The Hero’s Journey in Paris: The Power of Your Story
Two and a Half Day Leadership Journey in Paris
by Peter de Kuster
Your story is your life. As human beings, we continually tell ourselves stories — of success or failure, of power or victimhood — stories that endure for an hour, a day, or an entire lifetime. We have stories about our work, our families and relationships, our health, our friendships, our happiness. Yet too few of us recognize that we’re telling these stories, or that we could tell a different one.
For decades I’ve asked people one opening question, and I’ll ask it of you before we take a single step:
In which areas of my life is it clear that I cannot achieve my goals with the story I’ve got?
This is not a classroom question. It’s a walking one. Over two and a half days in Paris, we take that question into the streets, and let real Parisian lives — writers, scientists, exiles, statesmen, resistance fighters — show us what it looks like when a story finally gets rewritten. Each half-day carries one of the five subjects almost every dysfunctional story hides inside: business, family, health, friendship, happiness.
Introduction
I am Peter de Kuster, founder of The Hero’s Journey and The Heroine’s Journey. It took a near-death experience to show me what I wanted to do with the rest of my life: help people discover, shape and rewrite the story they’re telling themselves. Lying in a hospital bed, all the plans and deadlines that had once felt urgent simply fell away, and one question remained: what story do I want to tell with the rest of my life?
We are wired to tell stories — our brains take whatever we encounter, however random, and impose chronology and cause on it, because “it just happened” is never an explanation we accept. A story is our creation of a reality, and our story matters more than what actually happened. Since our destiny follows our stories, getting the story right is not a soft, sentimental exercise. It’s the most consequential editing work most of us will ever do — and never do.
That editing work is what these two and a half days are for.
Day 1 (Morning). That’s Your Story? — Île de la Cité and Notre-Dame
We begin where Paris itself begins, on the small island in the Seine where the city’s oldest stones stand.
Victor Hugo wrote his great novel of this cathedral while living in a kind of exile from his own contentment. By the time he wrote it, he had already buried a daughter, Léopoldine, who drowned in the Seine at nineteen — a loss he spent the rest of his life writing around, without ever writing directly through it. Decades later, forced into actual political exile for opposing Napoleon III, he kept working from the Channel Islands, further from Paris than he had ever been, producing some of his greatest work in rooms he never chose to be in. Hugo’s private letters from those years read like the raw first draft I ask every client to write here on Day One — furious, grieving, unresolved — long before they ever become the polished, purposeful story eventually told to the world.
Ask yourself, standing before these towers, the same question I ask on the first morning of every journey:
In which areas of my life is it clear that I cannot achieve my goals with the story I’ve got?
Don’t answer diplomatically. Write the ugly first draft — the one only you will read — before you try to write the one anyone else will hear.
Day 1 (Afternoon). Your Story Around Work — The Maison de Balzac
Walk to the quiet house in Passy where Honoré de Balzac hid from his own creditors under a false name while producing, at a pace that still astonishes biographers, dozens of novels and stories over barely twenty years.
Balzac’s relationship to his work was total, and not entirely healthy. He wrote through the night by candlelight, reportedly drinking enormous quantities of coffee — by some accounts fifty cups a day in his final years — collapsing into a few hours of sleep before starting again. Deeply in debt for most of his adult life, he treated writing less as a calling than as a machine he had to keep feeding, chapter after chapter, simply to stay ahead of the people he owed money to. He died at fifty-one, his body worn down by decades of exactly the punishing schedule that had also made him one of the greatest novelists France ever produced. His work never stopped being brilliant. His presence in his own life, by the end, had become something closer to what I call presenteeism — the body still at the desk, the story behind the effort long since reduced to survival.
Ask yourself here: is your relationship to your work a joy or a burden, a calling or an addiction? If money were no obstacle, which five things about your work would you keep doing anyway — and which would you let go the moment you no longer had to prove anything to anyone?
Day 2 (Morning). Your Story Around Health and Family — Père Lachaise and the Baudelaire Grave, Montparnasse
Health, first. Walk to Père Lachaise Cemetery and find the grave of Frédéric Chopin, who arrived in Paris in his early twenties already showing the first signs of the tuberculosis that would eventually kill him at thirty-nine. For nearly two decades he kept composing and performing through worsening health he rarely discussed openly, even with close friends, pushing through recitals and lessons on days he could barely stand. His illness shaped the music itself — some of his most delicate, interior pieces were written in periods when he had the least physical strength to spare. He is buried here; his heart, at his own request, was returned to Warsaw, so that even in death his story remained divided between the health he spent and the homeland he never fully returned to.
Ask yourself: what value have you actually placed on your own health, measured not by what you say but by what you do? If your current path continues unchanged, what condition will you likely be in five years from now — and is that an ending you would accept for someone you loved?
Family, next. Walk south to Montparnasse Cemetery, to the grave of Charles Baudelaire, buried, at his stepfather’s insistence, in the same plot as the man he had spent most of his adult life in open conflict with. Baudelaire’s father died when he was five; his mother remarried a rigid army general, Jacques Aupick, within two years, and the relationship between stepson and stepfather never recovered. Baudelaire spent much of his life financially dependent on the family he resented, alternately begging his mother for money and raging against the respectable household that had, in his eyes, never really made room for who he actually was. Even his own choice of burial plot was decided by the family he’d spent decades trying to separate himself from.
Ask yourself: is the story you’re currently living with your family — parents, children, partner, siblings — actually taking you where you want to go? If it isn’t, what is the story you tell yourself to explain why you keep tolerating it?
Day 2 (Afternoon). Your Story Around Friendship — La Closerie des Lilas
Walk south to the café at the edge of the Luxembourg Gardens where, in the 1920s, a loose circle of American and European writers gathered most evenings, arguing, drinking, and reading each other’s unfinished pages aloud.
Ernest Hemingway wrote some of his earliest published work at these tables, and it was here, by his own later account, that he first showed pages of a new writer’s manuscript to friends, and where friendships were made and occasionally, painfully, unmade — his own account of his falling-out with F. Scott Fitzgerald, written years afterward with real tenderness alongside real resentment, remains one of the most honest depictions in literature of how a real friendship can hold both admiration and rivalry at once, sometimes in the very same sentence.
Ask yourself, sitting at one of these tables: how fully engaged are you with the friends you already have — not how often you see them, but what you’re actually like when you’re together? If close friendship matters to you and isn’t happening, what is the story you tell yourself that keeps it from happening anyway?
Day 3 (Morning). Your Story About Happiness — and the Purpose Behind It
Happiness, first. Walk to Shakespeare and Company at dusk, close to the hour when, in one of the most affectionate modern films ever made about this city, a disillusioned writer wandering these very streets finds himself collected at midnight by an old car and carried backward into the Paris of his imagination. The film is gentle comedy, but the story underneath it is a familiar one: a man convinced that real happiness must belong to some other era, some other version of his life, anywhere except the one he is actually standing in. It takes the whole story for him to realize that the nostalgia itself was the trap — that a life spent waiting for the right moment to be happy in is a life that keeps the present permanently on hold.
Ask yourself: how would you honestly rate your happiness over the last six months? Is that an acceptable answer? What is the story you tell yourself about why greater happiness isn’t happening yet?
Purpose, to close. Walk down to the great domed building where France buries the citizens it has decided to honor as heroes, and find the memorial to Jean Moulin, the Resistance leader who unified France’s fractured underground movements under a single command during the German occupation, working under forged papers and constant threat of discovery. In 1943 he was captured, interrogated and tortured by the Gestapo in Lyon; he died from his injuries without ever revealing what he knew. His ashes were brought to this building in 1964, in a ceremony whose eulogy — delivered by the writer André Malraux — is still remembered as one of the most powerful ever given in this country.
Nobody was paying Moulin to take that risk. There was no fortune large enough that could have talked him into it if love of his country hadn’t already made the decision for him. That’s the real version of an old thought experiment I use with almost every client: offer most people a fortune to walk a narrow plank between two rooftops, high above a city street, and very few will move. Tell them someone or something they love is on the other side, and the same plank becomes impossible to refuse. Moulin’s story simply proves it happened, in this city, for real. A story without purpose has no organizing center; nothing in it is truly worth the risk. A story with one — genuine purpose, not merely ambition — makes people do things that look, from the outside, almost impossible.
Standing before his memorial, ask yourself plainly: what is the purpose that would make you cross the plank? Not the purpose you’d claim at a dinner party — the one you would actually risk something real for. Everything else in your story only holds together once you know the answer.
Testdrive your story. Take the steps to make it real. Go out and walk.
Make your hero’s journey.
Practical Info
The Power of Your Story — Two and a Half Days in Paris
€4,950 excluding VAT per person
The price includes the complete two-and-a-half-day journey and personal guidance from Peter de Kuster through each of the locations and reflections above. Travel and accommodation are not included, so that you remain free to choose how you travel and where you stay in Paris.
You can reach Peter with questions about dates and the program by mailing him at peterdekuster2023@gmail.com
— Peter de Kuster