Byrne Rhonda - Hero (The Secret)

Lastly, the idea for Hero came through a flash of insight that I received one evening, and so my deepest gratitude to the Universe and the Universal Mind for inspiring me with such a special project, and for guiding me through every step of its journey to its creation on planet Earth.

This book is about a story. It’s a story that changed my life, and throughout history has changed the lives of many other human beings. This story has been told since the beginning of time. It has appeared in different forms in every culture and country of the world, but the essence of the story always remains the same. The story is about a hero who undertakes a courageous journey on planet Earth.

The setting of planet Earth is an exquisitely beautiful one – filled with vast oceans, mountains, jungles, breathtaking coastlines, sweeping plains, and spectacular animals and creatures of every kind – and along with the beauty of the natural world is all of the joy that is experienced by the human beings who inhabit it. But as the hero discovers, life is also very challenging for human beings on earth. Growth is painful, from childhood to adolescence, adulthood, and eventual old age, and there are the experiences of physical suffering, poverty, and grief, and eventual death for everyone.

There is both joy and suffering on planet Earth because this beautiful world is a world of duality – a world of opposites. There is an opposite side to everything. There’s light and there’s darkness, near and far, up and down, left and right, hot and cold, and these opposites are experienced at every level of life. There are friends and enemies, falling in love and falling out of love, security and uncertainty, wealth and poverty, bliss and despair, and in every human there are positive and negative qualities. On planet Earth, everything has its opposite.

And it’s this world with its equal potential for great joy, great love, great challenges, and great suffering that you wanted to come to. It’s you who wanted to come here and experience the adventure of living in such a beautiful but challenging place. It’s you who were determined that there was no difficulty so great it would stop you from discovering the hero within you. It’s you who wanted to take the Hero’s Journey… for you are the hero of this story.

You are not left unequipped when you undertake the Hero’s Journey. You were born with immensely powerful abilities within you that would enable you to realize your dreams and overcome every trial, obstacle, and challenge you would encounter. But in being born into the limited material world of planet Earth, your mind and consciousness became limited too, which meant you wouldn’t remember your true nature, and you wouldn’t remember the powerful abilities within you. You would have to discover them for yourself.

Only through completing the Hero's Journey and allowing your highest human qualities to arise within you will you finally become the hero. And then a new purpose will overtake your heart – to help those who are beginning their own Hero’s Journey, with everything you discovered on the path.

The people you’re about to meet have already taken their Hero’s Journey. They’ve come together from all over the world to share their stories and everything they experienced to help you begin your own Hero’s Journey.

Liz Murray – from the United States of America

Liz Murray was born to drug-addicted parents and grew up in poverty in New York City. After her mother died and her father went into a shelter when Liz was a teenager, she found herself homeless. Liz hadn’t finished school, was sleeping in stairwells, and shoplifting food to survive, but it was at that time that a dream was born within her to attend Harvard University. Four years later Liz fulfilled her dream, and through sharing her story she has gone on to become a best-selling author and one of the most sought-after motivational speakers in the world.

G. M. Rao – from India

G. M. Rao grew up in a small village in India with no electricity and no telephones, where residents had to line up for their quota of supplies. Despite failing his first attempt at his junior high exams, Mr. Rao wanted to go into business so that he could settle down one day with a small business and a nice house. Luckily, he also stayed very open to opportunities that came his way. From his initial business of a jute mill, Mr. Rao gradually expanded his businesses until today his huge empire includes power plants, development of airports and highways, and urban development.

Laird Hamilton – from the United States of America

Laird Hamilton grew up in a broken home in Hawaii. Feeling excluded and discriminated against and realizing he needed to grow up fast, he set out to prove himself as a surfer and go where no surfer had gone before. His extreme adventures in and out of the water led to many serious injuries, broken bones, and being lost at sea on numerous occasions, yet Laird Hamilton still realized his dream to break the limits of what was possible and went on to become one of the greatest big-wave surfers the world has seen.

Anastasia Soare – from Romania

Anastasia Soare and her young family fled Communist Romania at the height of the Cold War, seeking a better life. She arrived in Los Angeles without money or the ability to speak English and worked fourteen-hour days in a beauty salon. When Anastasia realized that nothing was going to change in her life until she changed what she was doing, she decided to start her own business – in Beverly Hills. Anastasia experienced instant success with her unique method of shaping eyebrows, and over the years has turned the art of eyebrow shaping into a national and global empire.

Paul Orfalea – from the United States of America

Paul Orfalea struggled through his school years with severe dyslexia and ADHD. Though essentially unable to read, Paul held the ambition to build a company bigger than IBM. To overcome his literacy challenges Paul developed a keen sense of observation, and while standing in a line one day this skill enabled Paul to see a need – for cheap printing and photocopying. From that one idea, Kinko’s was born, which eventually grew into a billion-dollar photocopying company.

Peter Burwash – from Canada

Peter Burwash was a young ice hockey player when a heavy collision left him lying on the ice with his lower body paralyzed. He vowed that if he walked away from that, he would give up hockey forever. True to his word, when he was able to stand up an hour later, Peter packed his bags and set out to become a tennis professional. While he never became a top-ranking tennis player, Peter did go on to become one of the most revered tennis coaches of all time and to build the largest tennis management company in the world.

Mastin Kipp – from the United States of America

Mastin Kipp had the world at his feet as one of the youngest junior executives in the Los Angeles music industry. But an escalating drug and alcohol habit eventually led to the greatest shock of his life; Mastin was fired. After losing everything materially but gaining in wisdom, Mastin set about reinventing himself, and has since become an inspirational blogger and writer through his rapidly growing website, email, and Twitter account, The Daily Love.

Pete Carroll – from the United States of America

Pete Carroll dreamed of doing only one thing with his life – playing sports and having a career playing professionally. But that dream was cut short when he failed to make the grade in the National Football League. It left Pete with no idea what he would do with his skills or his life – until he realized that his dream could still come true, but in a way he’d never thought of. Pete became a football coach, and although his journey of professional coaching was full of ups and downs, he emerged to become one of the most inspirational American football coaches of all time, and was recently awarded the NFC coach of the year of the Seattle Seahawks.