Encouragement For Heroes | Trevor Hightower

Trevor: I'm Trevor Hightower, and I found out that from the store, that amazing store that was set up, I'm actually wearing a a woman's pullover. And I'm rocking it, by the way. I just wanna thank you. That might be the best laugh I get all day. I've always wanted to be in a footrace after someone stole something from me.

Okay? So the way that I envision this was I'd be walking down a busy street in, like, New York City with my wife. And the said perpetrator, let's call him the perp, comes up from behind and steals my wife's purse. And then my wife looks up to me and winks at me and whispers, this is your time. And then I know it's my time.

And I and I see as I slow motion turn, I see the perp running and he makes a strategic error because he heads down the wrong way. So I know that if I head down this alley, which I do, I start sprinting down the alley, and then I hit him from the side and the contents of the purse explode everywhere. And there's like an audience that claps for me in a 1940 style police car that picks up the perpetrator, and then I hand my purse the purse back to my wife. That's the way that I always envisioned it. And, like, so so much so that, like, I I'd be walking with my wife and I wonder, like, is this the time?

Is this, like, is this the moment? And then I had my moment. Okay? So I'm in Barcelona with my wife, and, we just got done having some tapas and some wine. And, I say, hey.

Let's go down this romantic, dark alley that no one is in. And, it seemed like a good idea. And these 4 gentlemen approach, and they ask for directions. And, you know, being in Barcelona for the first time for 24 hours, I I naturally give them directions. And, and then they turn and go away.

They're very nice. And then my wife turns to me and goes, do you have your wallet? And to my great and utter joy, I did not have my wallet. And so I still remember. I I, like, turned in slow motion, and I had my foot race.

And a story that to this day has been embellished over time and grown like a fishing story, I did get the wallet back, and I had my foot race. Thank you. Thank you. What I never wanted nor expected was that I would be alone, isolated, at the end of my rope in a in a hotel room. And, I'd just taken my the 5th Adderall that I had in my prescription, which this medication I was abusing.

And I the company that I had started was coming to an end, and I couldn't figure out how to keep it alive. And I was feverishly working on a slide deck that I thought was gonna help, win a client and another deck that was I thought was gonna help raise capital. And I was utterly in despair. And this was an abyss of my hero's journey. There's a few things that I wanna convince each of you of in this room today, and that is each of you are a hero on a journey, that each of you will need encouragement to go through your abysses in life, and that all of us need your encouragement.

And if I can convince you of these truths, and I can convince you of one more truth, and that is that you are most qualified to help the person that you used to be. You're most qualified to help the person who's gone through the abyss that you've gone through, and that is the essence of the hero's journey. So, I'm not a Superman guy. I don't really like those movies. I don't like the Marvel movies.

Now, like, give me Frodo. Like, give me Katniss. Give me Harry. Like, in the movies and the stories that I love, the hero has to become. You know, the the hero is going through a journey, is becoming someone better, someone different, someone more true.

And that's we love those type of stories because, we those are the stories that we all live. And Joseph Campbell calls these stories the monomyth. And from, you know, the divine comedy of Dante to Lucas' Star Wars, these are the stories that capture our hearts and our imaginations. And the arc is fairly simple. It's that you have a hero, who is leaves home on a call to an adventure.

Immediately, because they leave home on this call, they encounter toil and struggle and difficulty. They encounter like hearted friends. I love that Brent mentioned that this morning, that if you could do nothing else in this trip but to find a like hearted friend, it's going to be really good for you. They find like hearted friends who are living in the same direction as them. They encounter an enemy who is their opposition to all that they need to become.

They go through an abyss. And then just when they think it's going to be, something insurmountable, then they have unforeseen grace that Tolkien calls a eucatastrophe, and then they end up back where they can pass on their earned strength to others. And we know these stories, and we love these stories because they're our stories. So that, the hero's journey assumes that the good, the true, and the beautiful are reality. So we we know that it's not good for Shmigle to become Gollum.

We just know that. Right? And we we know it's good for Strider to become King Aragon. And the same thing with our journeys. Our journeys are towards who are becoming more true and more good.

And that's the case over and over and over again through our life as we live multiple heroes' journeys in our life. So let's go through each stage. To each of you heroes, I'm going to address you heroes in the room, and let's walk through each of the stage and how they apply. So you start from stasis. You start from home.

And home is not where you need to stay because you need to grow. If we're not growing, then we're dying. And so you're hearing something if you're in this stage that something needs to change, something needs to occur. And we're gonna wanna avoid that call so that we are gonna need guides in our life, Guides who have gone on and live the hero's journey and then are able to prompt us and help us say yes to our call, our call to an adventure. Now, you wouldn't be at Main Street Summit unless you had accepted multiple calls in your life.

And these are calls towards starting a company, towards getting married, towards adoption, towards restoration and redemption, towards healing, and to fighting. And it is good and right, and you should accept the call. But immediately when you accept that call, you're gonna encounter struggle. It's gonna happen. And we shouldn't be surprised by this because it's only in struggle where we grow, and we've gone from our old world to this new world.

And in this new world, everything's upside down, and everything's different, and it's hard. And we're going to need friends. We're gonna need companions. We're gonna need those who want us to complete our journey as much, if not more, than we do. And when you find these friends, and a few of these friends are here right now in this room, you if they're you have a like hearted friend who wants you to complete your heroic journeys.

You sign a treaty with that friend, and when they're at war, you're at war. And I hope, and I they might one of my hopes for you is that you have friends. If you don't have friends, you find them here. And you have friends for your journey. Because you're going to have an enemy.

You're going to have an enemy that is in opposition to everything that you want to become and need to become. And he's dead set against you becoming who you're meant to be. And this is really hard because in a room this size, many of you are going through abysses right now. And abysses suck. I mean, they they're the worst.

And you know it's an abyss if you can't see the light out. If you don't have hope, then you know you're actually in an abyss. But here's what I need to encourage you with, friends. In the abyss is where we're earning the strength that we can then impart to and encourage others. It's the most important part of the hero's journey that you hold on.

You hold on through the abyss to get to what Tolkien calls eucatastrophe or calls redemption. And this is unforeseen grace. This is that moment where you are out and it leads you to then be able to pass your earned strength onto others. So I think it's really important that you understand that because in your abyss, you're going to need encouragement. Like, you are going to need encouragement.

And it's good that we define our terms of what encouragement is. And so Trevor's definition is encouragement is 100% grace, 1 or 100 percent truth, where grace is what can be, you see what can be, And truth is you see what is. And so like anything incredibly complex, you can explain it in a 2 by 2. And all grace and no truth is coddling. It's this this is a big problem in our culture right now.

Coddling is why the first episode of American Idol is always so funny, because those kids have been told that only what can be and not what is. And you need to really be careful not to be coddled. We all know trolls. And, like, no grace and no truth, that's a Twitter troll. And you avoid trolls like the plague.

You have no room in your life for someone who has no capacity for grace and no capacity for truth. You cut them out of your life. You have to be very careful of all truth and no grace. Someone who can cast eyes, who can see what is, but you need to be very careful and eat the fish, spit out the bones with someone in your life who can't tell you what is going to be. That's not a that's not a companion you want on your journey.

And so what we need is encouragement. Equal part truth, equal part grace. It's a let me paint the example this way. If you are diagnosed with cancer, you you're in that doctor's office, and you're walking out. I don't care if you're Tony Robbins, If you haven't gone through the heroic journey of chemo and thinking about what you're gonna say to your kids and that entire journey, then that is the person that has unique authority and unique power to encourage you.

So, this is really important because each of you have gone through your own heroic journeys. Each of you have gone through unique abysses, and you have unique authority and unique power to provide encouragement to others, to us, and we need it. So, what's incredibly important is that the big lie that we believe is that our our disqualification, like, our trials and our abysses are disqualifying for us. And that could not be farther from the truth. Right?

They're actually what qualify us most to provide unique strength and power to others, encouragement to others. And, that's certainly the story with my abysses. So I had to close my company. It was gut wrenching. I'm a people pleaser.

My identity was in this company that I started. I had to, a big part of me had to die in closing that company. And I'm telling you, like, if you're in that spot now or you're going through that, I'm your guy. Like, text me on the app. Like, I'm your guy.

Like, I don't wanna go all Tom Cruise on Adderall, but, like, if that's a substance that is taking life from you and not giving life to you, I'm your guy. Like, text me. Like, I can encourage you. I can give you grace and truth. If you have a family member with mental illness, like, my dad is my hero.

He had bipolar, schizophrenia. Like, I've gone through that heroic journey. Like, I'm uniquely qualified to help you. And as such is the case for each of you in the abysses that you've gone through in your own heroic journeys. So, I'm gonna end with an encouragement to each of you.

It's only appropriate. And it's this. And I promise you don't read this next sentence and feel like it's striped. Because it's not. It's actually really important and profound.

And the only reason I can give it is because I need it, and I need to understand it every day. And it's that all things work together for good. And this is not saying that it's gonna be silver lining and Pollyanna and just put on a happy face. It's saying that our heroic journeys are not what we would choose, but they're exactly what we need. It's the formation of us to become who we're meant to be, more good, more true, more beautiful.

And that is what it means by saying all things work together for good. It doesn't make the abysses less horrible. They're horrible. And it doesn't mean that things are going to turn out exactly the way that you want it. But it means that who you're becoming is actually the most important part.

So, heroes in this room, hear me at this. May each of you answer amazing calls to adventure. May they be incredible start companies, start families. May they be redemptive and restorative. And the and and may they be brave.

You have to be courageous to answer that call. And may you deal well and with diligence and conviction when you hit the struggle. And may each of you find friends, like hearted friends who are along you with you the journey who want the same thing that you want. And may you walk with them. And may you defy your enemy who's dead set against it.

Defy your enemy. And hold on through the abysses. Hold on through your abyss. Because I promise you, that is where your unique strength is being formed. Because you catastrophes coming, and you're gonna be able to pass on that earned strength to heroes who are just behind you.

And that is a great story. Thank you.

This transcript was generated with Transistor AI