Joseph Campbell was a scholar of mythology, religion, and literature, best known for articulating what later came to be called the hero’s journey — the underlying narrative pattern shared across myths, religions, and modern stories across cultures and centuries. His work went on to influence writers, filmmakers, and artists in ways most people now absorb without ever realizing where it came from.

But long before any of that… before Hollywood, before bestsellers, before cultural influence… there was a moment that looked, from the outside, like failure.

In 1929, Campbell was enrolled in a PhD program at Columbia University. He had just returned from studying medieval literature in Europe, and what he came back with was not clarity, but a problem. The questions pulling at him could not survive inside a single discipline. Mythology, psychology, religion, art, and literature all needed to be in conversation at once — not as side interests, not as electives, but as one integrated inquiry.

When he explained this to his advisors, they did what institutions are designed to do. They told him to choose.

That wasn’t how doctoral programs worked. You picked a lane. You specialized. You narrowed your focus until it fit neatly inside an existing structure.

Campbell walked away.

Not because he had a better plan. But because choosing a path would have required him to abandon the question.

The Discipline of Not Collapsing the Question

What followed didn’t look strategic. It didn’t look responsible. And it certainly didn’t look like progress.

Campbell spent years reading. Not toward a degree. Not toward a job. Not toward a publication. He read because he was tracking something he couldn’t yet name — patterns that appeared across cultures, eras, and traditions that were never meant to touch.

He read mythology from the East and West. Psychology. Religion. Art. Literature. Stories separated by continents and centuries, stacked on top of each other without hierarchy.

This wasn’t drifting.
It was restraint.

• The restraint to not force clarity too early.
• The restraint to not turn curiosity into a résumé line.
• The restraint to tolerate not knowing what the outcome would be.

That kind of restraint doesn’t get rewarded much.

Why This Runs Against Everything We’re Taught

We live in systems that privilege decisiveness. Direction. Articulated paths. We’re encouraged to explain where we’re going before we fully understand what we’re asking. Open questions are treated as liabilities. Unfinished thinking is treated as weakness.

But staying with a question is not passive.

It requires:

• resisting premature answers
• refusing to specialize before integration has occurred
• letting uncertainty sharpen perception instead of shutting it down

Campbell didn’t discover the hero’s journey because he followed a roadmap. He discovered it because he lingered where others would have been advised to move on.

The insight didn’t come from speed.
It came from saturation.

The Long Delay We Rarely Account For

Even after Campbell eventually organized his thinking into The Hero with a Thousand Faces, nothing dramatic happened. The book was published. It circulated quietly. It sat with scholars. It did not reshape culture overnight.

Decades passed.

There was no external validation telling him those years of reading had been “worth it.” No feedback loop. No reassurance. Just the slow, often invisible work of letting an idea live long enough to mature.

It wasn’t until much later — when filmmakers like George Lucas openly credited Campbell’s framework — that the cultural impact became visible.

That delay matters.

Because we’ve grown impatient with work that doesn’t announce its value immediately. We want confirmation early. Proof while we’re still deciding. Assurance that we’re “on the right path” before the work has had time to do its deeper work on us.

Campbell’s life suggests a different order.

Sometimes the path doesn’t reveal itself until the question has been lived with long enough to change you.

What This Leaves Me Sitting With

Not every question deserves endless contemplation. But some questions are foundational. Identity-shaping. World-altering. And those questions don’t respond well to pressure.

They ask for patience, and stamina…and a willingness to be misunderstood for a while.

Staying with the question isn’t avoidance.
It’s devotion.

And in a culture obsessed with direction, staying long enough to let a question earn its shape may be one of the most disciplined acts we have left.

Strategic Reflection Prompt

What question are you being asked to stay with right now… and where might you be choosing a path too quickly simply to relieve the discomfort of not knowing yet?

About Giselle

I’m Giselle Hudson — writer, possibility thinker, musician, Organization & People Development Sensemaker™, and MCODE Legacy Coach. I help leaders and soul-driven professionals decode the deeper patterns shaping their business, work, identities, and results especially when it look like a performance issue but it’s really misalignment in disguise.

If something in your life or business feels off and you can’t quite name it, message me. Sometimes one conversation is all it takes to see what’s really going on.