I majored in history in college. Contrary to popular belief, history isn’t memorizing dates and names and dry lists of facts. At its core, history is storytelling.
First, historians get as close a possible to ground truth by immersing themselves in primary sources. Then they assemble a narrative from the details like a mosaic, explaining why events unfolded the way they did.
I’ve read hundreds of history books in the last 20 years, many of which have been biographies. I’ve read about Winston Churchill and Lyndon B. Johnson; Douglas MacArthur and J. Edgar Hoover; Andrew Carnegie and John D. Rockefeller; Le Corbusier and John Maynard Keynes.
They all share one thing: we know how the story ends.
This is one of the biggest challenges in writing about history. As Daniel Yergin observes in the Epilogue to the latest edition to “The Prize”:
When you write history there’s a risk that you have to be alert to that you will see what unfolded with the knowledge from the current perspectives. Since you know how the story came out, you may, without realizing it, implicitly assume your characters have all the information they need, have enough time to make a decision, have a pretty strong idea of how the future will unfold, and how things will turn out.
This is a seductive trap. Writers ascribe knowledge to their subjects that they couldn’t have possessed and a degree of conviction that, if present, would’ve made them either delusional or clairvoyant. Readers who get swept up in the author’s narration don’t question these characterizations — which is easy to do when you’re reading about a great historical figure. (e.g. “Of course Winston Churchill was bold and decisive!”) Authors unwittingly concoct idealized narratives and we credulously believe them.
And then we wonder why it’s so hard for us to be as decisive, as resilient, or as confident as those historical figures. Were they simply destined for greatness while we’re just mere mortals — NPCs?
History is written with perfect information, but as we sit in the present the future is filled with uncertainty.
What if I told you it’s possible to use this uncertainty to your advantage?
Certainty is an illusion — for everyone
In contrast to a biography written years or decades after the passing of its subject, a contemporaneous journalistic account can unwittingly illustrate this false confidence in how the future will unfold.
Take, for example, “Steve Jobs and the NeXT Big Thing” by Randall Stross.
Written in the middle of Jobs’ career, the book documents the first few years of building NeXT after Jobs’ initial exit from Apple. The company launched to tremendous fanfare and subsequently struggled prolifically, burning through hundreds of millions of dollars while pivoting from product to product and market to market, all the while making Jobs look increasingly out-of-touch with reality.
Obviously we know how the story ends: NeXT is bought by Apple; Jobs returns to his moribund first-company-turned-acquirer as CEO; and then he goes on the greatest 15-year run in consumer tech history, launching the iMac, iPod, iPhone, and iPad before tragically passing from cancer in 2011.
If you read one of the excellent Steve Jobs biographies by Walter Isaacson or Brent Schlender, the rise and fall of NeXT is treated as a critical part of Jobs’ hero’s journey: a necessary period of challenge and growth that, while not resulting directly in success, taught him valuable lessons that led to later success. But that’s only possible to know from where we sit now. When “Steve Jobs and the NeXT Big Thing” was written, it was entirely possible Jobs was just a really good hype man and would, after NeXT’s imminent failure, fade into obscurity, a mere footnote in the personal computing revolution. The story could’ve ended right there.
But it didn’t. Why not?
How did this event become a mere setback and opportunity for growth rather than a defining moment that set Jobs’ career on a terminal downward trajectory?
Your frame defines your narrative
Alan Watts’ “Parable of the Chinese Farmer” is one of my favorite didactic stories:
Once upon a time there was a Chinese farmer whose horse ran away. That evening, all of his neighbors came around to commiserate. They said, “We are so sorry to hear your horse has run away. This is most unfortunate.” The farmer said, “Maybe.” The next day the horse came back bringing seven wild horses with it, and in the evening everybody came back and said, “Oh, isn’t that lucky. What a great turn of events. You now have eight horses!” The farmer again said, “Maybe.”
The following day his son tried to break one of the horses, and while riding it, he was thrown and broke his leg. The neighbors then said, “Oh dear, that’s too bad,” and the farmer responded, “Maybe.” The next day the conscription officers came around to conscript people into the army, and they rejected his son because he had a broken leg. Again all the neighbors came around and said, “Isn’t that great!” Again, he said, “Maybe.”
The whole process of nature is an integrated process of immense complexity, and it’s really impossible to tell whether anything that happens in it is good or bad — because you never know what will be the consequence of the misfortune; or, you never know what will be the consequences of good fortune.
The upshot is: it’s totally unclear whether an event in your life is “good” or “bad” when it happens. Your interpretation depends on the narrative frame through which you choose to view it. Something that appears to be short-term “bad” could easily be long-term “good” if you zoom out.
While my last company, Ikaria, might have been a failure in the sense that I am not going to be able to scale that product to millions of people, if I look at the grand arc of my life its ending cleared room for me to pursue other ambitions. So was it really a failure, or was it just a step on the way to something better? I could apply the same lens to my divorce: it sure seemed bad when I was going through it, but in retrospect it’s been a tremendous blessing.
Said another way: clinging tightly to an outdated narrative about yourself (founder, husband, etc.) is an attachment, and attachment is the root of suffering. To what extent is your suffering born of attachment to an outdated narrative about your life?
Take a second and wipe the slate clean: whatever existing stories you have about yourself or your life no longer exist. Being aware that it’s impossible to know in the moment whether a recent event is actually positive or negative — and that “positive” and “negative” all depend on the frame you choose— how would you change the story you tell yourself about your own life, right now?
More to the point: If you’re going to have any narrative about yourself at all, and all self-narratives are equally imagined, why not choose one that empowers you?
How to actually write your own story — every day
It’s all well and good to have a positive narrative about your life’s overall trajectory, but what does it actually look like to live this way on a day-to-day basis? (That’s where all this self-help stuff breaks down: it’s easy to spout platitudes but the devil is always in the details.)
It starts with becoming aware of how you reflexively, automatically construct stories out of the mundane little experiences in your life.
Our minds are wonderful meaning-making machines, searching for patterns and narratives out of nothingness. Take, for example, missing the train: that can become the foundation of a negative story arc — “I’ve had an awful morning” or “my day is off to a rough start” — or it can be a random bit of misfortune with no deeper meaning. (Or, if you’re Family Guy creator Seth Macfarlane, missing a flight can literally save your life. The Parable of the Chinese Farmer strikes again!) The point is that you have the power to choose whether you want to imbue the episode with positive or negative valence — or none at all.
That choice sets the tone for what happens next. If you choose the negative story (the default for most people who miss a train) it primes you to view future events more negatively because the human mind loves confirmation bias. As a result, you’re more likely to have a difficult interaction with that testy coworker — and now you’ve created your own suffering from nothing. (Or, if you’re more new-age-spirtually inclined: you manifested it.)
True power over your story comes from cultivating the capacity to choose whether and what meaning to construct from any given experience in your life. Nothing has any meaning except that which you give it. You can accept your mind’s default interpretation or you can choose one that enables you to be the version of you to which you aspire.
This is the practical case for mindfulness. Noticing when your mind is just doing its default thing is the basic building block of meditation: you focus on you breath, notice your mind wandering — its default behavior — and then gently bring it back to the breath. The simple act of noticing is the ability you’re training — that little “aha!” You can apply the same skill to noticing your mind constructing stories — another one of its default behaviors. Once you’re aware it’s happening, you can then choose whether you want to go along with what your mind is telling you or whether you’d rather redirect it. This is real awareness: becoming conscious of all the things our mind is doing without our ever realizing it.
Notice your mind constructing narratives and choose which ones you want to empower. How would your life change if your reflexive inner monologue shifted? What experiences and opportunities might that unlock? How much more happiness, tranquility, and — yes — success could you have?
You can have an internal narrative that tells you you’re amazing and powerful; smart and capable; confident and inspiring; or you can have the opposite. You can choose the meaning you ascribe to events in your life or you can let your mind do that for you. You can become the author of your own story if you want. Then you get to choose where it takes you — and how it ends.
Now that you know the secret: go live a life worth writing about.