A Must Read for anyone who want's to be smart: Joseph Cambell's Hero with a Thousand Faces.

The modern hero, The modern individual who dares to heed the call and seek the mansion of the presence to whom it is our whole destiny to be atoned, cannot, indeed must not wait for his community to cast off its slough of pride, fear, rationalized avarice, and sanctified misunderstsnding. "Live," Nietsche says, "as though the day were here." It is not society that is to guide and save the creative hero, but preicsley the reverse. And so every one of us who shares the supreme ordeal-carries the cross of the redeemer-not so in bright moment's of his tribe's greatest victory, but in the silence of his personal despair.