Imagine you’ve just purchased front-row tickets to see the latest release of an incredible new film franchise. Every film so far has left you eager, excited and frustrated to see what happens in the next instalment. You follow the protagonist through their incredible emotional journey, experiencing their greatest achievements yet most distressing step backs they have overcome. But there’s a twist: you are the main character. Your journey through life is the best-selling story that has inspired millions. How would it feel to gaze into the screen smiling with great contentment as you watch the complete story of your life unfold?
Living your life as a story is a powerful metaphor that holds great potential to shift your mindset, perceptions and experiences. Let’s deconstruct some of the powerful messages from this concept that can be applied to your journey through life.
Consider reading an autobiography following the journey of one’s life, but about the thickness of a magazine. Three pages into the book, you discover the main character has found their perfect partner, finds a new job earning over £100K and moves to their dream location — end of story.
Boring, right? But now consider a story that pulls you in as soon as you pick it up, taking you on someone’s roller coaster of a journey. They go from having next to nothing to fighting through great obstacles, taking nail-biting risks, living fearlessly and fully to achieve what they thought was once unimaginable. What makes these types of books and films so compelling? A part of this is that we, as the audience, have been involved in every one of their experiences and emotions which magnetises a great emotional attachment to that character. We all know the heart-ripping feeling of seeing our most-loved character die tragically. We also can relate to the relief and sense of accomplishment we share with the character during their greatest heights.
A more important reason however as to how these stories are so compelling lies within a pattern that they all follow. At no point in a well-written book would you finish a chapter and think ‘end of story, all goals accomplished.’ Instead, in many cases, the mystifying question ‘What happens next?’ floats around your mind. Some films create this eagerness at the very end, leaving viewers desperate for the next instalment. Here, the journey of the character is what counts, not the destination.
This applies to your own life, too. There is no finite ‘end goal.’ Not even the most successful person in the world, earning unimaginable amounts of money will sit down one day and think ‘Well, I’ve made it!’ Yet so many people dream about achieving this mythical end goal. When saying the word ‘success’ to people, many will think of things like fancy cars, swimming pools or a great deal of money. But if you live merely to reach some ultimate goal, most of your days will be spent dwelling on thoughts like ‘I wish I was that guy…’ instead of actually living your life here and now. The key is to celebrate the goals you achieve day by day, as no one becomes a millionaire overnight. If life was so easy, you may as well pick up the magazine-sized story again. Yawn.
Aspiring to others can be helpful of course, but imagine how silly you’d feel if when reaching retirement, you notice how you’ve been distracted through your life by spending all of it envying what others possessed. Money isn’t everything. It is very possible to come across a person living a happier life with a lower income, a basic house but loving friendships and family and a job they love to pieces than a millionaire whose addicted to gambling and doing a job they hate just to feel ‘professional.’
Goals give us direction. They offer us satisfaction, but this is only temporary. We soon move on to other things. People often spend more time fantasising what it would be like to gain their desire than experiencing the results of it. For many goals, trying to define an endpoint to it is like trying to bite your own teeth. It has become common to set deadlines for goals, but notice the insincerity of the exclamation, ‘At 2:15 P.M tomorrow, I’m going to feel on top of the world because I’ve achieved my goal of being a better public speaker!’ The more you think about this, the more you’ll come to realise the myth of the final goal.
This is not to say don’t dream big or wish for a life of abundance, but rather instead of wishing your life away longing for a future desire, appreciate and fully experience every step of the journey. The mistake is seen in thoughts like ‘I’ll be happy once I’ve lost eight pounds.’ The sense of delayed happiness created here often creates dissatisfaction, ultimately stagnating your motivation towards the goal itself. ‘I’ll be happy once I’ve…’ implies you are not happy now. Note that this can be a feeling; it is not always an explicit thought to one’s self. To ‘reach’ a goal means we have set a measure in time, quantity or another variable, but by absorbing yourself in the measure every day, fantasising about the results, you’ll only delay your progress and welcome disappointment when the results arrive. If you combine this future-orientated mindset with the fabrication of some final, ultimate goal, it seems that people are searching helplessly for a particular destination that does not exist.
The solution? Take the weight-loss goal of losing eight pounds, for instance. Now instead imagine the person instead thinking ‘Hey, I feel quite content after that healthy meal at dinner today.’ Breaking the goal down is a lot more sensible. When breaking a goal down into small rewarding chunks, you not only become happier in general but increase your motivation towards your goals. You feel a sense of progress like you’re on the right path. You’ll glide through each next step with ease instead of being stuck in a cycle of self-doubt as you dwell how infinitely far away your goal is. The key is in the journey; the future distracts you from the present, just as the destination distracts you from the journey.
The fascinating philosophy of progress is that it often comes when you’re not thinking about it. To grasp progress is like trying to settle uneven water using an iron. But to be completely be involved in the task at hand is to escape from the outside world and then before you know it, having been so involved in each moment, you’ll suddenly switch back into the progress-checking mode and think ‘Whoa, haven’t I done well here!’ By removing the thought of flagship-like goals, you’ll find that success comes naturally. When thinking about this carefully and applying it to your life, you’ll see that success is the product of the journey, not the destination.
Nobody goes to school just for exam results, despite society conditioning us to believe that every educational step is merely to reach the next precious level ahead, which must be the goal. You go to primary school to prepare for the grown-up world of secondary school. You pass your secondary school exams in order to reach the great heights of University. You then study a degree with the intentions of opening up job opportunities. But notice that this mindset is the exact same as the delayed happiness concept discussed. You spend so long focusing your attention on the next stage, that you forget to experience each step in its full essence, and before you know it, it’s gone.
Now the pieces start coming together. We have learned that the concept of a journey plays an important role in our lives. In books, likewise, there are some pinnacle moments, but the most skilful of authors will always present a conclusion left open, inviting the audience to wonder ‘What is next in the journey?’ We eagerly search to see if a next instalment is in the works. By considering goals and key events in your life as highlights in the story, but not the ultimate destination, you’ll create your very own curiosity of ‘What comes next?’ This simple thought is guaranteed to make you more motivated. Successful people don’t wake up and relax all day. The greatest achievers are always on a journey to battle through their every day, to grow bit by bit.
The battle for success
To make your journey interesting, it’s going to have to be a battle at times. If you feel unmotivated about a challenge, imagine yourself skipping to the next chapter of your story where you see you’re at such an amazing height and think ‘I’m so glad I pushed through that challenge to reach where I am now.’ The successful outcome may not have existed if you let the challenge drop and went back to lazily watching T.V. It would be both illogical and boring if the main character could become the greatest athlete in the world without the hours of hard work, intense workout and years of training to achieve this. It always pays off in the end.
To be successful, there have to be downfalls
The whole principle of a resolution in a story relies on the dilemma occurring in the first place. Problems could never be solved if they didn’t exist. To learn self-acceptance is to realise that perfection is a fallacy. Fractures are necessary for healing. Healing is necessary for growth. The best thing to do with mistakes is accept them as a mistake, and let them go. The actual issue arises in how we deal with these difficulties. Fighting a mistake will only worsen things, yet it’s a trap many of us fall into. ‘Why was I so stupid?’ ‘I wish I would have said that.’ ‘I guess I’m rubbish at exams then, forget it.’ We all know the situation of wanting to reverse time to fix one of our silly mistakes. The greater the mistake, the more frustrated the feeling becomes.
Back in the story metaphor, if we could read characters’ minds, I’m sure we’d see that they also have urges to go back in time. But consider the following plot: a large terrorist organisation are making several attacks all around the world in major capital cities. The protagonist has just made a great mistake in preventing disaster: he’s cut the wrong wire of the bomb and half of the city has just blown up. But imagine if for the rest of the film was merely him nattering to himself ‘Ah dammit, I’m such an idiot, look at what I’ve done.’ Little does he know that we as the audience are shouting at him through the screen, kicking ourselves as we see him missing several opportunities to stop the terrorist organisation following their plans to attack the next city, where his wife and children that he’s been searching for have been kidnapped.
Okay, this sounds a lot more dramatic than our daily lives, and you’re right, it is. But by analysing this story we find that the issue was created by the character moaning about the past, distracting him from the important present moment. Little did he know that if he caught the earlier plane to the city where his wife and children were hidden, they could still be alive. In our lives, we can sometimes let the biggest obstacles take over our present — the pathway to grow. Returning to the ‘I wish I would have said that’ example, in a relationship scenario let’s say, by kicking yourself over and over about what you should have done, you’ll only worsen your damage. But by accepting the mistake and considering ‘But what next?’, you’ll find that a simple apology or explanation could save your relationship.
Notice again, the nature of the ‘But what next?’ question here, linking to the author’s clever techniques to always make us eager for the next chapter. Mistakes are natural. But to dwell on them is like swimming against a strong current. Sometimes, mistakes are even best handled by laughing them off, especially if they’re small mistakes. The pinch of relief and happiness you feel as you laugh to yourself or with others will soon bring you back to the present moment. It is here you’ll realise it wasn’t as much of a deal as you were making it out to be. This ‘back-to-reality’ feeling where you discover the insignificance of the mistake is easier to achieve with a little laughter. For larger mistakes, on the other hand, these often provide the perfect opportunity to fight and grow as a person. I find it unbelievable that Dr Seuss’ first children’s book was rejected 27 times by publishers before being released. At one point he had plans of destroying the book altogether, and I don’t blame him.
This is your story
Remember to write your own story — don’t let others write it for you. We sometimes find ourselves misguided by other people’s views and belief systems, preventing us from expressing our true selves. ‘What if they think this about me?’ At tense moments like these, we seem to spend so long dithering what others may think if we take the action that we miss the opportunity to go for it and create that highlight in our story. As we envisage all the negative outcomes, many of which are a complete fabrication, the future takes over the present and we miss the moment to strike.
There is a lot that can be taken from this metaphor for living. We’ve seen how setting goals, despite their use in guiding us in the right direction, create feelings of dissatisfaction with the present, creating the illusion that the specific goal in mind is the only key to happiness. We’ve seen how low points in your life are the necessary pathway for success. The resolution of the story doesn’t exist without the problem to solve. Surrounding all of this, we’ve seen the importance of the present moment, the ongoing journey. In goal-setting scenarios, by viewing the journey as a series of successes, you’ll always be propelled forward. You’ll make your entire book that is your life so much more read-worthy.
So, if you were reading back through your published book right now, how would you want it to look? I’ll leave it up to you now to ask yourself ‘What comes next?’
