Quadrant 3 of the Hero's Journey 2.0

Hello, and welcome to the StoryGrid 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 StoryGrid, the author of the book StoryGrid, and an editor with over 25 years experience. In this episode, we continue walking through the Hero's Journey 2.0 and how this is going to apply to your work and my work moving forward. This week, specifically, we look at that third quadrant. So in the past, we've talked about the beginning hook, the middle build, and the ending payoff. And now instead of looking at it as three pieces, we're looking at it as four, and we really dive into that third piece, and it's really helpful for me. I just finished the manuscript core my novel, and I'm going to be going back through it, spreadsheeting it, and looking at it through these different lenses. And so looking at this alongside of that has been really helpful for me. So I think you'll enjoy this episode. So let's jump in and get started.

So, Sean, this morning I finished the first draft of the second book in the threshing series. Wow.

Congrats. It's great.

Yeah, it. It's just over 90,000 words.

Yeah. And it's. It was one of those, like, I finished it, and then I was like, okay, well.

What now so do. Is this. Is this where, like, I should go ahead and. Because we've talked about a couple different things.

Like, and anyway, should I be. Should I go through and, like, spreadsheet it first? Do you want to go ahead and read it? Do you want me to go back and do you want me to fill out the full scap, like, where. What's next steps?

I think the neck. The next step for you would be to spreadsheet it, which is a bitch, I know, but. And then just add that extra column for, you know, tweaks notes to yourself, and don't fix anything. Just make the notes. So if you find that you're not right having a value shift in the scene, don't worry about it. Just say, need to, you know, check out five commandments for this scene. And then when you're done with that, then you can send me the spreadsheet and the manuscript simultaneously. And then I can plow through it pretty quickly and then give you my global thoughts.

Okay, I will get started on that today.

Good.

Yeah. Great. So I'll get Started on that. And then a couple weeks ago we were going through the Hero's Journey 2.0, because this is also anticipation of this will be kind of the first novel that we've run through this lens. And so I think we left off after the second quadrant. And so we're going to dive into the third quadrant of the hero's journey of those moments.

So again, I'm just going to review the beginning hook of the story. In The Heroic Journey 2.0, our protagonist, or, you know, protagonists have a very workable worldview. So just to review what a worldview is, again, it's. It's two components. The first component is just to having a general understanding of the way the world works, right? So it's like your model of the universe.

So that's generally understanding. Well, if I go to college, then I might be recruited for a good job. And then once I get a good job, then I'll be able to start a life and maybe have a family. That's a worldview of basically looking at the world as a means by which the way it works, the second part of it is how you go about collecting knowledge, right? So how you formulate new ideas, how you integrate new information into that worldview. So.

Generally what we've discovered, you know, what I've discovered over the last couple of years is that in contemporary society, the way we acquire knowledge is really skewed to only two of the four kinds of knowledge creation. So the first one is what I call propositional knowledge. And it's not just me. There's a wonderful series and I plug it all the time because I think it's brilliant. Called Awakening from the meaning crisis on YouTube by a professor at the University of Toronto named John Vervake. And it's. I go back to it again and again and again because his insights are just so wonderful. So I didn't make up all this stuff myself. I really attune to what he's talking about and I completely agree with him. All right, so propositional knowledge is the kind of things that we sort of figure out in school, right? Two plus two equals four. That's a proposition. And it's all this stuff that we see as someone who has a lot of knowledge would be, somebody who would be able to rifle off facts very quickly or, oh, they're so brilliant because they understand the, you know, when you know, all kinds of kind of factual stuff, historical moments in time, all. All those kinds of things, those big propositional understandings, all the stuff you learn in school. And you take tests on, et cetera. So this is the beginning, Hook, is when the protagonist or the group of protagonists is really, really embedded and believing in full, full heartedly in their propositions.

So the reason why they do is because they work right. So a character at the beginning of the story has a working worldview and it's based upon propositional knowledge. If I go to school and go to college and I get the thing and I get the degree, then I can become a professional and then I can have a house and blah blah, blah. So that's a worldview that a protagonist like in the movie the Graduate. I know I'm dating myself, but it's a terrific movie. It's based on a novel and it's about the story of this guy who just graduates from college. He has all the propositional knowledge he could possibly want. And the beginning of the story is he's just graduated from college and he goes back to his hometown.

And he's basically been programmed to understand the world in a particular way. That's the beginning, Hook. Now what happens at the beginning, Hook, is that something extraordinarily unexpected happens and that drives the protagonist or the group of protagonists into.

Their worldview starting to break down. So in the case of the Graduate, the young man is seduced by his parents friend, so she's an older woman. And it completely sends his world into topsy turvy because you don't expect your parents friend to seduce you after you get back from college. So his whole world is completely kind of thrown in topsy turvy. Now the second quadrant is all about procedural knowledge. And what procedural knowledge is knowing how to do certain things.

And doing those things until they fail to get you what they want. So for the example of the graduate, he falls into an affair with this older woman and he goes into an extraordinary world. So he moves away from his suburban house with his parents. Now he's renting hotel rooms to have an affair with his parents friend. And so that's a very strange place. But he knows the mechanics of a sexual relationship and so that's what he does. He goes through the procedures, the procedural knowledge of establishing some sort of relationship with another human being. And it turns out that it's a disaster.

So at the end of the second quadrant, our character now hits the third quadrant and this is the place where the worldview of the past is completely shattered. He finds out he actually goes on a date with his lover's daughter. As strange as this is, he doesn't want to go out on the date with the lover's daughter. But he does. And guess what happens? He falls in love with her. And that sends his world even deeper into crisis because he's not supposed to be falling in love with his lover's daughter. So this is a very, very strange moment for the character. And what he ends up doing is starting to get more and more outrageous. And he starts doing crazy things and he stops listening to his parents and he sort of fractures his entire worldview. Until the bottom of the WorldView in the third quadrant is when he realizes that his life doesn't seem to be very meaningful. The relationship he's having with his parents friend turns out to be really destructive. She accuses him of raping her, which makes him. His whole world is completely shattered. Meanwhile, he's trying to get.

His lover's daughter to fall in love with him and she is engaged to another man.

So everything is not working for him. And so what happens is he hits bottom and he's lost the meaning of his existence and he's just basically ready to give up.

And this is the moment in the story when all the objective qualities of the character's life are just so negative. The negation of the negation. They're worse than possibly could be imagined.

So not. I mean, and just what I described. To be accused of abusing another human being while also being in love with that human being's daughter while also betraying your parents.

Everything your parents have sacrificed for you is just everything possibly terrible is going wrong for. Plus the woman that he loves, he thinks he's disgusting and doesn't want to be around him.

So his worldview is completely crashed. And it's at this moment where he hits, you know, the all is lost moment. And this is what happens in the third quadrant in the Heroic Journey 2.0. It's the moment when the worldview of the character completely fractures. And so their propositions and their procedures no longer work for them. In fact, they're getting them deeper and deeper into trouble. Everything that they used to do to be able to make things okay for them no longer works. So the third quadrant is all about the acquisition of a third kind of knowledge that we sort of don't really pay too much attention to anymore in our contemporary society. And that's a perspectival shift.

So all that means is having a different perspective to be able to look at the world from a completely different vantage point. And a lot of us fear the perspectival shift because it requires an all is lost moment. It requires our understanding that the way we've constructed our worldview is not perfect. In fact, it's very flawed. Everyone's worldview is extraordinarily flawed. That's because the world is constantly changing all the time. So we can't have a perfectly attuned worldview to a universe that is constantly in flux. All we can do is to adapt to the changes as they arrive and as they come to us. But it's extraordinarily difficult for us to do that because it makes us lose. It makes us give up the things that we always held dear. Now, I can really relate to this right now because I'm in the process of moving my home. And what happens when you, when you have to move is you have to get rid of a lot of stuff because you really need to evaluate what you're holding on to. So as you know, we were talking about this earlier. I've gone through, I think, two or three dumpsters full of stuff that is no longer viable for me to be dragging or dragging around in my life. Now, of course, I have my wife and my three kids too. So it's not just my loss, it's my wife's loss and my kids loss all combined at the same time. So this is why moving is one of the most stressful things we can do. And you don't really think about. You're like, well, what's so bad? We're moving into a new house. It's going to be great. Everything's going to be changed. It's going to be different and fun. But no, you've got to shed a lot of your past in order to move into the future. And this is exactly what goes on in the third quadrant of a story. Only it's psychological baggage that has to be shed.

And here's, here's the real kicker.

We Homo sapiens have something called loss aversion. And it really makes a lot of sense because back in the days when we didn't have running water or electricity, to throw something away was probably pretty stupid because a lot of people didn't have a lot of things. And to lose something could be life threatening. So say you lost your winter coat, that would be a big problem way back when, when winter coats required actually killing an animal, skinning it, tanning the hide, sewing it together, a very, very long process from from zero to winter coat. And when you lose the coat, it can cause your death. So that is baked deeply into our DNA. So just like we are born with the proclivity to be able to pick up language and sounds and facial expressions. So are we born with loss aversion? It is deep in our DNA. So we can say, oh, it's no big deal, that old trophy that I won when I was seven years old. And. But then you start thinking about when you were seven years old and you won that trophy and how meaningful and important it was to you back then, and how when you look at it, you say, wow, I was, you know, I really had the whole. My whole life in front of me back then. And look at this great moment. And you gotta. What do you got to do? You gotta throw it in the dumpster because you can't drag that stuff around. So this is the moment in the story when the protagonist or the group of protagonists realizes, I've got to burn away and throw away a lot of the things that used to help me get around in this world. And it hurts. It's death. It's literally death. We have to kill off some ideas in our minds. And so that's what happens in the Graduate. He decides.

I am going to throw away the suburban life. I am going to reject everything my parents have told me, and I am going to go and demand that the woman that I love recognize me and tell me once and for all that she will never be with me. And that's the moment when he has his revelation. And he says to himself, well, the only thing that I have meaningful in my life right now is this very, very implicit love I have for this other person. Now, she has told me that she hates me and she doesn't want to have anything to do with me, but I'm going to go ruin her wedding anyway. And that's kind of what this guy decides to do.

So the. The third quadrant really hits that all is lost moment. And it. It's a reckoning. It's a reckoning with meaning or meaninglessness. It's a reckoning with what is the meaning of my life? How am I going to spend the rest of my life? What perspective am I going to adopt that will be more meaningful than my prior perspective? So his prior perspective in the Graduate was, as long as I go to a great Ivy League school and become a track star, then I will get a job in plastics and I will be able to have a nice house in Ventura, California, too. Or Tarzana. I'm sorry, Ventura is the highway.

And when he comes back from college, he just sees that that is not going to do it for him. And so he has to come to a new Perspective. So that is the third quadrant, and it's the.

Moment of real shift of worldview for the protagonist and the audience when they get to this moment in the story. It's extraordinarily cathartic for them. And so the entire, you know, ending payoff of the story, the fourth quadrant, is really important to them. They want to see what's going to happen. But this is the moment when they really, you know, say to themselves, oh, my God, this story is so true. I don't know what. What it is about it, but it just rings so true. That's the way the world is, and it's the moment when we have to throw away things that are no longer working and allow for something within us to bubble up on its own and emerge that enables us to have a better attunement to reality.

All right.

I'm not sure how to get us back to the third quadrant.

How do you do it? Right. Like, what's. What. What are the techniques by which.

That you're able as the storyteller, to understand the third quadrant? Right. So let's say you can look at this in terms.

Well, because.

Go ahead.

Well, because in the past, we've talked about it as the beginning hook, middle building payoff. That's what we've done for years. And then earlier this year, we split, you know, you split the middle build into the first half and the second half, which was really helpful for me to see that point because.

Yeah, the.

Way you talk about it, of, like, I'm still hanging on to my old way of doing things, just trying to, like, patch the leaks in the dam. And then after the middle point, when we flip into the second half of the middle build is when the whole dam just crashes down and I've got to start rebuilding something new. And.

And so we kind of got through that second quadrant. But now I'm curious what you see as the, you know, the points in this third quadrant, like, how do I.

How do I start rebuilding that world? Because I think, again, the middle build is, you know, the longest, kind of hardest log of the book. And so if everything's come crashing down for our protagonist, how do we start rebuilding that back up?

Well, this is. That's a great question. And this is the moment in the story where you can actually allow for.

Things to bubble up sort of almost out of nothing.

So, for example.

Sometimes when we hit rock bottom and we go, I just don't know, you know, what I'm going to do.

You know, and you went through this when you Wrote running down a dream. Like when you were. When you were working and building your company, and you hit this moment, and I believe I asked you at one point what was the all is lost moment for you that had you change your perspective about what you were doing with your life? And you told me something about. I think Candace was at the grocery store. She gave the credit card, and. And the grocery store denied the credit card, and she had to call you and say, honey, the credit card's not working. Is. Is something going on that I need to know about? And that's kind of like the all is lost moment that you hit, right? And so at that point, you had to. Everything that, you know, you were. You were basically, like, robbing Peter to pay Paul. And things were, you know, your. Your family. You were able to put food on the table. The dam was breaking, but you were plugging all the holes, and now the whole thing came crashing down. Now, Candace was like, hey, man, you got a level with me? What's going on? And so what choice did you have? You were just like, I can't go on. There's nothing I can do to fix this problem right now. Right? So what you had to do was feel it. Right? You had to allow your. Your body.

To actually react to the fact that you weren't living up to your responsibilities and that you were failing people that you loved. Right? Right. So at that moment, you didn't have any freaking answers. All you had was a recognition, a revelation that you were not living up to your promise. You were not the Tim Grohl that you wished to be. So guess what happened in that moment for you. Now, you didn't know this happened, because this is the miraculous part of being a Homo sapiens, is that once you recognized and you are truthful with yourself.

You made a choice. And the choice was, well, I can't run away from this. I just have to go on. I have to keep moving forward, and I have to figure out a new way, because the old way ain't working.

So that's what you did. You started to rebuild from the foundational stuff. And you said to yourself, well, what do I know? What am I good at? Well, I can. I have a degree in computer program. I know how to do that. I know how to fix websites. I know you write. And so you built.

How I can't allow myself to go home until I get a new client. So what you did is you went from your very, very. From nothing. You had zero. You believed that you were found out to be a Fraud that you weren't doing the things you were supposed to do. And something novel emerged within you that said, no, you're not Tim, you can, you can handle this. Just take it one step at a time. What are you going to do? What's the first thing that you're going to do? And from that foundation, you're like, I am not the kind of guy who's going to let down my family any longer. I know that I can do this. And you just did it. So this is the moment in the third quadrant when the character comes to that realization. And the beautiful thing for a storyteller is to just understand what that moment is. And we all have them. Every single one of us hits these all is lost moments every now and then.

Usually, you know, it's like a pattern. And there are moments when you become more mature and you get, you. You transition into the next level of wisdom.

So prior to the moment, you were just sort of like, hey, I'll take care of it tomorrow. You were like, you're like the Homer Simpson character. Like, I really feel sorry for that. That guy next, you know, tomorrow has to pick up all the problems that I'm doing. Homer Simpson of tomorrow has got a hell of a life in front of him. And then you mature it and then you're like, well, I'm not that guy anymore. I have to do this stuff. So these are moments of maturation. This is why, you know, a lot of stories are not only about worldview shifts. They're maturing into a deeper, deeper wisdom. So the heroic journey is the process by which we also become more wise. We learn things, we discover our authentic being, and in that process, we become more wise. And we also enable the entire species to see what it means to become wise. It's not about.

Going to the right school and getting the right grades.

Wisdom is much wisdom cultivation is about understanding these different ways in which we learn and to go through a cycle such that we can build upon each one of those levels of knowledge. Now the last one is participatory knowledge, and that's the one where you enact so you have a new perspective and then you behave with that new perspective in mind. So you don't do the procedures based upon the propositions of your prior worldview. Now a new worldview emerges.

And so the critical moment is in the third quadrant. And this is, this is like right about the liminal space between the third and fourth quadrants. This is the, the emergence of the foundations of the new worldview. And in my Estimation. The foundations of all new worldviews are simply the existential crisis itself. Well, everything is shitty, everything might be meaningless, but what am I going to do? Am I just going to sit here and cry in my beer or am I going to go on? Am I going to try and figure out something else? And the hero goes on. The hero does not cry in his or her beer until they die. They don't say, ah, life's meaningless. I'm just going to not do anything anymore. No, that's anti heroic. What's heroic is to say, well, I'm not really sure what's going to happen next, but I know that if I don't do anything and if I don't try, then I'm not going to find any meaning for my life. So the hero simply, and it's the most difficult thing to do, instead of falling into the depths of despair, says to themselves, well, at least I'll. Why don't I try this? I'm going to try this and see what happens, right? So what they do is they start to attune to the natural world in such a way that they look for the response from the environment to their action instead of just like robotically doing a procedure without even checking in with the environment about what the, what the response from the environment is to the action.

So this middle build is extraordinarily difficult because what you have to do is hit, hit a midpoint climax, which is the moment when the worldview shatters, right? So you can hit that midpoint climax with a very positive shattering. Like for example.

In Rocky. I used this the other day in the movie Rocky. The midpoint climax is actually pretty amazing. Rocky is ready for the fight. He's psyched himself up, he's gotten in great shape. He's ready to fight Apollo Creed. And yet he discovers that it's not what it's cracked up to be. He's no longer a bum, that, that's for sure, but he's got a whole other set of problems now. There's resentment in the community. Rocky, oh, look at Rocky. He thinks he's all cool now because he's got a shot at the title. And then he starts to really think about how strong Apollo Creed is. This is the greatest fighter ever. There's no way Rocky's going to beat Apollo Creed. And it's not about confidence, it's about. It's just the practicalities of it. And so he starts to disintegrate. His worldview disintegrates and he hits rock bottom and he realizes, I'm not going to beat the champ. In fact, I've been played as a patsy. So in the movie, he's, you know, he's at the big arena and this is the end of the third quadrant. He's at the arena the night before the fight, and he's looking at the poster and he notices that his shorts are not accurate. He's going to be wearing a different color shorts or something on the banner. And the fight promoter is in the back. And the fight promoter goes, what's going on, Rocky? And he goes, my shorts, they're the wrong color. And the fight promoter goes, well, it doesn't really matter now, does it? And it's when that moment that Rocky realizes that this is all just a big show, that there's no way he's going to beat Apollo Creed. He's just there for entertainment purposes. And so he really tumbles down the spiral there until he gets home and he talks to his girlfriend about it and he says, there's no way I can beat him. I'm just not going to be him. So when he realizes I'm just never going to beat Apollo Creed, it's a real revelation for him that makes his entire worldview just nothing left. But right after that moment, something boils and bubbles up in Rocky. And he says to himself, well, I might not be able to beat him, but I bet I can go all 15 rounds, right? So the authentic nature of Rocky emerges in that moment, and he holds on to it and he builds a new worldview. I might not win this fight, but I'm going to last. I'm going to take every punch this guy can give because I'm a survivor and I'm strong, and that's what I'm going to do. And it's from that moment that the new Rocky emerges, who's not out to win the fight. He's just out to survive the fight. He's gonna go on. He could have quit. He could have been like, I quit. I pulled my hamstring. But he didn't do it. He went on. He went on. So that's really the critical moment. And you know, at that moment when you're watching the movie, you go, oh, my God, I can't wait to see what happens. But, you know, whatever happens, Rocky is gonna be okay. Rocky has found a truth that he didn't have before. He has a completely new perspective. And then the fourth quadrant is, you know, it's the resolution. It's the great dramatic moments that we all love. And we love the entertainment of the fight. But it's the moment right before the fight when the protagonist has to decide, shall I quit or shall I go on? Shall I go on? In a way that is more attuned to the natural environment than in the prior ways? Because kind of like another way to look at this is that the first half of the story, the character is unconscious. They're sort of going through the stages of what it's like to be that person with that worldview. And their responses and the procedures and all the skills and the things that they do are all what they've always done before their habitual programming. And this is how we function as Homo sapiens. We learn a skill, it becomes habitual. We don't think about it anymore. So we can drive 700 miles and not even remember a damn thing that we saw on the road. Because driving is habitual response and habitual behavior. But while we're driving, if a deer jumps in front of our car and we smash our car, what happens? We wake up, right? And we have to deal with that new problem that we hadn't anticipated.

So the second half of the story is the moment of awakening, and the big moment of revelation and awakening to the new self is at the end of the third quadrant, right after all is lost.

And so knowing this as a storyteller is really important. Why? Because now you have these really great mile markers, and, like, say you're three quarters of the way through your story, and nobody's had this big revelatory moment. You got to say, oh, wait a minute. I haven't really sent them down into all is lost. Let me backtrack and see if I can find the midpoint climax when their worldview first shattered, and then all of the shards collect at the bottom, and we follow the character to the bottom. And from that bottom is the emergence. This is complexity theory. It's like when you break everything apart, something amazing can emerge that is stronger and bigger than the sum of its parts. And that's what happens at the end of the third quadrant. It's the heroic moment when the hero decides to go on, even when they don't have any guarantees that what they're going to do in the future is going to work. It's simply saying, there's no other choice. I'm going to go on and make meaning as it comes to me, as opposed to proving a proposition.

And so what are those?

Because previously you had kind of walked through, like, specific things that happen in the quadrant. So what are those? Specific things that happen in the third quadrant because you've talked about kind of the arc through it. But what are those moments that we're looking for to make sure we're making the right kind of progress?

Oh, well, you just use the five commandments of storytelling for each one of these quadrants, right? So you figure out what's the unexpected event, the inciting incident of the third quadrant and the unexpected event. Let's just use Rocky for an example. And I'm going off of memory, and I haven't seen the movie in 20 years, but as I recall, the inciting incident of the third quadrant is when.

Paulie, who is.

Rocky's girlfriend's brother, gets drunk and kicks Adrian out of the house because he's mad, he's resentful, because he's the guy who works at the meat plant. And Rocky is a big shot now. And now he doesn't want to have anything to do with Paulie. He just wants to, you know, have Paulie's sister as his girlfriend. And this is an unexpected event, right? It's unexpected to Rocky because Rocky believes, well, if I really train hard and I get really strong and I get a lot of publicity, people are going to like me. And so what he does is, you know, part of his training is he goes to Paulie's meat plant, and Paulie lets him in the back, and he goes into the freezer, and he gets to pound on the. On the meat, and he gets to break the ribs. It was a brilliant idea. So Rocky goes into the. Into the meat plant, and he breaks the ribs of the, you know, the cow carcasses. And they have.

A reporting crew from the local TV station comes down. They film Rocky breaking the ribs. And Paulie's there like, hey, isn't this cool? And nobody says, hey, who's your friend? Who owns. Who's let you into the meat plant? He doesn't say, it's Paulie, my friend. So Paulie gets nothing out of it. But Rocky becomes a big deal. So Rocky thinks, oh, wow, people in Philadelphia like me now. And his best friend now hates him because he's getting something that Paulie doesn't have. And then he kicks out his girlfriend from. From their house. So that's an unexpected event to Rocky, and he can't make sense of it, okay? So the turning point, progressive complication is when things get even worse for Rocky. And that's the moment when he's at the. The stadium the night before the fight. He's not sure if he's Going to win. He just wants to go check it out. He's got to go for a long walk. He's scared. And that's when he meets the fight promoter who changes the value so dramatically for Rocky. So the turning point, progressive complication for the third quadrant is when the fight promoter tells Rocky, hey, man, it doesn't matter. We're going to put on a show. This is a show. It doesn't matter. Yeah, you're gonna lose, but won't it be a good show? And that completely shatters Rocky's belief system. What do you mean it's a show? I thought I had a shot at the champ.

Right? And then the crisis is, is this a show? What if it is a show? What if I what, huh? Best bad choice, right? What am I going to do? This is a show. I'm going to get killed. For what? Just for ratings, right? Well, right. Maybe I could quit, right? So he's facing this moment like, well, shit, maybe I just won't show up tomorrow.

I don't want to get beaten up. And then the climax is when he's.

He's discussing it. Now he's discussing it with another human being instead of internalizing all of his pain.

And he asks his girlfriend, and she goes, what's the matter, Rocky? I don't think I can win the fight. Oh, you don't? And she doesn't say, of course you can, Rocky. Get in there. She cares about him. She goes, you don't. What's going. You know why?

And then that's, at the moment the climax of this story is, should I go on or shouldn't I go on? And he talks it out.

We see him participate in his own life with another human being in such a way that he can actually get genuine, authentic advice from another person who cares about him. Now look at Rocky at the beginning of this story. He, he was such a. He slept on a bare mattress with a six pack of beer in the fridge. He was a complete bum. And now he's actually having a very intelligent conversation with another human being. That's the climax. The climax is, oh, I know what I'll do. I'll just fight him 15 rounds. Nobody has ever gone 15 rounds. I can win by losing.

Huh?

Imagine that. You can win even if you lose.

That's a pretty great idea. That's a pretty amazing worldview, isn't it? Even if I lose, I win. Brilliant. Well, because then the resolution is, go ahead.

Well, that's the, that's the internal shift, right? So the externally he'll lose. And he did lose. He didn't win by losing. He actually did lose. But when we're looking at the worldview shift, then it's a win, right? So if you're. It's.

No, I think he externally won. He won. He didn't win the fight, but he won the accolade of going the distance.

So there was an external win that anyone in the fight game would say, yeah, the guy lost, but nobody went 15 rounds except Rocky.

And, yes.

He wins the Worldview one, too. And he wins the love story, too. So if you're doing a tally of wins versus losses, Rocky's really coming out on top at the end of this movie. And this is why we're so thrilled at the end of the movie, even though, you know, Apollo Creed wins the fight, Rocky wins the love story. He wins the worldview, he wins the external. He's a tough son of a. You know, so you can.

That's a great way of looking at a surprising but inevitable ending, right? It's inevitable that Rocky's gonna lose to Apollo Creed. Now, we all have hope against hope that he does win the fight, but if he did, it wouldn't have been as powerful because we'd be like, that's a fantasy. There's no way that guy's gonna win.

And the whole story was based upon a fighter named Chuck Wepner, who was called the. The Bayonne Bleeder. And Chuck Wetner got the fight. Yeah, the Bayonne Bleeder. He got the fight.

My nickname is Never have the Bleeder in my.

In my nickname.

So he got the fight with Ali.

Cut. And he would just. Yeah, he would get. He would bleed the entire fight.

But anyway, Chuck Wepner did go the whole. I mean, he almost beat Ali, and Ali was using him as a practice fight, and I think Sylvester Stallone really locked into that. And, I mean, the Rocky story is much bigger than that.

But.

But anyway, so the answer to your question is like, well, how do I do. How do I actually do that? Is just use your five commandments, right? So when you get off track, no matter what, what unit of story you're dealing with, and we're talking a quarter of an entire story, so we're talking a macro level of analysis here, but still, just use your five commandments, and then you can do the five commandments to get to these particular points with individual scenes, too. So, you know, every quadrant has five commandments to guide you. So you have 20 scenes in total, five commandments for each quadrant that you can use. As your story skeleton so that you can track well. Quadrant number one is the ordinary world worldview 1.0. Quadrant number two is a shift into an extraordinary world where they have to use their old procedures that start to fray. The midpoint climax in between quadrant 2 and quadrant 3 is the dissolution and the fragmenting of the worldview 1.0. And then quadrant 3 is the full Monty bottom down complete destruction of worldview 1.0 so that at the very bottom all is lost. And then the emergent worldview 2.0 emerges from the crisis of that third quarter.

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