Back at the start of 2001, I felt like I was on top of the world. Having previously built communities online around video games for fun in my spare time, I was now a Senior Web Developer and Community Architect for a local web firm building online community hubs for some of the largest computer game publishers on the planet at the time, like Sierra, Activision, and Konami.
By the end of 2001 though, the dot-com bubble had burst and I was standing on the street corner without a job and a box of my belongings at my feet. It felt like a great cataclysm had shaken my life and turned it upside down, leaving me lying within a deep crevice that I felt like I couldn’t get out of.
Extremely frustrated and angry with how people were treated and disposed of so easily in the aftermath of this and also grieving at the life I had lost, I felt like the conventional concept of work wasn’t working for me anymore and there had to be a better way.
Over the next couple of decades, I began researching The Future of Work, social innovation, creativity, and vertical development, with each helping me to delve deeper and deeper into what was needed to make this change and step into not just a whole new world of work but a whole new way of being.
During this adventure, as I was learning this newer knowledge, I started noticing synchronicities between it and my past experiences building and cultivating communities online around video games. At first, I couldn’t understand what they fully meant or what I was supposed to do with them. But finally after reflecting upon the Hero’s Journey and its deeper psychological significance, I realized that these synchronicities were revealing deeper truths about life but using role-playing game terminology to do so, just like the Hero’s Journey did.