A hero within many faces
Where is the hero in your week?
I love hero's journey movies. Dune. Star Wars. Black Panther. The Matrix. I've watched some of them enough times that I can mouth the dialogue before it lands.
I remember being small enough that the toys still mattered more than the plot. I’d line them up on the carpet and replay a scene I loved, except I’d quietly rewrite it. My focus went to the one character who outlived everyone, the one who got to stand at the end while the credits rolled. The others, the ones who didn’t make it, I’d pile them up to the side. Out of frame. Job done.
Nobody taught me to do that. I just absorbed it, the way you absorb the shape of a room before you can name a single piece of furniture in it.
As I got older, the piling-up started to bother me. Why didn’t certain characters get the time they deserved? Why, no matter how many people did the actual work of surviving, did the story always fold itself down into one person at the end? I didn’t have language for it yet. I just remember the discomfort, low and specific, every time the credits rolled on a story where six people had clearly done the saving and only one of them got remembered for it.
It took my professional life to give that discomfort a shape.
Early in my engineering career, the job was speed. Fix it fast. Minimize retries. Be the one who gets paged at 2am and has the system back up before anyone with a title above you wakes up. I was good at that. I liked being good at that. There’s a real, physical satisfaction in being the person who makes the red light go green, and tech rewards that satisfaction with the things tech rewards: the feedback, the recommendation, the next title.
[Coffee, cold, the mug from this morning sitting on my desk three feet from where I’m writing this. I keep forgetting to drink it before it goes cold. That’s been true since long before I started writing this paragraph.]
By the time I became a leader, I understood something that the toys on the carpet had been trying to tell me for years. We cannot do this alone. Not because it’s a nice sentiment to put on a slide, but because I had personally watched what happens when a team is structured so that only one person is allowed to be the hero. It gets fixed. It also gets fragile. Take that person out of the room and the system doesn’t just slow down, it forgets how to think.
I remember the exact shift, or close enough to it. I’d spent years being the person who got paged, the one whose name showed up in the incident channel right before things turned around. Becoming a leader meant I had to stop being that person on purpose, which is a strange thing to ask of yourself when being that person is the entire reason anyone trusted you in the first place. The first few times I held back, let someone else troubleshoot a problem I could have solved faster alone, it felt like failure. It wasn’t. It was the actual job, finally starting. I just hadn’t been trained to recognize it, because nothing in my early career had rewarded restraint. Everything had rewarded speed.
That’s the part nobody warns you about when you move from doing the work to building the conditions for the work to happen without you. The instinct that made you good at the first job actively works against you in the second one, and there’s no clean handover document for that. You just have to notice it happening, usually after you’ve already gotten it wrong a few times.
Joseph Campbell wrote about the hero’s journey beautifully in The Hero with a Thousand Faces. He also wrote it from a narrow seat. His sources lean heavily Western, with African and Indigenous traditions treated as footnotes rather than full traditions in their own right. That gap matters, not because Campbell was malicious, but because the lens he built is the same one most of us still use without noticing we’re wearing it. A framework doesn’t have to be wrong to be incomplete. It just has to be repeated enough times that the incompleteness stops looking like a choice.
These stories grip us because they tap into something primal. One figure carries our fears, our hopes, our rage, our longing. When the hero wins, defeats the empire, awakens to their power, reclaims the throne, we feel it in our bones. We’re released from something we didn’t know we were holding.
But I’ve started asking a different question about these stories. Not whether they’re powerful. They are. The question is what they quietly train us to expect.
When was the last time you waited for someone else to be the hero, instead of asking what your own move was?
Think about that for a second before you keep reading. Not rhetorically. Actually think of the last time.
I’ll go first, since I’m asking you to.
When chaos arrives, most of us look for someone to help. As an engineer, I go straight into troubleshoot mode. Fix the thing in front of me. But the moment it stops being a one-person problem, the moment it needs delegating, something else kicks in. Who do I call. Who tells me what to do next. We turn to our managers, and sometimes, if we’re lucky, they tell us exactly what we needed to hear. And sometimes they hand the ball straight back to us, except now it’s heavier, because we’ve spent the energy hoping someone else would carry it.
Either way, we were expecting a hero. I know this because I’ve been on both sides of that handoff more times than I can count.
What I’ve spent years trying to build instead is teams that do this collectively. Not chaos managed by a single firefighter, but groups of people who seek help in a coordinated, organized way, where the asking itself is part of the skill. It is not an easy task. The more people you add to a system, the more confusion becomes possible, and the balance can tip either direction. Toward shared judgment, or toward noise. I’ve watched it tip both ways, sometimes in the same week, sometimes because of a decision I made.
The one-hero habit runs deeper than the movies
There’s something almost hypnotic about watching one person become “the one.” One chosen leader, one voice, one path forward. It’s comforting. It’s also narrowing. It trains us to look up, to wait for someone stronger or smarter or more enlightened to arrive and show us the way.
Who were you taught to wait for, growing up? A teacher. A boss. A founder. Someone whose arrival was supposed to fix things you were also, quietly, capable of fixing yourself.
When we over-identify with the lone hero myth, we miss something the myth itself usually contains, if you look at the cast list instead of just the lead.
Take El Eternauta, the Argentine graphic novel. It’s not as globally known as Star Wars, but it does something most hero stories don’t. Juan Salvo isn’t a chosen messiah. He’s a regular man surviving a catastrophe alongside his family, his neighbors, people whose names you’d forget if the camera followed only him. The story doesn’t crown him “the one.” It shows that anyone can lead, depending on the moment, the need, the crisis directly in front of them.
That idea isn’t new. It’s buried inside the classics we already love, if we stop watching for the spotlight and start watching for the room around it.
In Star Wars, Luke has the arc, but without Leia’s political clarity, Han’s grit, Obi-Wan’s wisdom, and the bravery of rebels whose names never make the poster, his mission fails before it starts. In The Matrix, Neo is “the One,” but Morpheus is the one who believes first, and Trinity is the one who holds him together when belief isn’t enough on its own. In The Lord of the Rings, Frodo carries the ring, but Samwise carries Frodo, often literally, when Frodo can’t carry himself another step.
These aren’t sidekicks. They’re co-leaders. They hold space, fix problems, question the plan, and sometimes make the call the hero couldn’t make in time.
You don’t have to look at fiction to find this pattern. Open source software runs almost entirely on it. The most resilient projects in the world aren’t held together by one brilliant maintainer pushing every commit. They’re held together by hundreds of contributors who show up, fix what they notice, document what they learn, and hand the work forward to people whose names most users will never know. When a major maintainer steps away, the strongest projects survive precisely because leadership was never concentrated in one person to begin with. The fragile ones collapse the moment their single hero burns out, and we usually only notice the structure was fragile after it’s already too late to fix it.
The same pattern shows up after disasters, in the mutual aid networks that form faster than any official response, organized by people who never asked permission to lead and never expected to be thanked for it. Nobody appoints the person who starts the supply chain from someone’s garage. They just start, and other people join, and the network does what no single coordinator could have managed alone.
Why do we still focus on the one?
Because it’s easier. Cleaner. The single-hero myth gives us order in a chaotic world. Someone to praise, someone to blame, a simple line of cause and effect. It also lets us off the hook. If the hero hasn’t arrived yet, we’re not responsible for moving.
Where in your own life have you been waiting for a hero who was never going to show up, when the work was already yours to do?
I want to sit inside this question a little longer than the original draft of this essay did, because it’s where the tech version of the myth gets dangerous in a way the movies never quite manage.
In our industry, there’s a deep, almost unspoken belief that for every problem, there’s a fix, and the fix has an author. We’ve built entire reward systems around that belief without examining it. The person who resolves the incident gets the recognition. The person who writes the patch gets the recommendation. The person who’s calm under pressure during the outage gets the next promotion conversation framed around their name. None of that is wrong on its own. The problem is what it teaches everyone watching: that leadership looks like the dramatic, visible fix. Not the quiet work that prevented the fire from starting in the first place. Not the person who asked the uncomfortable question three weeks earlier that nobody wanted to sit with.
I’ve taken that reward more than once. I’m not writing this from outside the pattern. There’s a particular kind of satisfaction in being the one who fixes things, and tech is exceptionally good at supplying that satisfaction on demand, which is precisely why it’s so hard to notice you’re addicted to it until you’re the one in the room asking, out loud, whether we’re just doing what we’re supposed to be doing, or whether we’ve built a whole incentive structure around manufacturing heroes instead of building systems that don’t need them.
I can think of a specific performance review, years ago now, where I sat across from someone whose actual contribution to a hard quarter had been almost entirely invisible. She’d asked the question, three weeks before the outage that didn’t happen, that made two other teams change their rollout plan. Nothing broke. No incident channel lit up. No name appeared in a postmortem, because there was no postmortem to write. When it came time to talk about her impact, I had almost nothing concrete to point to, and I remember the discomfort of realizing that the system I was operating inside had no good language for what she’d actually done. It only had language for fires and the people who put them out. I gave her the best review I could write, and it still felt thin next to what she’d genuinely prevented.
I don’t think anyone designed it maliciously. I think a dashboard rewards what it can see, and what it can see is the fix, not the prevention. Nobody chose the harm. The metric chose it for us, and we kept feeding the metric because feeding it felt like leadership.
The real world doesn’t run on a clean arc. Leadership rarely comes with a glowing sword or a chosen prophecy. It’s messy. Fluid. Often invisible. Sometimes it’s speaking truth to power in a room where that costs you something real. Sometimes it’s staying back to hold weight others can’t carry that week. Sometimes it’s logistical, or quiet, or spiritual, and most of the time it’s shared between more people than the story ever bothers to name in the credits.
In reality, leadership emerges through the relationships between people, not from a single figure at the front of the room. That makes it harder to follow as a story. It doesn’t fit a three-act structure. It doesn’t fit a quarterly review either. But it’s real, and it matters just as much as the version that gets the applause.
The command-and-control trap
There’s an older structural pattern hiding underneath all of this, and it’s worth naming directly, because it’s not just a movie habit. It’s an organizational one.
A command-and-control structure looks like a single general at the top of a hierarchy, decisions flowing down through ranks, information flowing up through reports, everyone waiting on the order before they move. It works, for a while, in conditions that are stable and predictable enough for one person at the top to actually see the whole board. It is also, almost by design, the slowest possible structure to respond once conditions stop being stable. Every decision has to travel up the chain and back down again before anyone on the ground is allowed to act.
Compare that to a resistance network, the kind that survives precisely because no single capture takes down the whole structure. Nobody at the bottom is waiting for permission from the top, because there often isn’t a single top to wait for. Decisions get made locally, by whoever is closest to the problem, with shared principles standing in for centralized orders. It’s messier. It’s also far harder to kill.
Most tech organizations are built like the general, while talking, in every internal memo, about wanting to behave like the network. We say we want autonomous teams, distributed ownership, people empowered to make decisions close to the work. Then we build approval chains, dashboards, and escalation paths that quietly recreate the general at the top of every single decision tree, just with more layers and a different title. Nobody chose that contradiction on purpose. It’s what happens when you bolt resistance-network language onto a command-and-control skeleton and hope the language does the structural work instead of the structure itself.
I’ve sat in the room where a single architecture review board, four people, became the bottleneck for an entire engineering org’s worth of decisions. Nobody on that board was a villain. They were trying to maintain consistency, reduce risk, keep the whole system coherent. But every team below them learned, within a quarter, that the real move was to wait for the four people at the top to bless a direction before committing to anything. We had built, with the best of intentions, exactly the structure the org chart claimed we didn’t want. The general didn’t ask for the role. The structure built the general out of whoever happened to be standing in the gatekeeping seat.
Nature has been doing this longer than we have
Nature shows this constantly, if you’re willing to look at something other than the apex predator. In a healthy forest, trees share resources underground through networks of fungi. No single tree dominates the system into health. The forest survives through interdependence, not hierarchy. A spruce that’s struggling can receive sugar through a mycorrhizal network from a tree it never touches above ground, sent by a neighbor that has more than it needs that season. Nobody crowned that tree the hero of the forest. The forest just kept the whole system alive, because the system, not any single trunk, was the actual unit of survival.
It’s worth sitting with how unintuitive that is from the outside. If you only looked up, at the canopy, you’d assume the tallest trees were doing all the work, reaching the most light, producing the most energy, holding the whole forest up through sheer size. The actual exchange happens underground, in a network most people never see and would have no reason to suspect exists. The forest’s real leadership structure is invisible from the angle most of us are trained to look from. That should sound familiar. It’s the same angle most performance reviews are written from.
Leadership, seen that way, isn’t about control. It’s about support, adaptability, and the willingness to respond to what’s actually needed instead of what looks impressive from outside the canopy.
Teams and communities work the same way. We move forward not because one person has every answer, but because many people contribute what they can, when they can, in whatever currency they happen to hold that week. Sometimes that currency is technical skill. Sometimes it’s patience. Sometimes it’s just being the person willing to say the thing everyone else is thinking but won’t say first, the unglamorous equivalent of sending sugar underground to a tree nobody’s watching. The hero in that picture doesn’t have one face. It has many, and most of them never make it onto a slide.
What if the story itself is the wrong size?
This isn’t only about representation, though that matters too, and matters more than I had room to say the first time I wrote this. When we flatten heroism into one type of character, usually male, often white, often gifted or chosen, we erase the multitude of ways people actually lead. We lose the stories of care, of collaboration, of quiet resilience that never make the poster but absolutely shape the outcome of whatever crisis the poster is commemorating.
Look at how we talk about founders. The mythology around a single visionary, the garage, the dropout, the one who saw what nobody else could see, gets repeated so often that it starts to feel like the only legitimate origin story for anything that matters. It erases the co-founder who handled the parts nobody photographs. It erases the early employee who built the actual infrastructure while the visionary was on stage. It erases entire teams of people, often women, often people the cameras simply weren’t pointed at, whose names don’t survive the editing process even though their work absolutely did. We don’t tell those stories because they’re less true. We tell the single-founder story because it’s the one shape our culture has practiced telling for a hundred years, and practice makes a story feel inevitable even when it isn’t.
We see the same flattening when we talk about teams stepping up during a crisis without waiting for instructions, when friends carry each other through grief without anyone announcing they’re doing it, without a single person performing the role of comforter for an audience, when movements grow not around a single figurehead but through decentralized, collective action that has no single name attached to it, no individual who could stand at a podium and take credit for the whole thing even if they wanted to.
If you had to name the most important act of leadership you witnessed this year, would the person who did it even recognize themselves as a hero?
I’d guess not. The people who actually hold systems together rarely think of themselves that way. They think of themselves as the person who happened to be paying attention.
I think we need more stories that reflect that. Not stories of “the one,” but stories of “the many.” Stories where the hero isn’t a person but a process. A movement. A network of people doing their best in an impossible situation, none of them waiting for someone else to start, because they’ve stopped believing the start has to come from a single source.
Imagine raising children not to wait for someone to save them, but to look around and ask, “Where can I lead today?” Imagine workplaces that reward not the loudest voice in the room, but the one who quietly builds trust and brings others along, even when that work never shows up on a dashboard. Imagine treating power as something to share rather than something to possess, the way you’d treat warmth from a fire rather than ownership of the wood.
That shift goes against decades of storytelling, corporate structure, and cultural conditioning. It’s not an easy one. But it feels necessary now, in a way it might not have ten years ago, back when the systems we were building hadn’t yet shown us quite how brittle a one-hero structure actually is under real pressure.
We’re living through overlapping crises. Climate. Inequality. Misinformation. Burnout. No single hero is coming to fix this. No app, no billionaire, no charismatic visionary will be enough on their own, no matter how convincingly the keynote is delivered.
I’d add one more name to that list, since it’s the one currently being pitched to people exactly like you and me. No model, however capable, is going to arrive as the single hero either. The pitch decks describe artificial intelligence the way Star Wars describes Luke, a singular force that shows up at the right moment and resolves what years of accumulated complexity couldn’t. That framing isn’t an accident. It’s the same myth wearing a new costume, and it sells for the same reason the original sells: because waiting for a single savior is so much easier than doing the distributed, unglamorous work of fixing the structure underneath the problem. A model can help six people think faster. It cannot replace the trust between them, the judgment about which problem is worth solving, or the years of context that told them where to look. Treating it as the hero just relocates the myth. It doesn’t retire it.
What we need instead is a lot of ordinary people willing to see the hero in themselves, and in each other, and willing to lead from exactly where they’re standing, without waiting for a title, a stage, or a model update to make it official.
Sometimes that looks like showing up. Sometimes it looks like listening. Sometimes it looks like stepping back so someone else can lead the part they’re actually suited for, even when stepping back is the harder, less visible thing to do, and nobody will ever write it up as the fix.
It’s a great feeling when you tackle something together and someone, almost miraculously, lands on the fix. I’ve felt that feeling plenty of times, on both sides of it. But in tech, our collective obsession with finding a fix for every problem clouds our judgment about what leadership actually looked like in the room. The person who fixed it gets the reward, the feedback, the recommendation that opens the next door. The people who made the fix possible, who asked the question that pointed the right direction, who held the calm that let the fixer think clearly, get a thank-you in a meeting that nobody remembers by Friday.
I wonder sometimes whether we’re just doing what we’re supposed to be doing, in the sense that the system asked us to, and never stopped to ask whether the system was asking the right thing.
There’s a version of this that worries me more than my own habits, and it’s the one I think about when I imagine someone twenty years younger than me starting their first job in tech this year. They’ll learn what gets rewarded the same way I did, by watching, not by being told. If the only visible leadership in their first few years is the dramatic fix, the loud save, the one name in the postmortem, that’s the template they’ll carry forward, and they’ll teach it to whoever comes after them without ever deciding to. We don’t just inherit the lone-hero myth from movies. We hand it down through what we choose to applaud in front of people who are still learning what’s worth wanting.
The hero’s journey still speaks to me. I just see it differently now. One thread in a tapestry woven by many hands, many voices, many hearts, most of whom never got their name on the cover, and most of whom, if you asked them, wouldn’t particularly want it there.
So yes, be the hero if you have to. Follow the call. Rise to the challenge. Take the leap, when the leap is genuinely yours to take.
But also look around. Notice the others walking beside you. The quieter arcs. The shared burdens. The unexpected guides who never asked for credit and never will, not because they’re saints, but because credit was never the reason they were there.
Because in the end, the journey isn’t only about the one who saves the world. It’s about the many who sustain it, week after week, in ways that will never get a poster, a sequel, or a toy on anyone’s carpet.
So here’s what I actually want to know, what would change this week if you stopped waiting for the hero, and started asking where you’re already one of the many faces it’s wearing?
I’d genuinely like to know what comes up for you. Tell me in the comments, even if it’s messy, even if it’s just one sentence. I’ll read every one.
About the Author
Diamantino Almeida is a tech leader, coach, and writer reshaping how we think about leadership in a burnout-driven world. With over 20 years at the intersection of engineering, DevOps, and team culture, he helps humans lead consciously from the inside out. When he’s not challenging outdated norms, he’s plotting how to make work more human, one verb at a time.