The 9-Stage Hero’s Journey For Leadership Storytelling

Extractive Summary of the Article | Read | Listen

When 60 Minutes interviewed NVIDIA CEO Jensen Huang, they didn’t meet the head of the world’s first $5 trillion company at its gleaming new headquarters. Instead, they met at a nearby Denny’s, where Huang’s journey began.  Huang recognizes a good setting because he’s a storyteller at heart. Huang told Wired Magazine that he didn’t sell the idea of NVIDIA from a pitch deck. “It was really about telling a story,” he said.  

The ability to tell a compelling story is a crucial skill for today’s leaders who need to clarify complex information, win support for their ideas, and align teams around ambitious goals.

Storytelling is a skill anyone can learn.  In his advanced communication classes for global executives at Harvard, the author introduces a framework called The Hero’s Journey, adapted slightly to make it easier for business professionals to follow.

In the 1940s, mythologist Joseph Campbell uncovered a common pattern that heroic stories follow across time and cultures: an ordinary person accepts a challenge, faces tests along the way, and is transformed by what they learn.  Filmmakers and storytellers like Star Wars director George Lucas and screenwriters Christopher Vogler and Blake Snyder later adapted it for modern cinema. At Harvard, we condense it to nine stages for anyone who wants to build a blockbuster business pitch that inspires and persuades.

9 Stages of The Hero’s Journey for Leaders

1. Ordinary World.  Most great stories start in an ordinary setting. It makes the story relatable and provides insight into the hero’s values. That’s why Huang often shares the story of his first job, cleaning dishes and clearing tables at Denny’s.  “I washed the living daylights out of the dishes,” Huang told Stanford business students. “And then they promoted me to busboy. I’m certain I was the best busboy Denny’s ever had. No task was beneath me.”
2. The Catalyst.  A catalyst or ‘inciting incident’ is absolutely required to kick off the adventure. If Luke Skywalker never sees Princess Leia’s hidden message, there’s no Star Wars and no multi-billion-dollar franchise.  Think of the catalyst as the moment when you realized the status quo was no longer good enough.  For Huang, the catalyst was meeting two former co-workers at, you guessed it—Denny’s. His friends proposed an ambitious plan to start their own company.
3. The Debate.  Since most people get comfortable with the status quo, a hero should show relatable human impulses like hesitating before making the leap into the unknown.  It’s natural for people to go back and forth before making a big decision. Huang was no different and was reluctant to join his friends. “I was gainfully employed and happy doing what I was doing,” Huang said on the podcast Crucible Moments. “I told them I’d wish them well.”
4. Crossing the Threshold.  Once the hero decides to take the leap into the unknown, there’s no turning back.  Huang eventually decided to take the courageous step of leaving the safety of a steady paycheck, even though he had two young children at the time. But he didn’t take the leap blindly.  “I believed in my co-founders, and I believed in myself,” Huang told students at the Haas School of Business at UC Berkeley. “The only thing that really matters is, are you going to love the people that you work with, and are you going to love the work that you’re going to do?”  This stage raises the stakes and encourages audiences to lean in. They’re invested in what happens next.
5. Fun and Games.  This is the stage where momentum starts to build, the time when leaders look back in disbelief at the crazy events they experienced.  Huang often gets a laugh when he reminds audiences that NVIDIA’s strategy to make graphics chips for PC games was like entering “a zero billion market.”  Leaders are more relatable—and entertaining—when they look back with humor on days money was tight, ambition was high, and excitement was in the air.
6. Tests, Allies, and Enemies.  This is the messy middle where the hero is tested, allies emerge to offer help or guidance, and the world pushes back.  “NVIDIA didn’t almost fail once; it nearly failed repeatedly,” Huang says. “We were 30 days from going out of business. More than once.”  Failures, mistakes, hurdles, and challenges are part of being human. Leaders who excel as storytellers don’t avoid such stories. They celebrate them.
7. The Supreme Ordeal.  Just when you think it can’t get much worse, it does.  When NVIDIA was locked into a contract with Sega to build the NV2 chip, the computer industry’s underlying architecture shifted.  “I was confronted with a situation where we would finish the project and die or not finish the project and die right away,” Huang recalled in Crucible Moments. NVIDIA’s strategy would have led to ruin, but by abandoning a flawed plan (with the help of an ally in Sega), the company managed to pivot and survive.
8. The Reward.  In the reward stage, the hero ‘seizes the sword’ symbolically, taking possession of the treasure they seek. In NVIDIA’s case, the reward was a moment of clarity and transformation.  After surviving failures and ordeals, Huang realized that accelerated computing, not just graphics, would define the future. Years before ChatGPT arrived, NVIDIA was perfecting the technology that would make AI a reality.
9. Return with the Elixir.  Heroes return from their adventure, not as conquerors but as guides with newfound insights or wisdom that transform their lives or better their communities. In this stage, leaders turn hard-won insights into shared benefits.  For example, in his keynote at CES 2026, Huang announced new AI models to help partners accelerate the development of AI applications. According to Huang, NVIDIA now builds “completely in the open so that we can enable every company, every industry, every country to be part of this AI revolution.”

show less