Marketing Secrets with Russell Brunson - The Hero With a Thousand Faces: Joseph Campbell’s Framework on Storytelling | #Marketing - Ep. 93

Episode Date: December 3, 2025

Most entrepreneurs think storytelling is about simply entertaining. But the stories that move markets, build movements, and create generational brands all follow a deeper pattern that is wired into every human across every culture in history.  In this episode of The Russell Brunson Show we talk about the Hero’s Journey! I open up Joseph Campbell’s The Hero With a Thousand Faces and show you why this framework has shaped your favorite movies, your personal development, your beliefs, and even the way ClickFunnels grew to a billion dollars in sales. If you want your message to resonate at a primal level and persuade people without feeling pushy, this is the story structure your business has been missing. Key Highlights: ◼️How Joseph Campbell discovered that every enduring story across time and culture follows the same pattern. ◼️Why George Lucas built the first Star Wars movie using this exact framework and how thousands of Hollywood films now follow it. ◼️The core steps of the Hero’s Journey and why audiences subconsciously connect to it in movies, books, and real life. ◼️How applying this structure transformed my webinars, funnels, events, and ultimately the growth of the ClickFunnels movement. ◼️The three versions of the Hero’s Journey you can study and use: Campbell’s original, Christopher Vogler’s Hollywood version, and my Expert Secrets version. The Hero’s Journey isn’t just some ‘fun’ thing to talk about... It is the blueprint behind every story that has ever moved a crowd, converted an audience, or transformed a customer. Once you understand it, you start seeing it everywhere and you will know exactly how to weave it into your own marketing, sales presentations, and content. If you want my notes with all three frameworks side by side, you can find them here: ◼️⁠⁠https://russellbrunson.com/notes⁠⁠ ◼️If you’ve got a product, offer, service… or idea… I’ll show you how to sell it (the RIGHT way) Register for my next event →⁠⁠⁠⁠ https://sellingonline.com/podcast⁠⁠⁠⁠ ◼️Still don’t have a funnel? ClickFunnels gives you the exact tools (and templates) to launch TODAY → ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠https://clickfunnels.com/podcast Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

When you're flying Emirates business class, enjoying a good night's rest in your live flat seat, you'll see that your vacation isn't really over until your flight is over. Fly Emirates, fly better. Do you have a funnel, but it's not converting? The problem 99.9% of the time is that your funnel is good, but you suck at selling. If you want to learn how to sell so your funnels will actually convert, then get a ticket to my next selling online event by going to sellingonline.com slash podcast. Sellingonline.com slash podcast. This is the Russell Brunson show.

George Lucas gets this book and he reads it and he's like, oh my gosh, if this is true and every single story of all time follows this that's been successful, I'm going to make a movie based on that. And he creates the very first version of Star Wars. Hey, this is Russell. Welcome back to my vault. Today I've got an insanely cool book, one of the greatest books of all time. You've probably never heard of, but it has definitely influenced you both in your personal

life and probably your business life as well. It's called The Hero with a Thousand Faces by Joseph Campbell. And this not only is a copy of the book, this is a copy of the first edition of Hear with Thousand Faces. And so if you've ever heard the story of The Hero's Journey, it all started with this man right here, Mr. Joseph Campbell. This first edition copy I paid $500 for and this book has got so many cool stories that I cannot wait to share with you today. The first time I heard about Hero with A Thousand Faces, I was at a marketing seminar, and I believe was Perry Belcher on stage. He was talking about storytelling and things like that. And he referenced like, hey, there's this book by Jill's account, we'll call The Hero Thousand Faces. And so I don't know

much about other than that. But whenever anyone recommends a book, especially someone I respect like Perry, on Amazon buy it. So I bought a copy of the first edition that came to me. And I didn't read it for a while. And then later I started hearing more and more stories about it. As I got deeper into understanding storytelling and stories selling, I kept coming up over and over and over again for me. So I started just doing some research. And the first thing I found out, about this book that was super fascinating. Was there was a guy, you may have heard of him before, but he got a copy of this book, and he started reading it.

And that guy's name was George Lucas. And George read this entire book, and he realized that the framework that Joseph Campbell talks about in here is the framework to tell stories. What Joseph Campbell did, his studies, he went back in time, he went back through every generation time

all the way back to basically Adam. And then also everywhere, like, around the world, different cultures. And he started looking out how all these people told their myths, their stories, their legends. And we realized is when we start looking from from culture to culture, area to area, time period to time period, every single person told their story in almost the exact same way. They all followed this sequence of events that he called the hero's journey.

Now, Campbell's version of it, there's 17 steps. I'm not going to go through all 17 steps. But the basic gist of it is the hero starts in an ordinary world, right? Then the hero hears the call to adventure. And then right after he hears the call to adventure, he has a refusal to call. Like, no, I don't want to do that. But then he decides to go on the journey anyway. So he leaves his ordinary world.

and he goes on this journey. As he goes on the journey, he meets this guide, and the guy takes him and goes through this whole journey, right? And if you look at almost any movie, even nowadays, they follow this process. They follow this path. I always think about, like, if you read Lord of the Rings, or watch it, like, J.R. Tolkien literally followed this process, right? Frodo Bagan starts the journey at the Shire, his ordinary world, right? And also here's this called Adventure. Bilbo comes and brings him the ring. Like, you need to take this ring to Mordor and destroy. It's called Adventure. And then Frodo's like, no, not me. I'm a little halfling. I'm not even a real, like, you know, refuses to call.

but then they talk him into he decides to go do it and as soon as he does then who shows up Gandalf the Grey, the guide shows up and takes him on this journey and like the entire Lord of the Rings follows the hero's journey to a T, right? And it happens in movie after movie and so that's why the Hero Thousand Faces is so fascinating

because it's the framework of how we understand stories. And honestly, if you think about it, it's each of our framework. I think the reason why we as humans resonate with it so much subconscious, even we don't know it, right? Even if you watch all these movies,

you had no idea that every movie follows basically the same storyline, and we still relate to it because it's our story, right? It's our story of growth and change. You think about this, like for most of us, like we start, like we are in our ordinary world and somewhere along the line, you decide you want to step up, you want to start a business, you want to be an entrepreneur, you want to be an athlete, you wanted to, you wanted to leave your ordinary world to become something different, right?

And then if you left that world, it's probably scary for it, you refuse the call and eventually decided to go forward anyway, and then you met a guide along the way, and the guide took you on a journey, right? And throughout the journey, you had trials and you had ups and downs, the hero's journey, is our story, which is why I think we resonate at such a deep subconscious level. And so for me, when I first read this book, I started understanding.

I started thinking, how can I use this when I'm speaking to my audience, right? How can I weave this into my presentations? At a time, we were launching ClickFunnels. I was trying to write webinars for it. I started thinking, instead of me just like telling random stories, what if I took this story framework and story structure? I started like actually telling my stories differently.

Not just me telling the stories the way I thought of top of my head, but actually following that process of me, following the hero's journey and sharing it. If it's the same story framework that's persuaded people for thousands of years in every culture of all time, would it be the same framework I would need to tell stories

to move my audience, to move my people. I look at this now a decade later as I've weave this into most everything I've done from webinars to live events to challenges, the hero's journey framework I use over and over and over again. In fact, if you read the expert seekers book, I literally teach everybody the hero's journey framework

and how I weave it into my presentations. And so what's fascinating is, did this work? Yes, right? I look on the back end of 10 years of applying this. to my business specific. I run a software company for crying out loud. Like, people are like, oh, yeah, this works in movies.

I understand. Oh, yeah, works for story books. I understand. It's like, I run a software company, right? And I heard the story of this, and I decided to use the framework, and what did it do, right? In the last, the first 10 years of click phones, we sold over a billion dollars of our products. We built the community. We built the tribe of funnel hackers, right?

We changed people's lives from all around the world. And how did we do it? It's by we layered our message onto the framework found here inside of the hero with a thousand faces. And that's why this book is so important to me. and should be so important to you. Again, this is something that's influenced you in ways you don't even know. Every book you've read, every movie you've experienced, every webinar from me or any of my students who've gone through all followed this framework and this journey.

And so by learning it and understanding it and mastering it is the fastest way to persuade and influence and change the lives that people even call the serve. Okay, now Joseph Campbell's version of the hero, it's a thousand faces. His hero's journey is 17 steps. And honestly, it's probably more complex than what we need for our world. Like in expert secrets, I broke it down to like to closer to 10. 10 or 14 steps. But what's interesting is that Joseph Campbell, after wrote this book,

later Christopher Vogler, who's one of the big Disney executives, he read this book, and then he changed it and built a framework that's like 13 or 14 steps. It's much simpler. And if you look at this, this is literally the framework that they use in every single Disney movie. So if you watch Cars, Moana, Brave, Frozen, literally any Disney movie of all time,

it follows Christopher Vogler's framework, which is adapted and based off of the hero with a thousand faces. So I'm going to walk you us through what the, what this framework looks like. So I'm going to draw it like this. It's a big circle. There are two sides of this. Over here is the normal world or the ordinary world.

And over here is the unknown. Okay. So it starts up here with the hero living in the ordinary world. And then the hero hears a call to adventure. Okay. So you think about this with any movie, right? Lightning McQueen is the hero of that. story, right? And he's racing with the Piston Cup. He loses, or it's a tie. And so he's got

to go and drive to California to go and do this race. So he's called adventure. I get to leave and go to California. If you have a chance to win the Piston Cup, right? Here's the called adventure. Rocky Balboa sitting there. He's a boxer. He's not that successful. And then all a sudden, Apollo Creed calls him up because he happens to be the Italian stallion and he gets an opportunity to come fight, right? And so Apollo Creed calls him, brings him in, like, you need to fight, you have a chance to fight the champion. Right. Here's the call of the adventure. So that's the first step. And then usually after the call, the venture.

What happens is the refusal of the call. They freak out. Rocky Babel is like, I'm just some bum on the street. I'm not going to fight the greatest fighter of all time, right? They get scared. They don't want to. But they eventually decided to go through it. After they hear the call, the venture, the refusal of the call,

then they come to the next phase, which is the meeting of the mentor. Okay. So Rocky decides to say yes to the fight. Who shows up? Boom. Mick shows up and says, all right, I'm going to train you to be able to beat Apollo creator to be able to fight. In cars, Doc shows up and teaches and becomes his mentor to help teach them how to be a race car, right?

After they meet the mentor, it's where they cross the threshold. This is where Frodo leaves the Shire. This is where Laieva Queen gets in the car and starts driving. Like, they cross the threshold here, and now they're officially on the journey. During the next phase, it's called trials and failures. Okay, this is where they're learning lessons. They're growing. They're becoming something different.

Right? They go through different trials and failures. They go through growth. you get new skills from there they get to a spot in a phase that's called death and rebirth okay on the journey

the hero has to go through something where they have their essence there the person who they are before they leave on this journey and for the hero to transform and become who they want the old character has to die and they be reborn into a new character right and so it's fascinating because you look at if you look at spirituality Christianity for example This is part of our journey if you're a Christian, right?

It's like, you go on this journey and then there's a time where you have to go through death and a burial and a resurrection, which is baptism, right? But every single hero goes to that, the death of their old identity and the rebirth of who they are, the new person is coming. From there, they have a revelation. Like, oh my gosh, this is the idea, an epiphany. Like, I call them an epiphany bridge and expert secrets. They have a revelation, an idea of like, this is how I'm going to succeed. Then they keep moving through it. And they go to the next section, which is where they have.

They finally start getting the changes. They're looking for. Boom. Then after that, then they go through the section called the Atonement. Again, for Christians, that sounds very familiar. But for most people, this is where they make right, the thing that is wrong, right? They go through that. They have this thing, the atonement.

After that, they get the gift. Okay? Inside of a hero thousand faces, he calls us, that the hero returns back to the ordinary world with the elixir. So they figured out the solution. This is the problem. This is how we solved the problem. And they bring the gift. They bring the elixir back.

And then the person returns back to the ordinary world changed. and then this is the end of the story. So that is the process. So again, you can plug in almost any movie, any story into this framework. And you see it happening over and over and over again. I remember the first time I learned this after I started watching movies and it would almost be frustrating to me. I'm like, oh, there's the hero.

There's the ordinary world. Oh, there's the guy just showed up. Oh, here's the first set of trials and errors. Oh, here's where the death is. Here's the rebirth. Here's the moment of no return, right? Here's the revelation. Here's the spot where they, you know, they made up for the thing they did wrong.

Here's what they got the gift of the, you know, they got the elixir. Now they're returning back home with it. And so you start seeing this pattern happening over and over and over again. We change the characters, or change the circumstances, or changed situations. And it's built literally millions of TV shows, movies, stories, books. And again, I think it's the pattern of your life. All right, if you guys want, I made some show notes, putting together some notes, where literally you can get the entire framework, the 17 steps that Joseph Campbell uses in his version of the hero's journey.

Also, he has a copy of Christopher Vogler's version. And I'll also give you a copy of my version from Expert Secrets. So you can see three different variations and versions of the hero's journey. They all follow the same process and the same path. One is used for all stories, myths, things like that. This is used very specifically for Hollywood and movies. And mine is very much for how funnel hackers, markers, business, they can use inside their presentations, their video sales letters, anytime they're speaking.

All three is to help you to see how to apply the hero's journey into your life, into your business, into all the things you're doing. so if you want that in the description we'll have a link over to those notes other than that thank you guys so much i hope you enjoyed this video if you did let me know the comments down below and then click on the other videos and check them out to find out some more cool books that we're showing you off here inside the vault