Storyworthy: Engage, Teach, Persuade, and Change Your Life through the Power of Storytelling

By Matthew Dicks

I read this book on a random recommendation. Matthew talked about how so many moments in our lives slip through our fingers, and are lost forever. 

Think about 7 years ago. For about 99% of the year, I bet you have no memory of anything. In fact, if you didn’t move, getting into a relationship, fall out of a relationship, or change jobs, there’s a decent chance that you’d be hard pressed to think of a single thing that happened. And that’s wild. 

Time is the substance of our life, the only and most vital thing we have, and we just watch it slip through our fingers. And we’re glad to let it flow, so we can come back to the few moments we enjoy.

By rushing through our lives to get to the good parts, we miss a large portion of our lives.

I mention the book, because Matthew daily does something I adopted 3 years ago, and it’s been a real treat. 

Everyday, I record one thing that happened the day before. Just right in the morning. Sometimes they’re long entries, but usually they’re short. A few examples:

-As we were driving, there was an old beat up pickup truck behind us, with a young couple. The driver was the girl, and she had bright orange hair dyed, and was singing and dancing. You have to wonder what her story was

-Talked to James. Monday packet with daniel. tomorrow more and more.

-Took magi to the vet near here. Asked anne about going to the thai place

-typical monday. Got tacos and salad and had dinner with Anne

So, nothing earth shattering. But the cool thing…I actually had to look for a bit for these, because many are deeply personal and moving and meaningful to me (and definitely not things I’m about to share with the internet).

There is this idea in some Buddhist thinking that you can’t postpone death, that we have a fixed amount of time. There is this trick that you get from mindfulness though. By paying attention to your life, you get to experience it. You effectively double it just by enveloping yourself ever more deeply into thing the way they are. 

That’s all I got. I’ve been busy. 

I’ve been recording podcasts. 

Note: I’m fucking terrible. But that’s ok. You have to start somewhere. It’s exhilarating to start and try. And I think that, with 20-30 reps, I may suck a tiny bit less. And someday, I may actually be 1/100th interesting to listen to. 

And if I fail at that, I’ll likely banish the words ‘um’ ‘so’ and ‘yeah’ from my vocabulary. That’ll be worth it by itself.