First Two Steps in the Hero's Journey 2.0

Hello, and welcome to the Story Grid podcast. This is a show dedicated to helping you become a better writer. I'm your host, Tim Grall, and I am a struggling writer trying to figure out how to tell a story that works. Joining me shortly is Sean Coyne. He is the creator of Story Grid, the author of the book Story Grid, and an editor with over 25 years experience. In this episode, we start walking through the actual heroic journey 2.0 circle quadrant thing, and we start looking at how this new way of understanding the Heroic journey can really help you understand your story and how to tell the story better. We also reference an infographic, and so I'm going to put that in the show notes for this episode so you can see that to reference what Sean is talking about in this. But anyway, it's a really great episode. We're going to spend a couple weeks going through the Heroic journey and talking about it. And so this is the first one to really dive into the nitty gritty. So I hope you enjoy it. So let's jump in and get started.

So, Sean, last week we started talking through.

Well, the last couple weeks, we've kind of approached this Hero's Journey 2.0 thing. And last week we talked through just the importance of looking at Campbell's work and Young's work and then where this is kind of looking at both of those and putting, you know, kind of new glasses on the whole thing. And when I went back, I've been going back through The Hero's Journey 2.0 content.

For the course that'll come out in December. But, you know, you had kind of the main thing is this in this big circle infographic with four quadrants.

Could you just. That's kind of the central piece of it. Could you just kind of tell me a little bit about what that is and how it helps us understand what you're trying to teach here?

Sure. Okay. So the four quadrants and the circle comes from. Let me just start at the fundamentals. So let's start with the line that goes north, south. What does that line represent? Well, it represents sort of what scientists would be called. Would call the objective. The objective facts of a particular phenomena. So the objective facts are things that are measurable, and.

We can say that they're either positive in terms of our ability to attain a particular goal, or that they kind of obstruct us, or they're negative and they keep us from getting a particular goal. So if I'm making coffee and I have coffee filters, that would be an objectively positive thing for me if I don't have coffee filters or if I'm out of coffee, that would be objectively negative. So having coffee and not having coffee is dependent upon those objective facts. All right, cool. So the, the top part is the positive objective elements and then the bottom is the negative. So the top is positive emotional and the bottom is negative. Now the X, the horizontal line, so that's the vertical line is the objective qualities. Oh my gosh, I just screwed up.

It's actually the opposite.

So let me, let me, let me go back and say the, the horizontal line is the objective quality. So, okay, so to the right is positive, to the left is negative. That's the whole thing with the cough filters. Now the vertical line is subjective. So subjective quality is what is going on for the character or the person as they are experiencing the thing that's happening. Right. So if I were, we're going to track, we're going to plot out my emotional state as I'm making my coffee and I find my coffee filters very easily, then we would be able to hit positive on my, my vertical axis because I know, oh, once I have the coffee filters, I can make my coffee. So that's a, going to be a positive thing. And again, the objective quality of having the coffee filters would be positive too. So on the Y axis it would be positive. And on the X axis it would be positive too. So I would be able to plot some kind of piece of data inside the positive and the positive Y axis and the positive X axis for having coffee filters. Okay. So similarly, if I don't have coffee filters, that's going to be negative on the X axis because I won't be able to make my coffee and it's going to be negative for me emotionally. So that's going to go down in the negative negative quadrant, which is actually the third quadrant which we'll get into soon. So anyway, as you can see, having this target, this X and Y axis is pretty cool because what it'll be able, what I'll be able to do is I will be able to track a story from its beginning to its end on these specific moments. So each scene is going to have a particular objective and subjective valence, meaning a specific kind of quality. So something can be positive objectively and negative subjectively. I don't want to get into all the philosophical stuff right now because we want to get into this big schematic, but that's where that X comes from. So it all comes from Descartes. It's called A Cartesian graph. And Rene Descartes was the genius who figured that out about 500 years ago.

So anyway, now what's the circle? Okay, well, the circle is representative of what happens throughout a story that has a heroic journey component to it. So it's literally a movement from the first quadrant, which is positive positive, to the second quadrant, which is kind of a little bit counterintuitively, it's left handed, not down. So the left upper left hand quadrant is the second quadrant and the third quadrant is the bottom left hand quadrant and the fourth one is the bottom right hand quadrant. And if you look at the qualities of, of the subjective and objective world in that story, you can see it moves from a positive positive to a positive negative. I'm going from, I'm speaking subjectively first and then object. Let me do it the other way. So it moves from positive objective to positive subjective to negative objective to positive subjective to negative objective, negative subjective to negative subjective positive objective. So you can see how this can get a little mind trippy. But the whole point is, is that that is the entire revolution of a heroic journey that we have to traverse from a positive positive world into very negative states in order to emerge out the other side with a new skill set, a new worldview.

So let's just go through the first quadrant right now so that I can explain kind of the beginning hook of a heroic journey. Now, the beginning hook of the heroic journey is all about finding a character in a state of having a pretty good working worldview. Now what does that mean? Well, it basically means that I know how to make coffee, I know how to get to work on time, I know how to do my job, I make enough money to take care of myself and.

My family, etc. So my worldview is working. Okay. It's pretty complicated, right? So the things that I have to do to navigate the world personally are working. But it's complicated. There's a lot of different variables that I have to take care of in order for things to work out. So it took me, let's say it took me 56 years to figure out Sean Coyne's worldview. And boy, it's pretty complicated. There's a lot of different things that I know that I know when to employ, when not to employ all kinds of skills, all kinds of other stuff. Now what happens in the beginning hook of a heroic journey? And I'll just use myself as an example here, is that an unexpected event kicks off the entire story. So what's the unexpected event? Now this is Something that obviously I am not going to see coming. And it's going to upend my life in a way that is going to really disturb my worldview. So it's really, really important when you're constructing a heroic journey 2.0 story that you have an unexpected event that really, really upends the life force of the protagonist. So let me use the Wonderful wizard of Oz as an example. So the unexpected event that drops into Dorothy's life at the very beginning of the story is the cyclone. Now, the cyclone is just a random event from the environment. It's an external force that bears down in Kansas at that time period around 1900 in the United States. And it literally knocks out Dorothy, right? She is trying to get to shelter, and she. Her dog runs away, so she has to go chase the dog because she cares for her dog. And in that chase, her entire house is upended by a cyclone, and she is transported into another world. Now, this is a great example of what I call an invisible fear gorilla.

And the reason why I call it an invisible fear gorilla is that it stems from this incredible experiment that anyone can check out on Google. It's on YouTube, and it's called the Invisible Gorilla Experiment. And these two psychologists back in the 90s at Harvard were trying to, you know, rediscover some information that had been.

That had been experimentally proved in the 1970s. I don't recall the original person who did it, but what they did is they had an experiment where they would bring in a person to look at a particular.

Performance on video. And the. The person was told, what. What you need to do is that there's going to be two teams of people who come onto the screen. One team will be wearing white T shirts and another team will be wearing black T shirts. And the team wearing the white T shirts and the black T shirts, they will be bouncing basketball passes to one another. So your job is to count the number of basketball pass that the people with white T shirts are wearing. And then they did the same thing, you know, to other people. And they. They said, you know, count the number of the black T shirt people. And so what would happen is they would run the video and the person watching the video would count the passes. And then at the end of the video, they would say, okay, so how many passes did you count that the white team or black team pass to each other? And they would say something like 32. They go, okay, that's good. That's exactly how many. And just one last question. Did you see the gorilla and 50% of the people who were experimenting in this did not see, because in the actual video, a woman wearing a gorilla suit walks onto the stage. She pounds her chest for a minute and walks off the stage. And it's literally like four or five seconds that this happens. But because the people were concentrating so hard on counting the basketball passes that their brains didn't even register the presence of this gorilla. And this is fascinating.

I remember. I remember when this first became viral, I don't know, a long time ago of me watching it and being like, okay, I counted the. Like, I totally got taken by it. Where when they said, no, was there a gorilla? I'm like, there was no gorilla. And, like, I even, like, backed it up to make sure they weren't just messing with me. And sure enough, I missed the gorilla.

It's. It's really incredible because it shows you the power of our minds, right? It shows you the power of our concentrated attention to specific tasks. So why do I use that invisible gorilla experiment to define the unexpected event that drops into the heroic journey? Well, I see these unexpected events that happen at the very beginning of the story as invisible gorillas. And what I mean by that is that the protagonist at that time is so concentrated and their attention is so tightly focused on attaining a particular goal that they don't see the truth of what that unexpected event actually is. And the entire story, the entire heroic journey, is about them figuring out what that event actually means to them. So the fear element comes from Carl Jung. And Carl Jung proposed that there is sort of this fundamental unit of change. And he called it. What did he call it? Like a chaos ball. He said these little random balls of chaos drop into our lives and they disturb us to the point where they change us forever. And so he believed that those were the sort of metaphysical units of change that make us change our minds. So the reason why I call them fears is that these changes in terms of our neurology actually induce fear within us. And because they're spherical, I call them fears. P H E R E S so I combined the invisible gorilla experiment and this concept of Jung's chaos ball into the invisible fear gorilla, which I think is very specific about the kind of unexpected event that you will need to drop into the life of your protagonist at the very beginning of a heroic journey story. So how does this apply to the wonderful wizard of Oz? I mean, let's face it, the cyclone is just a cyclone. It has no.

You know, real psyche within it. It's just a random external event. So how is that an invisible fear gorilla? So I think the use of a cyclone is a very specific choice by Baum, the author. And he didn't call it a tornado. Right, a tornado. The difference between a cyclone and a tornado is that a tornado is just sort of a single spout that's maybe 100 meters in circumference. So it's only one kind of phenomena that drops into a specific terrain. A tornado is very devastating, but a cyclone is actually numerous numbers of tornadoes together in a, in a full system. So a cyclone is a much bigger event than a single tornado. And let's look at the state of Dorothy as, as a person at the beginning of the story. Right? She's, she's a little girl, she's 12 years old, I believe. And so the cyclone to me is, is representative of the things that Dorothy is going to have to learn how to deal with in the future. And they're all multi domain, they're multi dimensional. So when you're a young person, you really have a black and white view of the world. And your parents, you look to your parents and to your guardians as the sources of your, of the people who are going to solve your problems for you. So the cyclone at the beginning of the wonderful world wizard of Oz is representative of all of the domains of things that Dorothy is going to have to confront in the future. And it's so overwhelming that it literally knocks her unconscious and sends her into an alternate universe, which is really cool. Now the thing about the wonderful wizard of Oz is that Baum doesn't really beat around the bush. You know, he immediately takes Dorothy and dumps her into an extraordinary world within the first chapter of the story. So it's a great story to take a look at because he's not really gilding the lily with any of his language. I mean, the entire novel's, I think, something like 35 or 40,000 words. It's only 24 scenes, 24 chapters. And you can get the full heroic journey experience by reading it and listening to it. So just to get back to this first quadrant, at the beginning of the Wonderful wizard of Oz, Dorothy has her life pretty much figured out. She's got her dog. I'm talking about the, the novel, not the film.

The film added some extra elements, you know, in order to be more entertaining and I think it worked extraordinarily well. But at the beginning of the novel, Dorothy and her dog are living in Kansas. And yes, she's an orphan, but she does have relationships with her aunt and her uncle. It's a kind of a gray world, though. You know, it's not very open. There's not a lot of color to it. And the language that Baum uses is very much in that grayish kind of. She lived in a gray world.

But it was complicated. And she was able to navigate the world in a way that she's able to survive and thrive and. And it's meaningful to her. She has close relationships to her uncle and her aunt. They might not be perfect, but it's complicated, but it works. So generally, if you look at Dorothy's life at the very beginning of the story, it's objectively positive. She has enough food. She has people to take care of her. She has a companion dog. You know, it's not super great, but it's not terrible either. And so subjectively, in terms of the way Dorothy is viewing the world, it's positive, too, right? She does have these relationships. She does like to be with her dog. So this first quadrant is the protagonist in their state of being, and she has a specific worldview that things are going to work out. I've got my aunt, my uncle. I was an orphan. Now things are good. I've got my dog, things are okay.

So in this quadrant, the whole point is to get an unexpected event to drop into her life such that she is required to go on a journey. She has to level up her cognitive capacity in order to mature. This is basically a maturation story. This is the story of what it's like to grow up, and it's very hazardous to grow up.

And that's why it's an action story, because basically what Baum has done is to take the internal anxieties of being a young person trying to navigate an extraordinarily complex world and externalize them into an action story. So the cyclone literally knocks her unconscious. So immediately we've got life and death stakes right, you know, right in front of us. And throughout the story, life and death plays the part. It's the major action of the story. Will Dorothy survive? Will her companions survive? Will she attain her goals? Will she have to, you know, kill the Wicked Witch of the west in order to. To attain her goals? All of these questions arise, and the value at stake is about life and death. So it's an action story, but underneath those external action qualities, there is this worldview maturation plot. At the beginning of the story, Dorothy really relies upon other people to save her. She is looking for guidance. And her. Her aunt says, get in the. You know, get in the. The shelter of the hole. The tornado hole.

And because the trickster character Toto jumps out of her arms, she's on the way to listening to her aunt. And then she has to abandon her aunt because she cares about her dog, right? So her innate ability to be empathetic to other living things is the quality that will actually teach her how to mature. So it's the inciting incident that will move her into another realm. And that realm is the realm inside her mind. So, you know, we can objectively look at the Wonderful wizard of Oz and say, oh, well, Dorothy is in dreamland the entire story. This is basically a dream story where she's been knocked out by something in the cyclone, she's unconscious, and they're waiting for her back on Earth to wake up. And what we've done is enter the world of Dorothy's mind the minute.

You know, she wakes up in the Munchkin world.

So anyway, this first quadrant, you can see the beginning hook is establishing the worldview 1.0 of the character and then dropping into that world an invisible fear gorilla. And in this case, it's the cyclone. So it's invisible. It's an invisible gorilla to Dorothy because she doesn't even understand what it means to mature.

So what makes it so? Because what I've wondered is, because this is the inciting incident of the entire story, so it has to tie to.

Something bigger. So.

I don't know, I'm having trouble wrapping my head around the whole invisible gorilla thing. So is it because, like, something's happened and she sees it as a cyclone that knocked her out or took her house or whatever, put her in danger, but really it's a thing that's going to change everything for her life.

That's exactly it. So she sees it. She doesn't even really see it, right. She gets knocked unconscious.

So the thing that knocks her unconscious, she has to metabolize before she can wake up. This is thematically what the story is about.

So, yeah, I don't want to get too woo woo here, but there are the. The external, objective facts of the universe, and random things can happen that knock us off of our path. We don't see them coming.

And our initial reaction is, oh my gosh, that thing. I'm never going to get over it. It's going to be horrible. This thing is going to ruin my life. So, for example.

You know, there are so many stories about people who have had tragedies fall upon them, like they lose a finger. And there's a famous story I think is World War One where.

A wonderful piano player, like concert pianist, gets drafted. I think he was. I don't even know what. What nationality he was, and it doesn't matter. So he gets drafted to fight in World War I, and he's a concert pianist, and he has to serve his country. So he goes to the front lines. He's, you know, he's barely hanging on. A mortar shell comes in and it blows off his hand.

So he survives the war, and for whatever reason, he loses his hand. And his entire life has been built upon his ability to be a concert pianist.

So when he comes back from the war, he's devastated. And this unexpected event that dropped in has seemingly destroyed his life. But what happens? Well, instead of it destroying his life, what he became was a brilliant performer with a left hand, and he created chamber music that people with only one hand can create and play that is as beautiful and different and incredible as it is with somebody with two hands. So that is an example where some external event that seemingly has destroyed someone's life actually becomes the impetus for the creation of a whole new art form.

So it's sort of like you ask people, it's like that old song, regrets. I've had a few, you know, and it's because the things that challenge us, the things that completely shatter the way we view ourselves, are the very things that transform us into different creative forces.

So the cyclone, in terms of Dorothy is this external event that literally could take, you know, it's about to kill her. But it doesn't kill her because when she is unconscious, she's traveling into the realms of her own mind, and she is going through the maturation process in her mind, and she cannot get home until she completes that journey. And it's wonderful when Glinda at the very end of the story, says to her, oh, by the way, you've been able to go home from the beginning. All you had to do was click your heels and say whatever she says. I think I wish I'm home again, or whatever. There's no place like home.

There's no place like home.

And so what does that say? Well, she always had the power within her to be home, but it's not until she releases her reliance upon third party figures to. To deliver all of her wants and needs to her that she's able to do that. So I don't want to, you know, I don't want to get too deeply into my full analysis of it, but, you know, when we are children, we. We rely upon our. Our parents and our mentors. And our grandparents and all these people, when we have a problem, we run to our parents and we go, hey, I've got this problem. I've got a paper due on Thursday and I don't know what to do. Right? And what does your parent do? They say, oh, well, let's walk through it. Let's sit down and figure this thing out. And guess what happens. It's through that process that the mentee starts to embed and embody the skill set that the parent, the mentor, has that can solve a problem for them. But guess what happens when we mature? We discover that our parents are not gods, that they don't have all of the best solutions, that the things that they've taught us might not work all the time. And that's a terrible psychic blow.

It basically means these people who say they care about me can't solve all my problems. Boy. And in fact, everything that they've taught me doesn't work anymore. Now, obviously I'm exaggerating and catastrophizing, but that's actually the way you mature. You have to literally reject the worldview of your parents.

In order to create your own. And so as a parent, I. I'm going through this process myself on the other side. And it's not pleasant. But you do have to understand that when you're, when your kid reaches a certain age and they go, no, I'm not going to do that. No, you're stupid. No, I. Blah. And it's not that they don't love you or care about you. It's that they are maturing. They are discovering that you are not omnipotent and that you can't solve their problems for them, that they're the ones who have to write the paper, that daddy can't write the paper for them. I can give you some general principles that, that have worked for me, but they might not work for you because your brain is different than mine. So this is what happens in the Wonderful wizard of Oz is that Dorothy starts to gain the capacity to solve her own problems and she starts to be able to level up her cognitive capacities such that she has a completely new worldview by the end of the story. And that's what the heroic journey is all about. It's about changing our minds so that we can attune to reality in a better way. And the reality is we are responsible for our agency, each and every one of us. And it is a. It is ridiculous to hand over your agency to another person and expect them to solve your problems for you. That's the maturation process. Now we have a lot of people in the world who as adults and by, by years who are still handing over their agency to third parties believing that those third parties are going to solve their problems for them. But guess what? Dorothy in the wizard of Oz she figures out she's the only one who can solve her problems. The wizard of Oz can't do it for her.

So the inciting incident, I mean this is the first step in the 20 steps.

But.

But it also doesn't have to be like huge, right? It can just be almost like a bump because I think like a cyclone obviously is this huge thing that comes into your life and can cause damage. But like the one that comes into my mind is this show called Run that I saw. I think it's an HBO show I watched a while back. And the inciting incident was just a one word text message. You know, that just careens the woman's entire life into chaos. And, and so you're just looking for anything. I just think that. I just think that's interesting the way of looking at it of like, you know, as the person crafting this story that you've just completely destroyed this person's life with this action. But the person who's in the story thinks I just need to solve this problem to get back to normal.

That's exactly it. That's exactly it. And you're right. Like the beginning of the Hobbit, the inciting incident of the Hobbit is some guy knocks on another guy's door and says hi.

Right? But it happens to be a wizard named Gandalf who has come to get Bilbo to get out of his funk, right? His complacent funk. He just wants to eat all day and hang out in the snugginess of his hobbit hole. And that's what everybody else does. So why should he go on adventures? There's no point in going on adventures when we can, you know, be snug and cozy in our own little home. But Gandalf is there. He's a mentor. He comes. He's a force of chaos, right? He's, he's actually a. He cares, right? So the mentor figure as inciting incident is doing something like, come on Gandalf. If he really wanted to just take care of, you know, the dwarfs problem and Smaug, you know, he'd probably call up his other wizard friends and they'd go kick the. Out of Smaug. You know, they could probably take him out and they can divide up the jewels and Bilbo doesn't have to leave his house. Right? So Gandalf is there for a purpose and it has nothing to do with getting jewels back for the Dwarves.

Anyway, so the inciting incident. And I think you really nailed something there, Tim, when you said the storyteller is the one who has all of the answers. So Baum was thinking, what is it that I could use that would be interesting to a child? So there would be lots of action on the page.

That is actually underneath that. Teaching children about what it's like to grow up. That's a pretty abstract problem to solve. How can I get children to understand it's really hard to grow up? And that parents are going to disappoint them and things are going to seem ridiculous and horrible and all this crap that you have to do in order to grow up seems pointless and meaningless. How can I tell a story that can embed within a little child what they're in for in the future? This is like, you know, I'm extrapolating what Frank Baum might have been thinking, but he's like, I know, I'll have, like, a big tornado. No, better. A cyclone will descend on this little girl's life and it will knock her unconscious. And she will have to go into a magical world where I can play around with physics and all the. I can have wizards, I can have witches. I can have all kinds of stuff there because it's another world. And all of that stuff can be in the mind of the girl. And it's the process by which she will learn how to become an adult. And then when she does learn that ultimate lesson, she'll be able to wake up, and now she's an adult. So at the beginning of the story, a little girl is knocked unconscious. When she wakes up, she's an adult. That's the story. And guess what? Thematically, that means things are going to happen that seem devastating to you, that almost kill you. However, if you use your mind and apply your cognitive capacities of your brain, you can metabolize that thing and actually convert it into good.

So that all of the horrible crap. Like, I was listening to an interview with Eddie Vedder, the. The lead singer of Pearl Jam on the Howard Stern show last week, and Howard Stern's, you know, whatever you think about him, he's a wonderful interviewer, and he just always gets to the crux of things. So he literally says to Eddie Vedder, eddie, I can't believe your childhood. I mean, your mom didn't Tell you who your real father was. All this horrible. Then they abandoned you, and you had to live by yourself when you were 15, San Diego, when they moved to Chicago. How did you ever overcome all that? I mean, geez, I would have jumped off a bridge if all that stuff happened to me. And Eddie Vedder said, well, you know what? I just kind of thank God I had a guitar. Because what I did is I took all of that externally, really not so great stuff that was unexpected for a little boy like me. And I converted it into music. And when I write songs, guess what happens? These things come to me in these images.

That are about that pain. But guess what? What comes out the other side is a song like alive. And Howard was like, oh, okay, I get it now. So what you can. You can take the unexpected negative events of your life and transform them into new creations. And all the while you're doing that, you transform yourself into a much higher level capacity thinker. And guess what the heroic journey 2.0 is all about? It's how to do that very thing. How to consciously wake up, accept some really bad stuff that happens, and see what you can do with that. How can you transform some negative stuff or positive stuff into things that are even more creative and interesting? How do you bring something new out of something old? That was difficult.

And it's a brilliant construction that is embedded in all of the masterworks that we. We come to know and love. We just don't explicitly understand the trajectory. That circum. Circumnavigation that Carl Jung was talking about, the individuation process. We just don't understand that that thing is inside of all of these stories, from the Hobbit to the wonderful wizard of Oz to Pride and Prejudice to Harry Potter to Lord of the Rings, and on and on and on and on. But this. This monomythic idea of how to level up our cognitive capacity and transform ourselves into more potent actors on the stage of life.

Is really, you know, in my estimation, it's like the super duper.

Information that we all need to remember and enact every day of our lives.

Okay, so that's the inciting incident. What's the second one?

Okay, so at the beginning of the beginning, Hook, the character has a complicated worldview, okay? Now when we move into the second quadrant, we are going to still have that worldview 1.0, which is positive, right? Because Dorothy has a set of skills that she uses and has used to work for her. So the transition from the first quadrant into the second quadrant is the Movement from the ordinary world of Worldview 1.0 into the extraordinary world or the unknown world. So Dorothy moves from the known world of Kansas into the second quadrant, the unknown world of the land of the Munchkins, or the Emerald City. I forget. Or the Land of Oz. Right.

So.

That transition means that she is going to continue to use the positive nature of her worldview 1.0 to solve her problems. However, she's now in different objective universe, so the objective nature of her world is now negative. Okay? So the reason why it's negative is that no matter how great a circumstance is, when we go into an unknown environment, our bodies just tell us to beware. So we have a lot of a negative emotional input when we go into an unknown place. So when. The first day you go to a new school when you're a kid is extraordinarily negative objectively, because you don't know where the bathroom is, right? And you're afraid of asking anybody, and you don't know what your teachers want from you, and you don't know how to work a lock on your locker. And you. And on and on. And you. You haven't been around these other kids who are from across town before. So that environment is unknown to you, and you get a lot of negative input because of it. So this is what the second quadrant of the heroic journey is about, is that the protagonist has to leave their comfort zone and go into an unknown world. So subjectively, they still have a reliance upon the way they're viewing the world. Right? So Dorothy still has the skill set of navigating Kansas, but now she's in a different world, so what is she going to do? It's all she knows is her original worldview 1.0, so she's going to keep using that skill set even in an unknown environment. So let's say, like, I remember when the first day I went into junior high school.

You know, it was terrifying because it was. I grew up in a very large place, and so my small elementary school was one of like 12 elementary schools in the community, and all 12 of those elementary schools fed into one junior high school. So, you know, I only knew 1/12 of the people in my class, and on top of that, they got rid of home rooms. You know, like when you're a little kid, you stay in the same room the whole time. That's for a reason, right? They don't want little kids having to go to different rooms or too many rooms because it's too overwhelming. But when you hit junior high school, it's like, okay, here's your schedule. And you're like, what? And then you're like, find your way. Find your way. And what you soon discover is, like, you ask some older kid, and you go, I don't know where room 212, 223 is. And what does the older kid do for fun? They. They. They do something negative, right? They're like, oh, that means you have to. You have to get on that bus down there and take it to, you know. And so you discover that the things that you, you know, you just ask a simple question of some friendly face in a. In a hallway. You can't even imagine that somebody would lie to you.

But they do.

So you're applying worldview 1.0 in a negative environment that objectively turns negative very quickly.

So that's what this quadrant, this second quadrant is all about, is that the protagonist is using Worldview 1.0 tools in order to navigate an extraordinary unknown landscape that they may or may not work in. So, of course, the first thing that happens when Dorothy gets into the Land of Oz is that the Munchkins come, and then the Good Witch of the.

North or south, one of them.

She shows up. And the first thing Dorothy says is, can you send me home? Like, just ask the nice lady to drive you home and everything will be fine. Right? That's a Worldview 1.0 tool for Dorothy. And she's like, oh, no, I don't. I've never heard of Kansas. And she's like, what? You don't know where Kansas is? So.

That'S the acclimation to the extraordinary world is the second quadrant. And it's very disturbing to the protagonist because the tools that they've used before are starting to fail them. And so what happens is that they just.

Go through every skill that they have in order to solve their problems, and they're barely moving forward at all. So at the end of the second quadrant, you know, actually, like.

She goes on the yellow brick road, and then she has to just follow that. That road. What is the road representative of, but just her fundamental belief, Geez, they told me to keep moving forward on this one road, so that's what I'm gonna do. So it's her foundational worldview 1.0 skill set, is to, what, follow directions to the letter? And that's what she does. She just follows that yellow brick road, and along the way, she starts to acquire.

Different components. She starts to acquire friends that enable her to start navigating the road a little Bit better. But these. These companions are in search of things themselves.

So it's this beautiful metaphor where the first person she. She runs into is the Scarecrow. Now, the Scarecrow is. Says he doesn't have a brain, he's stupid, and so all he needs is a brain. And she's like, well, I'm going to go home if you want to tag along. Now, what does the Scarecrow represent but Dorothy's ability to have her own ideas and thoughts and brains and problem solutions. And she's not aware that she actually has a brain. Right? So the Scarecrow saying I don't have a brain is thematically about Dorothy discovering that she does have a brain.

And similarly, she then meets the Tin Woodman who cannot make any actions, right? He needs to be oiled up, and he's in search of a heart. Well, why does he want a heart? Well, a heart is an emotional system. He wants to feel emotions. That's the second part of our psyche. It's our emotional systems that enable us to react to stimulus. So she is not able thematically to react emotionally to negative stimulus until she brings the Tin Woodman with her on the journey. And lastly, she meets the lion. Now, the lion says he doesn't have any courage. That's the third thing that the psyche requires. The ability to step into situations that do not have certain outcomes, but to apply agency. Anyway.

So once she gets that lion, now she's got all three parts of her psyche walking with her on her way to solve her big problem, which is to go home.

To go home, meaning to find the place of comfort and a new worldview. Home is when you feel like your worldview is working.

Anyway, I'm going way over the. Oh, that's.

No, I'm thinking through this too, because it's like. Well, because in writing the book I'm working on now, the second book in the threshing, the interesting. The part that's like, really stood out to me that I've thought the most about is that middle point of the Middle build, right? So the. When we switch from Middle Build one to Middle Build Tool two, where the. It's like that shift where the protagonist one decides, like, okay, I have to go forward. I can't go back. And that is that the Switch 2, when they realize, like, okay, my 1.0 version isn't working anymore. I have to develop a 2.0 version.

It's not that they. They actually figure that out.

What happens is that at the. The transitional moment, the. The liminal space between middle build one and middle build two is the moment when the worldview 1.0 shatters. So it's not like they are thinking through it. It's just like everything breaks.

So at the moment for Dorothy, when she.

What's the midpoint climax?

It's when she discovers, in my estimation, the big, big climactic moment of the wizard of Oz is when she finds out that Oz is a fraud.

Yeah, I thought that because when you're. When you were talking about the Good Witch at the beginning, she. She trusts the Good Witch at the beginning, and then at the end, she realizes the person she was told to trust isn't trustworthy.

Well, I think it's.

I think the Good Witch at the very beginning serves as sort of the Gandalfian figure for.

Dorothy because there are people in the world who aren't fraudulent who understand. Like a good parent is going to understand. Yeah. My kid's basically going to reject everything that I've taught them since they were born, and I need to be okay with that because that is a natural process by which they need to construct their own worldview by themselves. I can't say, say no, son, listen to me, or no, daughter, you're going to do what I tell you because I know best. Because that's not going to work. Because guess what? Nobody knows best. There is no best. There's a context. Right. There are different tools that we use under different situations in different times of our life. And so you can't just download somebody's worldview and your life will turn out well. My worldview worked out really well for me. It's probably not going to work out so well for my kids because I was raised, what, in a different time and place.

So the things that I know aren't going to be really that helpful to them because they weren't exposed to the environments that I was exposed to. They are exposed to environments that I had no idea about. Right. So I can't say to them, you just do what I say and everything will be fine for you. No, I have to say to them, I love you. When things get rough, you come to me and I'm going to apply all the energy that I have to help, but that's all I can do. I can't guarantee that you're going to get an A on this paper. I can give you some help, but I can't guarantee it because I'm not writing your damn paper for you. That's your. That's your problem to solve. Right.

So Glinda or the Good Witch is the Gandolfian figure at the beginning of the Wonderful wizard of Oz. She knows she can't just say to Dorothy, oh, just click your heel. Put on those shoes. Click your heels three times and say, I want to go home. There's no place like home. And then you'll be fine. Why didn't she do that? Because she knew.

Dorothy needs to solve her own problems. Dorothy needs her own ability to solve her problems in real time. And what can Dorothy do if all she relies upon are other people to solve her problems? This is a journey that she must go on to learn that she has a gentic capacity that is really powerful.

And that's the point of the heroic journey. It's to teach us. Hey, hey, hey. You're no loser. You've got capacities that you can't even imagine you have. So guess what you gotta do. You gotta keep breaking the way you see the world, because it's not perfect. Your worldview that works for you today is probably not gonna work for you tomorrow. In fact, you're probably being held back by. By what you believe today because guess what? It was formed by everything from the past. The future is going to bring all kinds of stuff that you can't anticipate, you never will be able to predict. So wouldn't it be good to be able to break and reframe the way you see the world in real time? What if you were able to not hold on to things that are keeping you back from discovering new truth? Wouldn't that be cool? That's what the heroic journey is about. This is teaching you. This is how people break the way they see the world. And guess what happens when they give into it and they go, you know what? I don't know what the hell's going to happen. But you know what? I've got to be at class at 9am so that's what I'm going to do. I'm going to show up for class with my paper. I don't know if it's an A or a D, but I gave it everything I had. And I'm going to turn in my paper and we're going to see what happens. There's no guarantee. My dad's pretty smart, but they might not. You know, the advice he gave me might be terrible for this teacher because she has a different point of view. She might be trying to teach me something that my dad doesn't know. Cool. Well, maybe I'll learn that. So that's the process by which you become heroic is you keep going on even when you don't know what the hell is going to happen next. And guess what happens when you embrace that is that things are more exciting in your life. Nobody wants to live a perfectly plotted story where everything works out. Nobody wants to read that story. Who would want to live it? So that's what the Heroic Journey 2.0. So it's this ability to surprise the audience.

Because we all go through this stuff. So at that liminal space between middle build 1 and middle build 2 is the moment when the entire system crashes. And guess what the character has to do? They have one of two choices. They quit and run home.

But guess what? He can never go home again. Can't go back to the past. Damn. Or you can recreate the past and do your best. That's what happened to Jay Gatsby. Or, and it's anti heroic to do that. Or you go on. And you go on in a way that you adapt to the context of the things that are happening right in front of you. You don't go in with preconceived notions of how you're going to get back home. You just deal. You put one foot in front of the other and you do your best. That is the heroic journey. That is heroism. Heroism is not getting all the treasure. Heroism is simply recognizing there's a lot of chaos in the universe, but there's a lot of order in the universe. So what you need to do is to try and make things more orderly while dealing with chaos. And that's the Heroic journey. It's that simple. We must go on even when we don't think that there's any point to it. Because guess what? We create the point to it. It's our job to create the meaning. There's no meaning for us to discover. We have to make it. And that's what Carl Jung was trying to say with this individuation process. And that's what he discovered in all these great stories across cultures. And that's what The Heroic Journey 2.0 is. To just get a little higher resolution, to understand that midpoint climax is the moment when the worldview of the protagonist or protagonist just shatters. It's the point of no return. It's like, oh, I'm screwed. Like, I can't go back to Kansas because I don't know how to go home. And I don't want to go on because.

Geez, what's the point? I'm never going to find a way home to Kansas. So when she finds out Oz can't send her back to Kansas. That's her dilemma. The crisis is, oh geez, what do I do? I can't go back to Kansas because there's no clear way and I can't go to Kansas.

So I just have to keep going on trying to solve these problems by myself instead of relying upon some fraudy wizard who's gonna, you know, solve all my problems with me.

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Sam.