12 Steps to a Good Life

Begin your Hero’s Journey to a good life.

12 Steps to a Good Life: The Hero’s Journey Through Knowledge and Wisdom is a practical and inspiring guide to living with clarity, resilience, and purpose. Drawing on the Hero’s Journey, the 12 Steps, and decades of study in personal growth and recovery, it shows how to overcome struggle, reshape your worldview, and build a life of meaning. Along the way you will learn to train your mind, balance your emotions, care for your body, nurture relationships, and manage your finances with wisdom and confidence.

About the Book Knowledge & Wisdom

Timeless wisdom · Practical tools · Daily practice

Book cover: 12 Steps to a Good Life

About the Book

At the heart of this book are four simple ideas. First, we are motivated by real needs — physical, social, emotional, and spiritual. Second, our worldview can distort those needs, often blinding us to what is true. Third, new knowledge and wisdom arrive only from outside our current worldview; growth begins the moment we step beyond our limits. Finally, there exists a transcendent truth that cannot be handed from one person to another, but can be known through direct experience.

What you’ll learn

Understand your needs and values
Train your mind and balance your emotions
Care for your body and strengthen relationships
Create good habits and rebuild your life
Manage money with wisdom and confidence
Build a daily program that steadily improves your life

Readers in the wild

Young woman and grandmother reading together
Man reading the book
Book and coffee on table

Knowledge

The Knowledge section translates big ideas into daily practice. The eight domains below interlock; strengthening one strengthens the rest.

  • Being. Your fundamental state of existence. Honest self‑inquiry into traits, character, and values shapes everything that follows.
  • Doing. Action is not just willpower. Hidden, unconscious forces shape what we do and fail to do. Learn how to work with them.
  • Body. Health, nutrition, movement, and sleep — the foundation of quality of life and the ability to think, feel, and act.
  • Mind. Train thought with logic and precision. An untrained mind creates suffering; a trained mind creates clarity.
  • Emotion. Understand and regulate feelings. Emotions add richness, but unregulated emotions can derail a good life.
  • Spirit. A personal relationship with a higher power — beyond dogma, rooted in experience — is the ground of meaning.
  • Relationships. Right relationship with the divine, with self, and with others. Practical methods to build and repair connection.
  • Finances. Budget, spend, earn, and define true wealth. Money is not life’s purpose, but it often determines its quality.

Wisdom

Timeless writings from multiple traditions are presented for both inspiration and practice: Zen koans, Epictetus’ Enchiridion, the Gospel of Matthew, the Dhammapada, Lao Tzu’s Tao Te Ching, and Proverbs, with additional selections from the Gospels of Thomas and Mary.

Daily: Leaves of Life

365 readings cross‑reference the Knowledge domains and the Wisdom texts, creating a built‑in study guide you can follow for an entire year.

Mountain sunrise — journey motif landscape
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