At the start of the year, I wrote a post about telling a better story. It’s a hard task. There are two problems that I’ve run across already. I have a blog so I get to share these things. It’s a nice arrangement.

1) I should take every opportunity to tell a good story. I was listening to The Moth, one of my favorite podcasts, today. The Moth is a series that features true stories told live without notes, and it’s awesome. Today, I listened to a story from Salman Rushdie, best-selling author of several novels including The Satanic Verses. His story took place while he was working on Verses. He ended up getting writer’s block and traveled to Nicaragua to “experience a revolution.” His story was about war and about the inequality that existed in that country. But he told it with an insane amount of humor and poise, and I had two thoughts: First, should he really be telling the story like that? Shouldn’t he be talking about how horrible it was and how bad war is and all that? But then I realized that this story was decades in the past. Humanity needs to laugh at itself. Second, sometimes we need to tell a sad story happily.

I started thinking about what my life would be like if I stopped dealing in failure and started dealing in success. What if, instead of talking about how many things Freud got wrong, I talked about all of the things he got right? I suppose people would start to call me a Freudian, but perhaps that’s just because they don’t understand.

2) To tell a better story, you have to know who the main character is. Spoiler alert: it’s you. This is not to say you need to know exactly who you are. That’s never going to happen. This is to say that you need to know a few things about yourself and you need to live knowing those things are true. My heart is different than yours. And your heart is different than mine, and that effects how we live our lives.

If you want to know more about telling a better story, I feel like you should visit Donald Miller’s blog. All of my ideas are reflections on his.