A hero’s journey starts with a call to adventure, something the hero sets out to achieve. This call to adventure is often a problem that arises (and that cannot be avoided) or an invitation to do something exciting.

In the second half of the 1940s, a man named Joseph Campbell analyzed the journeys of the hero in ancient myths. He found that the hero followed a common pattern in all these myths. He found this so compelling that he wrote a book about it called “The Hero with a Thousand Faces.”

The book became a worldwide success, inspiring many like George Lucas and Christopher Vogler. Vogler had attended the same school as Lucas. While he worked at the Walt Disney Studios in the 1990s, he was developing a secret code for generating movie stories based on Campbell’s work. He wrote a 7-page memo and distributed it amongst his colleagues. It was picked up by Jeffrey Katzenberg, chairman of Walt Disney Studios, and used in the movie The Lion King.

What had started as a memo, ended in a book called “The Writer’s Journey: Mythic Structure for Writers.” In it, Vogler identifies the 12 parts and three acts that form the basis of almost any (good) story.

Below is a representation of Christopher Vogler’s model:

Now, imagine that the UX designer is the hero of the story. She started working as a UX designer in the early 2000s. The first task she did for an ad agency was to translate whatever they had on paper to the web. She taught herself the skills to program in HTML and to turn her static screen design into an interactive web design.

As code took on a severe shape, she had to choose to continue as a designer or become a developer. Although she knew programming was the safe bet, she chose the first.