can you become who you’re meant to be, that your identity, your very Self, is something to earn through hardship. [06:07.2]

Now, here’s the question—what happens when the dragons are gone? What happens when there’s no villain anymore to defeat, no mountain to scale, no prize to chase? What happens when you’ve already made the money, or you’ve found the partner or spouse, or you hit the milestone you thought would finally make it all worth it, and yet something still feels empty? Or worse, what if at some point you begin to realize that the dragon you’ve been trying to conquer is actually a part of you.

This is where so many achievers land without knowing how they got there, a sort of quiet crisis, not dramatic, just this persistent, uneasy question, “Why doesn’t this feel better?” because here’s the uncomfortable truth, one that’s hard to face when you’ve built your whole identity around growth and grit—the hero’s journey, as compelling as it is, doesn’t scale well into midlife and beyond. [07:10.3]

It’s a story built for the climb, for the proving ground, for youth, but try to live that story forever and it begins to fracture, because your value can’t always be measured by conquest, because transformation has limits when it’s always tied to adversity, because constantly needing to win eventually becomes exhausting and unfulfilling.

So, here’s a question worth asking, not just as individuals, but as a culture—is this really the path to a good life, not a productive life, not a high-performing life, but a good one? Is endlessly overcoming really what we want or have we been living inside someone else’s myth all along? [08:00.7]

Maybe the problem isn’t that we haven’t worked hard enough to complete the hero’s journey. Maybe the problem is that we’ve never been shown another better path, and maybe that story, while useful for a season of life, is ultimately unsustainable in the long run and was never meant to sustain a long, fulfilling, good life.

So, if the hero’s journey brought you to this point—which is great, it served a purpose—what comes next? For those who sense the heroic story is no longer working, maybe even doing harm now, there’s another path, a quieter one, a slower one, a wiser one. I call it the sage’s journey, and it doesn’t begin with a call to adventure. It begins with a kind of ache, not sharp pain, necessarily, just a subtle restlessness, a sense that something is off, or a kind of emptiness, even if you can’t quite name what it is. [09:03.8]

It’s the moment when the striving starts to feel hollow, when the old rewards don’t land the way they used to, when the next win already feels a little tired before you even get there. This is the first phase, the call to stillness. There’s a line from the Ten Ox-Herding Pictures, the ancient Zen sequence of spiritual development, where the seeker is searching for the ox, but he doesn’t know what the ox looks like yet. He only knows that something is missing. It’s this quiet discomfort. You wake up and realize you’ve been running hard in a direction you never chose. You followed a map that someone else handed you, and now there’s this soft ache in your chest, a whisper that says, “Stop running.” This isn’t a collapse. It’s not a midlife crisis in the dramatic sense. It’s just a deep, steady sense that something is calling you back to yourself, but the direction isn’t forward, it’s inward. [10:05.7]

That brings us to Phase 2, the descent inward. In the hero’s journey, this is usually the place where the hero faces the enemy, crosses into the underworld or battles some external monster. But for the sage, the descent is internal. Instead of confronting a villain, the sage begins to meet the parts of himself he left behind. In Internal Family Systems therapy, we call these protectors and exiles.

The protectors are the parts that keep the show running, the inner critics, the overachievers, the perfectionists, the firefighters. They’re working hard to protect the exiled parts. These are the parts that are the most vulnerable, wounded selves that we buried long ago, and now, instead of powering past them, we turn toward them. Instead of chasing clarity, we sit with confusion. Instead of forcing growth, we begin to listen. [11:04.0]

This is where real shadow work begins, where the stories we told ourselves start to unravel, where we realize that purpose isn’t something we conquer. It’s something that emerges when we’re no longer afraid to feel everything. It’s not glamorous. It’s often lonely, but it’s true and authentic.

There’s an image in the Zen tradition of the seeker finally catching the ox. The ox represents the mind or the True Self, but it’s wild at first. It bucks and pulls and runs, and that’s what happens when we first start to look inward. The inner world feels to us as chaotic, untrained, messy, but with time and patience and compassion, it all shifts—which brings us to phase 3 out of five, the path of cultivation. [12:00.5]

In the Zen ox-herding pictures, this is the moment where the seeker begins to ride the ox home, and eventually, the ox disappears entirely. The struggle quiets. The ego softens. The sage no longer has to fight for presence. It begins to arise naturally. This is a phase of quiet discipline, of daily alignment.

In Daoism, this is where we get to the practice of Wu Wei, non-striving, effortless action, not passive inaction, but instead, flowing with the current rather than against it. In ancient Confucianism, this is xiū shēn, self-cultivation through daily ritual, reflection and virtuous conduct. In Buddhism, this is arriving or getting closer to no self, liberation from identification with our thoughts and cravings and our need for control. [12:58.8]

The sage learns to act from presence instead of performance. There’s nothing left to prove. There’s only the ongoing work of staying in harmony with the way, the dao, and this isn’t something you can perform for others. In fact, the moment you try to show it off, it slips away, because the cultivation is inward, quiet, gentle, and eventually, something remarkable happens, which leads us to Phase 4: return without ego. [13:28.4]

Many high-achievers struggle when it comes to managing their emotions or navigating their relationships, and they hit a wall when it comes to emotional mastery. Maybe you’ve noticed that stress, frustration or anger is seeping into your personal or professional life, or you feel disconnected from those you care about.

That’s where David Tian’s “Emotional Mastery” program comes in. It’s based on peer-reviewed, evidence-backed therapeutic methods to help you find happiness, love and real fulfillment. Learn how to break free from the emotional roller-coaster and start thriving in every area of your life. You can find out more at DavidTianPhD.com/EmotionalMastery. That’s D-A-V-I-D-T-I-A-N-P-H-D [dot] com [slash] emotional mastery.

This is one of my favorite faces, because it flips the hero’s journey on its head. In the heroic story, the return is triumphant. The hero comes back with the boon, a prize. He’s celebrated, crowned, admired, but the sage doesn’t return that way. He or she returns without fanfare, without need for recognition or validation, without even needing to speak much. Their presence speaks for them. [14:49.8]

The sage reenters society not to be a savior or a fixer, but to serve, not with moral superiority, but with open hands. They don’t tell others how to live. They embody what living looks like. They don’t lead by volume. They lead by resonance. In Daoism, this is called de, inner power, not the power of force or domination, but the quiet strength of being deeply aligned with the way.

It’s like the gravity of a mountain. It doesn’t have to do anything to hold presence. It just is. You can sense this inner power or inner charisma in certain people, a kind of settledness, nothing to sell, nothing to hide, not needy. They’re not performing. They’re just here, and this is what happens when the sage forgets himself. 

That brings us to the final phase, the joy of emptiness. In the last of the Zen ox-hurting pictures, the sage returns to the marketplace with bliss-bestowing hands. He’s laughing with the ox. He gives away what he once fought so hard to find, because now he knows it was never about finding the ox. [16:06.1]

The journey was never to arrive somewhere. It was to remember something, that he has always been home, that there’s nowhere to get to.

In Daoism, this is being one with the dao, not in theory, not in concept, not in the abstract, but in how you tie your shoes, how you hold your child, how you move through the grocery store, in the smallest moments of your life. This is where joy shows up, not as a reward, but as a natural consequence of not trying so hard.

Liezi, the great Taoist sage, calls this riding the wind. He described a kind of flow where one no longer exerts effort, no longer pushes, no longer defends itself, and in that lightness, there is freedom. Philip J Ivanhoe wrote about this as unselfconsciousness, not the loss of self-awareness, but the absence of needing to manage how you appear to yourself or others. [17:12.8]

C. S. Lewis made a similar point in a very different context. He once wrote, “Even in literature and art, no man who bothers about originality will ever be original: whereas if you simply try to tell the truth without caring how often it’s been told, you will likely be original without ever noticing.” This is the paradox of presence. The more you focus on yourself, the more rigid and anxious you become. The more you forget yourself, the more fluid and free and in flow you feel.

Zhuang Zhou, the great Daoist sage, understood this well. He wrote about forgetting the Self as the beginning of true happiness. He described the highest human state, not as a god, not as a warrior, but as someone so attuned to the way that their own name no longer matters. [18:05.8]

This isn’t nihilism. It’s not erasing your humanity. It’s the opposite. It’s finally releasing the burden of constantly checking whether you’re doing enough, being enough or appearing enough, and in that release, there is room for play, for joy, for love to naturally emerge, not the kind you earn, not the kind that rises and falls with performance, [but] the kind that flows when there is nothing left to defend. So, the sage doesn’t slay the dragon. He realizes the dragon is an illusion. He lays down his sword and he laughs, and then he walks back into town and buys some fruits and vegetables. [18:54.5]

The sage’s journey isn’t something you add to your to-do list. It’s not something you master through sheer will. It’s a return, a softening, a remembering, and for many achievers, it begins the moment you stop running long enough to hear the question that has been there all along—what if you don’t have to become anything more in order to be deeply, fully, joyfully alive? What if you’ve already arrived, and what if the only thing left is to remember that?

This is the sage’s journey and it’s open to anyone willing to stop striving long enough to feel what’s already here, and this is why the sage’s journey matters now, maybe more than ever, because we live in a world that won’t stop pushing, pushing us to do more, earn more, become more, all under the surface assumption that we’re not already enough. [19:56.7]

The pace never lets up. The feed never ends. The inbox fills as fast as you clear it. There’s always another level to unlock, another benchmark to hit, and it’s easy to confuse that constant motion for progress, to believe that if we just keep going, keep pushing, eventually we’ll arrive. But arrive where? And who gets to decide when you’re finally enough?

The old paradigm said, “Conquer. Overcome. Slay your dragons. Transform yourself through struggle. Be forged by fire,” and that worked for a time. That story has a place, especially for young people. It builds muscle, builds will, builds grit. It got us off the ground. But here’s where that story falters—when it becomes a way of life, because if you live your entire life in battle mode, you never learn to rest. You never learn to feel safe and secure in yourself. You never learn how to be with yourself without trying to fix something. [21:06.1]

Here’s the quiet tragedy hiding beneath high-performance—the more we focus on conquering our dragons, the more we reinforce the belief that we’re broken, that we must fight who we are in order to be whole. But what if the dragon is a part of us, too? What if that fear or that anger, or that part of you that lashes out or pulls back or stays silent, what if that part was trying to protect something, trying to keep you safe?

The sage doesn’t slay the dragon. The sage listens to it, learns from it, and in time, tames it, not through force, but through understanding and compassion—and then something beautiful happens. The dragon stops being a threat. It becomes part of the family. It takes its place in a larger, more integrated whole. This is what we miss when we cling too tightly to the hero’s myth. [22:10.0]

We think our pain needs to be eliminated, that our flaws must be erased, that peace will only come once we’ve won some final victory. But true peace doesn’t come at the end of war. It comes when the fighting stops. It comes when we no longer fear our own hearts and minds.

The hero’s myth or journey got you here, but if you’ve listened to this this far, maybe you’re starting to feel what I’m pointing toward. That story, the heroic one, served you once, but now it’s hurting you. The sage’s journey is what comes next. This isn’t weakness, it isn’t defeat, and it doesn’t mean giving up on excellence, leadership or ambition. It’s a shift in how you relate to yourself. It’s a deeper strength, a kind of clarity that doesn’t depend on winning, a kind of courage that’s rooted in love, not fear. [23:16.5]

The truth is, this path was always here. wWe just couldn’t hear it over the sound of the fight. Now we can—and maybe that’s the real call, one that doesn’t demand a leap or a battle cry, but something much harder, a willingness to slow down and listen, to let go of the story that says you have to earn your place in the world, because you already belong, and if you’re willing to stop chasing for just a moment, you might begin to feel it. [23:54.5]

So, here’s the invitation. If any part of you resonated with this, if some quiet part of you whispered, “Yes,” while I was describing the sage’s journey, then pause with me for a second and ask yourself which journey are you still on. Are you still trying to chase dragons, still fighting to be enough, still trying to earn the right to rest, or are you starting to hear that quieter voice, the one that doesn’t need you to prove anything, but just wants you to come home?

This is the Crossroads many achievers never realize they’ve reached. They just keep climbing, because that’s what they’ve always done, until one day they look around and realize they’re not even sure what they’re climbing anymore or why. This is where the sage’s journey can begin. 

If you want to walk that path, if you’re ready to stop living inside a myth that no longer fits, this is the kind of work we do inside my small-group coaching programs and in my private advisory work. It’s not therapy, but it’s deeply therapeutic. It’s not a mastermind per se, but it will challenge you. [25:10.3]

It’s a space where we slow down, where we listen inward, where we meet the parts of you that got left behind while you were busy becoming successful, and we do the real work together, the kind of work that doesn’t just upgrade your mindset, but actually softens the armor, because you don’t need it anymore, so you can lead from your core, connect from your presence, and finally, rest and enjoy without guilt.

So, here’s a prompt for you just to start. Grab your journal or your notes app, if that’s easier, and write down this question. “What part of me is still chasing a dragon that no longer exists?” Write whatever comes up, no filter, no judgment, just notice, and if what comes up feels raw or confusing, or even painful, that’s okay. That’s how the deeper truth usually shows up. We don’t run from it. We stay. We listen, and in time, that’s how the path opens.

If you want to take that next step with me, check the show notes or send me a message, or don’t. Just keep listening, because you’re already on the path and you’re not walking it alone.Thanks so much for listening. Until next time, David Tian, signing out. [26:38.6]