30 Best Quotes from Hero on a Mission by Donald Miller

I don’t think any of us should trust fate to write the story of our lives. Fate is a terrible writer.

As you read a story or watch a movie, you feel sympathy for the victim, you cheer for the hero, you hate the villain, and you respect the guide. These four characters exist in stories not only because they exist in the real world, but because they exist inside you and me.

Living a meaning-filled story does not happen by accident. In fact, living a good story is a lot like writing one. When we read a great story, we don’t realize the hours of daydreaming, planning, fits, and false starts that went into what the reader may experience as a clean line of meaningful action.

The idea that fate writes our story is a lie. We do not suffer fate. We partner with fate to write a story generated from our own God-given creativity and agency. And that story can be more than interesting: it can be meaningful.

The hard truth about life is not that it asks us to live a story, but that it forces us to live a story. We have been forced into this life by the breath of God. We come out crying and gasping for air, and what we do with that air is what constitutes the quality of our story.

I often wonder if people pray for rescue and then resent God for not helping them, only to realize, in time, that God did not rescue them because they did not need to be rescued. They were not actually victims.

Many stories didn’t work out. Every good writer has thousands of pages they’ve tossed into the trash. Bad writing is bad writing. It’s the same in life. Not every day works out.

When we live as victims, we do not experience a deep sense of meaning, but when we live as characters acting on an important mission, we do.

To experience meaning, a person simply needs to rise up, point at the horizon, and, with deep conviction, decide to venture out toward the hope of a meaningful story.

Meaning is something you experience while you are on an adventure.

A hero chooses a life of meaning.

Meaning is not an idea to be agreed with. It is a feeling you get when you live as a hero on a mission. And it cannot be experienced without taking action and living into a story.

We build lives of meaning by stating an ambition, by enduring challenges, and by sharing our lives with others.

The single characteristic that sets heroes apart, however, is that they are willing to accept a challenge that will ultimately transform them. Heroes take action, which is why they are so good at experiencing meaning.

When something difficult happens, victims accept defeat but heroes ask, “What does this make possible?”

Pain can serve a purpose if we cause it to. Again, while we do not have power over all that happens in the world, we do have power over our perspective. We can choose to take unfair and undue pain and cause it to serve our own story so that we become better. So that we transform.

When we see mistakes as a curriculum rather than a judgment, the velocity in which we transform increases. Failure, pain, mistakes, and even injustices directed against us offer an advantage—if we let them.

Things that are healthy and alive change. The converse is also true: things that are dead do not change. A rock does not change because a rock is not alive.

Wanting to create something new in the world is not bad. Wanting bad things is bad.

Life is not a journey about feigning perfection. It’s about becoming better versions of ourselves.

A victim has no plan. They are waiting for a rescuer. A villain has a plan for destruction and strategizes vengeance on a world that has hurt them. A hero creates a plan that is mutually beneficial for the world and sticks with it. A guide has lived a great life and turns around to help heroes find and live meaningful stories of their own.

Competence involves the ability to encounter difficult circumstances and grow from them rather than be destroyed by them.

The more we experience life as a hero on a mission, the more we learn and the more we can pass down.

Starting with the end in mind, bringing something good into the world, accepting life’s challenges, and sharing our lives with others is the path to transformation.

Do not trust a person to guide you up Mount Everest if they have never been to the Himalayas.

When the existential vacuum comes for you, and it will, remember there is a hope that is very real in the world. We can always make meaning.

The stories we live don’t affect only us, they affect the people around us. Our stories teach the people around us what is worth living for and what is worth dying for.

When we live a life of meaning, we invite others to do the same. Those who come behind us will build on our stories. They can add to them and make them better because we have showed them the way.

The truth is, we can all go much further in this life than we ever thought. Leaving a victim mentality behind, where it belongs, is like dropping a bag of rocks. We’ll move faster, I promise.

You and I may or may not come from a powerful or positive legacy, but every single one of us gets to leave one.