From childhood we are enthralled by stories. There’s something within them that we are pulled towards; from the time we can understand language to the last word we speak. It seems almost biological. A yearning to look into another world, whether it’s a superhero movie, a romance novel, or a verbal bedtime story about knights and dragons. Stories are powerful and inspirational. They can cause intense emotion or insights. Everyone loves a good story, and they love a good storyteller. It’s been this way for thousands of years , which is why some stories have lasted as long as The Iliad or The Bible.
One of the most important things you can do to live a good life (whatever that means to you) is to live your life as if it is a story, and that you are the hero. Looking at your life this way puts things into perspective. It will help you look at where you are and how you got there. It will help you map out where you want to go and more importantly, who you want to become. This view aids the individual in gaining agency in their life, or to see as Goethe saw when he said “Everyone holds his fortune in his own hands, like a sculptor the raw material he will fashion into a figure. But it’s the same with that type of artistic activity as with all others: We are merely born with the capability to do it. The Skill to mold the material into what we want must be learned and attentively cultivated.”
A logical start is to begin with your origin story. What events or actions got you to where you are now? What was your childhood like? Who did you have to influence you, positive and negative? What could you have done better? When did your current bad habits start? What about your good habits? What are some things that you are extremely proud of? What are your regrets? It’s important that you write it down. The past is important because it will show you where you are and how you got there. Without this knowledge, a map of the future is useless, and you will be disoriented and bound to repeat mistakes.
“Reading makes a full man; conference a ready man; and writing an exact man.” -Francis Bacon
After looking at your past, you can begin to assess where you are now. You may ask yourself some of the following questions. Are you someone that you would look up to? Do you respect yourself? Do you have all the qualities that you want? Are you someone that other people can rely on in a crisis? Do you have all the skills you want or need? Are you close to your ideal? Are you working towards it? Are you using your time wisely? Are you letting laziness or your bad habits get the best of you? Do you act heroically? If you’re like me, or if you are honest with yourself and you are like most humans, then a lot of those answers are “no’.
“You’re not everything you could be, and you know it” -Jordan Peterson
Maybe you don’t even have an ideal yet. A good way to construct an ideal is to look at who you admire. After choosing a handful of people we admire, we should then spend time studying their lives. It is for this reason that I believe it is very important to read biographies of great men and women. You can then look at people you admire and distill the major positive qualities that they have. That becomes your ideal.
“There is an innocence in admiration: it occurs in one who has not realized that they might one day be admired.” -Friedrich Nietzsche
Now that we have something to aim at, we can specify it to our own story. We should write out our unique ideal future (3 years is a pretty good time frame to use for this). What qualities or skills do you want to acquire? How do you want your life to be set up? What kind of relationships do you want? What bad habits or addictions do you want to rid your life of? What good habits do you want to incorporate every day? Imagine this ideal life and write a story about it. Write about how you would get to where you wanted to be.
It’s not enough to imagine a future heaven. You also have to imagine a future hell. Imagine what your life would be like in three years if you let your bad habits get the best of you. Even if you just stay the same for three years, you will just become more bitter (and three years older).
“To evolve out of this position of psychological immaturity to the courage of self-responsibility and assurance requires a death and a resurrection. That’s the basic motif of the universal hero’s journey — leaving one condition and finding the source of life to bring you forth into a richer or mature condition.” -Joseph Campbell
One way to begin the process of becoming our ideal is to create an alter ego, and spend more time behaving like the person we would like to become, also known as Fixed-role Therapy. This therapeutic technique was created by psychologist George Kelly in 1955. Kelly recommended creating an ideal character to enact for two weeks. During these two weeks the client is urged to become the character and act in situations as their ideal would. It is important to begin immediately and to not tell anyone about the experiment, for it will become simply an act if others are to know about it. If people say you are acting different or strange, well, that means you are doing it successfully. This experiment will show that we are more in control of who we are then we think.
In order to bring us back to acting like our ideal when we stray, we should devise a ritual. A ritual can be anything from a song, to a breathing exercise. Many great men have rituals to bring them into “peak state” as Tony Robbins puts it. Even the great philosopher Niccolo Machiavelli used rituals to bring him into his ideal. He said “When evening comes, I return home and go into my study. On the threshold I strip off my muddy, sweaty, workday clothes, and put on the robes of court and palace, and in this graver dress I enter the antique courts of the ancients and am welcomed by them, and there I taste the food that alone is mine, and for which I was born. And there I make bold to speak to them and ask the motives of their actions, and they, in their humanity, reply to me. And for the space of four hours I forget the world, remember no vexation, fear poverty no more, tremble no more at death: I pass indeed into their world”.
Your life is a story, but your story can be better than any story there is. Stories are supposed to provoke emotion and feelings. With your story you can go out into the world and actually feel things. I hope your story is filled with joy, and love, and ecstasy, and the glory overcoming obstacles. I hope your hero becomes bolder, and smarter, and stronger than they could’ve even dreamed of. I hope you slay dragons and rescue villages.
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