A young man is unhappy and in turmoil over his life. He encounters a wise but mysterious old man who seems to command knowledge that could make all his dreams come true, but for the youth to achieve his goals, the old man demands that he pass the tests and challenges he will put before him.

Does it sound familiar? It’s Star Wars. It’s The Hobbit. It’s The Sword in the Stone, and a thousand and one other hero quests.

And it’s also The Go-Giver, a new book that modestly (and accurately) describes itself as “A little story about a powerful business idea.”

It’s pretty high in Amazon’s rankings for business and motivational books, and I would guess that its positive message and its mytho-heroic story are the reasons why.

So, just as Joseph Campbell set forth in The Hero with a Thousand Faces, the book that George Lucas used as a thematic blueprint for Star Wars, The Go-Giver begins with a youth who stumbles into a secret world. In this case, it’s it’s Joe, a 25-year-old company go-getter who is struggling to succeed in his sales business. He’s lost the big contract he was after, and so goes in search of the mysterious “Chairman,” who, he thinks, he can use as leverage to win back the big account.

The Chairman lives regally in a “beautiful stone mansion.” (Campbell notes that the first stage of the mythological journey is the “call to adventure,” signifying the destiny that has summoned the hero “and transferred his spiritual center of gravity from within the pale of the society to a zone unknown.” Campbell says the zone can be represented as a distant land, a forest, a kingdom underground, but it’s always a “place of strangely fluid and polymorphous beings.” So too in The Go-Giver.)

The Chairman leads Joe through his journey of initiation, introducing him to transformative characters—the chef, the real estate genius, the teacher-turned-CEO, the coffee goddess, and the ultra-mysterious “Connector.” He imparts to Joe the “Five Laws of Stratospheric Success,” and while that doesn’t have the same ring as the Sword in the Stone, the Force or the Nine Rings of Power, I guess stratospheric success will have to do in here in the world of the business quest. By the end of the book, Joe has learned and lived the laws, become the benevolent and successful “go-giver,” and secured the love and freedom of the fair maiden. At then the Ewoks dance with joy. Sorry—I got my quests mixed up. No Ewoks here.

As I said, a lot of people are buying this 132-page book, at $20 a pop, even though its message can be stated, verbatim, in less than 100 words. The writing is pedestrian, and all in all, I’d rather watch Star Wars. But clearly, thousands of Amazon readers are getting something that I’m missing. What is it? Let me know.