12 Steps to a Good Life:
The Hero's Journey Through
Knowledge and Wisdom
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Publication date is 20 September 2026
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12 Steps to a Good Life: The Hero’s Journey Through Knowledge and Wisdom is a comprehensive guide to personal transformation. Inspired by Joseph Campbell’s Hero with a Thousand Faces and grounded in the proven framework of the 12 Steps, this book weaves together story, philosophy, practical knowledge, and sacred texts into a single path toward living well.The book is divided into four parts:Part I: Defining the Good Life. What does it mean to live well? This section introduces the Hero’s Journey, the 12 Steps, and Four Simple Ideas: (1) we are motivated by needs, physical, emotional, social and spiritual; (2) our worldview distorts our needs; (3) new knowledge can only come from outside our current worldview; and (4) a transcendent truth exists, available only through direct experience.Part II: The 12 Steps. Each Step is explored in depth, with observations, examples, and practical guidance for applying it as a milestone on your own Hero’s Journey. The 12 Steps to a Good Life are:1. Life is unmanageable.
2. Be open to a Higher Power.
3. Rely on my Higher Power.
4. Take a personal inventory.
5. Admit what I found.
6. Be ready to change.
7. Humbly ask for change.
8. List the harm I caused.
9. Make amends where possible.
10. Continue my inventory.
11. Pray and meditate for guidance.
12. Make the world better.Part III: Knowledge. Eight domains of life are addressed with clarity and practical tools: Being (your existence and values), Doing (the mysterious link between choice and action), Body (health, nutrition, and movement), Mind (training thought with logic and clarity), Emotion (understanding and regulating feelings), Spirit (personal connection to a higher power), Relationships (with self, others, and the divine), and Finances (budgeting, money, and true wealth). Together they form a curriculum for living and thriving.Part IV: Wisdom. A one-of-a-kind library of timeless texts provides daily reflection and guidance: Leaves of Life (365 daily readings cross-referenced to Knowledge and Wisdom for a full-year study), 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. These works are presented for both inspiration and practice, creating a living bridge between ancient wisdom, practical knowledge, and modern life.By combining the 12 Steps, the Hero’s Journey, Knowledge, and Wisdom, this book is both a comprehensive reference and a lifelong companion.Why wait? Your Hero’s Journey begins now.
About the Book
The 12 Steps to a Good Life are a comprehensive philosophy of life. They are a practical system for living. They express a desire to live well, regardless of the individual's initial state or state of mind. The phrasing of individual Steps reflects this. It is because they work that I am bringing a version of the 12 Steps to you through this book. Only in rare cases where an individual "cannot or will not be completely honest with themselves," have I seen the 12 Steps to be ineffective in changing a person's life.
Purchase
*** Check back often. ***
Publication date is 20 September 2026
Interactive Content
A dashboard for playing various music, relaxation, and meditation tracks. These include brain wave synchronization tracks, background nature sounds, and others. The music tracks include categories such as Happy, Cinematic, and Ambient.
Short, interesting summaries and quizzes of some of the major points of 12 Steps to a Good Life.
Interact with the book's content in Google NotebookLM. Contains the entire text, minus the front and back matter. Using NotebookLM, you can create your own study guides, videos, and audio overviews.
This is experimental work with ChatGPT. It is not always correct, and sometimes it makes things up.
The YouTube channel is an ongoing project. There are meditation videos, information from the book, automated slideshows, podcasts, and more.
Each of these slideshows are based on material directly from the book. They were created and generated from a variety of sources and are hosted on archive.org.
Downloads
Files are stored on Archive.org. It is the closest thing to "permanent" on the internet. The first link is everything related to the book. The other links are for specific types of files. The text files are fully searchable. Put your search terms in quotes ("search terms") for best results.