Coleman Ruiz

He built the arc of Star Wars around the 17-stage hero's journey.

He credits Joseph Campbell's book for...

And if you ever read it or you go through the 17 stages or you see it or watch a short video, anybody, you'll see how damn near everybody's life, which is why it's called the monomyth.

He describes it as the monomyth or the cosmogonic cycle.

There's a little weirder term for it.

But what he lays out in the book is, I don't know, maybe supposedly 2,000 years of culture across multiple cultures, right?

The book is incredibly complicated in that sense.

So I listened to it audio first and then went back to it and listened to it in paper.

I could not believe how a human could put this narrative together, honestly.

But the summary...

I struggle with the first 10 stages a little bit, but I'll try to come back to them.

If you look at the image when you lay out the 17 stages, the way it's in a circle is the ordinary world and the extraordinary world is on the bottom of the page.

There's a horizontal line.

The diameter of that circle goes horizontally across, and the extraordinary world is on the bottom.

The ordinary world is on the top.

Let me talk about the back end of the journey first, because what I was mostly concerned about with when a friend pointed me to that book was my return to the ordinary world.

And he told me, Coleman, you got to read this book.

And so the back end of the hero's journey in the return section is seven stages of the 17.

It's the ultimate boon, which is you learned something big.

in life, depending on everybody learns something where you sort of realize that something big happened to me.