I was asked a few years ago to write a column for an executive magazine about lessons to share with future leaders. If you’re in any business long enough - and enjoy a middling-to-better level of success - you’ll be asked to do the same. It’s a rite of passage.

If you track these columns, podcasts and leadership books - which should end after the first chapter, and if you’ve read your share, you know what I mean by that - you know the Hero Path breaks down to these tent poles in a four-act arc:

Overcome lowly circumstances but use that as a superpower. Your parents/coaches/peers never thought you’d amount to much. But you were going to show them! So you worked twice as hard, walked five miles uphill both ways to school, ate Ramen, hawked your baseball card collection for rent money, dug some coal. These hardened you like a diamond but kept you humble. But you knew you had the horsepower to go the distance.
- (You watch “Field of Dreams” a lot.)
Accomplishment and Achievement (correctly capitalized) arrive simultaneously with Impostor’s Syndrome (see previous). You rise through the ranks because of your unique thinking, designs and calculations. If physicists don’t publish important works in their 20s, they’re written off - and you haven’t been! You have a family, which you compartmentalize but also use as the relatable source of your humanity. You are on track for executive, thought-leader shit. You win awards you deserve.
And then you arrive! Executive life with its perks. You fly first class without paying for it (because you sat in coach during Act II for, like, 800,000 miles) and you’re a Captain of Industry. You draw on all of your past to lead humbly and with an iconoclast’s outlook. You know everyone’s name in your leadership realm - there are hundreds. You manage up and down. You win awards because conferences want to make money off your name. You serve on boards where you can give back.
Pay It Forward. Your shares are vested but you still have something to give, so you’re going to consult/teach/advise/volunteer in the arena where you can have the most impact. And this is when you write the column/book/manifesto for how future executives can follow your path, mimic your success, do you all over again. But with different words, clothes and airline choices.

And all of that’s true. And you’ve read that before. It’s the story of Kal-El as business executive. You just don’t fly.

But that’s not what I wrote. Because that’s a lovely arc - it would be better if it were a three-act arc, but sometimes, reality defines the arc, not screenwriting school. But it’s not true.

Not on the fourth act.

The fourth act is this:

You will get shot in the head.

In the movie “Phenomenon,” John Travolta’s character is mentally accelerated by a flash of light, perhaps the flare of a random synaptic condition, that catapults his IQ to quadruple digits. He has heroic accomplishments, even without the telekinesis, but dies as the condition shows its true nature: It’s a tumor.

He was shot in the head.

This third act bothered me so much I contacted the writer of the screenplay - I was in my early 30s - because I was offended that the resolution of the story wasn’t The Next Level of Human Achievement, but a miscarriage. (I also asked him to be my mentor as a writer; I had a screenplay in front of Warner Brothers.) He said he wasn’t game for the mentorship, but offered a valuable piece of advice:

“That’s the only way that story can end.”

I was in the middle of Act II in my life. I was horrified by his response. It’s a cliche that we all are the heroes of our own stories - listen to yourself the next time you talk about getting home in heavy traffic - but we all believe we’ll do the climbing of Act I and Act II to arrive at Act III to realize the sense of accomplishment and statesmanship of Act IV.

And you know what?

He was right.

You will get shot in the head.

First, you’ll be careless. Naive, maybe. You’ll forget you’re a manager and not still one of the guys/gals/union. When you’re in Act II, you’ll forget that you crossed a street, as my friend and mentor Howard Weaver said to me once, and you can’t uncross it.

You’ll say something, do something or even intimate something that suggests you’re still part of what you used to be, and you’ll be shot in the head. That’s not your world anymore. Don’t talk about the dirt under your fingernails or anything that happened in Act I. They don’t believe you were there. And they don’t think you earned the awards. They kind of doubt the Pulitzer nod.

Once you’re into Act III, you’re managing up more than you’re managing down. You just don’t know it - and that’s where the bullet comes from. I have a moral compass and a true north. I once told an executive boss that I had one rule, and that was not to ask me to lie. He broke it, I didn’t lie and then I was shot in the head.

Later in this act, I worked for an industry group that drove more than $100 million a year to local news organizations. It was a non-entity (it didn’t have tax status because we didn’t know if it would survive beyond holding conferences paid for with equity loans on my house) and then I folded it into a legal for-profit entity. This meant I couldn’t be a ghost in the machine anymore; I’d have to be a CEO.

A few members of the Board didn’t like that, so they emailed me to rescind my CEO title and go back to being a contractor, which is illegal. They also instructed me to pay back the federal tax withholdings, which is even more illegal. I pointed this out, and they shot me in the head.

And here is what I wrote in the article that was ditched:

I am glad those things happened.

Act IV should not be a hero lap, where you spend your winnings on second or third homes while writing memoirs about how awesome you were. I lived in Sarasota, FL, for 11 years; the #2 question everyone asks is “Who did you used to be?”

Most of those conversations ended with what kind of European sports cars those previous lives provided, a dozen selfies with your trophy spouse in an island you can’t pronounce, and the fortunes you are trying to spend down as fast as you can to give meaning to your Autumn season.

Because you never were shot in the head.

But if you were, chances are, you were …

Iconoclastic
Passionate
Mission-driven
Forward-leaning
Path-clearing
Authentic
Sincere

And you got shot in the head.

And it will hurt. It will bleed your finances. It will get right up on your neck about your own self-worth. It will call on your lesser angels. You will skip leg day at the gym and “forget” to make the bed. You will look at social media and wonder why all the people who were quick to adore you can’t be found. And you’ll lose friends and colleagues and peers - especially the ones you helped along your journey.

Their hands are on the gun, too.

But what comes after that shot? That’s the act that columns and podcasts and business books don’t cover, because it’s not being Odysseus for future generations of Olympus. Future generations want to be gods. And gods don’t get shot like that.

Because what comes after that shot is being back on the ground.

Being mortal.

I’ve been an executive for almost 30 years. I talk regularly to owners of news companies, enormous nonprofits, billion-dollar foundations, writers who have scripted your imagination, college deans, a couple of guys who invented Twitter and Square, a Beatles fan who runs all the photojournalists in Europe and the Middle East (and, sadly, Ukraine). I once served soup to Jerry Garcia and signed a 10-figure deal with Google.

And all those people, at one point in their careers, were shot in the head.

It’s how you come back. That’s the real Act IV.

Because when you’re shot in the head, you’re down on the mat. And the mat is betting every day that you won’t get up. Every day. And it’s your job to prove that mat wrong.

Every day.