I’m usually fanatical about the process I follow to pick the book I’ll read next. I’ve done the calculations (spreadsheet deleted so there is no evidence) and I know I’ll never read all the books I’d like to. Having realised how life-changing the right book at the right time can be, I’m a touch panicked by it. For this reason I have a carefully curated to-read list and I generally follow a principle that I picked up from the founders of the Support-a-Back who shared on this Tim Ferris podcast that they read books they believe will help them with opportunities or challenges they’ll face in the next 3 months.
I’m not all business though. Get this. In December time, when the weather is hot and the sun sets late, I totally cut loose. I go crazy and read a thick fiction book. I always make sure my wife spots the book on my nightstand so she remembers that she married a mercurial, wild man.
Have you ever read a book that changed the direction, or dimension, of your thoughts, actions and theories on a topic from then on? Well, Donald Miller’s Building a Story Brand did that for me in Marketing & Business – which are pretty important fields of my life. So when I came across A Million Miles in a Thousand Years (and tried to say it fast a few times) I wondered if Mr. Miller might not perform his wizardry on me again.
I had no idea what the book was about. I had heard nothing about how this book might help me on my three month time horizon test, but it was Donald Miller and I was on a weekend away, so I gave it a bash. Mr. Miller did it again, but on a much deeper level.
A Million Miles in a Thousand Years is a book about the time two filmmakers wanted to make a movie about Donald’s life, based on a memoir he wrote, but quickly told him his actual life was too boring and they’d need to spruce it up for the big screen. In the book Donald shares the way he processes this and integrates it into a new approach to his own life. I learned some big lessons reading this. Here are my top 5.
1. The undervalued miracle of our lives
This one was less of a new lesson than it was a reminder of something that first clicked for me when reading the seminal Meditations by Marcus Aurelius. There’s a quote in the book that has always stuck with me:
“For the thrown stone there is no more evil in falling than there is good in rising”
I’m no philosopher and I’ve never checked my interpretation with a real Roman history scholar, but what this means to me is that everything that we may lose we must first have gained. Anything subtracted from our life must first have been added. I’m of the opinion that stoic maxims such as these are too heady to truly protect us from the emotional realities of those true, tragic moments of subtraction – moments of loss. That being said I’ve realised how powerful this perspective is when applied to life on a consistent basis, especially for the small things but even in moments when you’re able to get far enough away from the big tragedies in your life that they look small enough to carry.
This formulaic perspective of our lives helps us remember that in order to experience loss we must first have experienced gain. That makes life look a whole lot more fair than we think. Many of us are born with a sense of entitlement (if we look hard enough) about what we’re ‘owed’ or that the things or relationships we have are ours because we deserve them, not because we’re just really blessed to be alive and have things in our lives we care for.
I run the risk of seeming really weird here, but I often think about an alternate reality where us humans only get one day, one month or one year to live on average. If that were the case, well, that would be the case! We would live that year and feel so grateful that we were able to be alive. Try to make the most of it. Our lives would feel like an absolute miracle and we would soak up every day. Now snap back to reality and even 30, 60 or 80 years on earth can feel like the most amazing gift.
When you truly absorb this thinking you can’t help but stop taking for granted that you ‘deserve’ to live a long life. We’re just blessed to be alive! Everything we have can be tied back to an origin of providence. Our worlds are filled with moments, elements and days that, were they our only day on the planet, we’d be lucky for it.
2. The struggle is the goal
When I was 20 years old I happened across a reality documentary series on MTV called The Buried Life. The show follows four college students who decided to drop out of school in order to complete a list of “100 things to do before you die”.
As a young guy, about to enter into adulthood, I drank that show up.
It was dangerous, rebellious, bold and hilarious. Most of all, it stitched together the impression that there was a practical way to gain the elusive feeling of having lived life well. With every item they ticked off of their list they seemed to be getting one step closer to that joyous achievement of not having taken for granted the incredible gift of a pliable state of existence.
I even penned my own Buried Life list complete with the heartfelt:
- “Marry my girlfriend Amber” (which, hell yeah, I did!);
- The most what-will-make-me-manly: “Start a fire with only sticks” and;
- The most oh-yeah-a-twenty-year-old-made-this-list: “Play with an adult lion”.
What I didn’t realise whilst building out my Buried Life list was that I was slowly conditioning myself to believe a lie: Living a good story depends on how much you do.
As I left University and started working in the real world my attention turned to a different set of goals around finances and career.
Whilst these goals may have seemed a little too avaricious to actually write down in my younger self’s Buried Life book, my mindset was the same: living a good story depends on how much you…earn. How much you…have. How much you…do.
The locus of my attention may have matured from starting fires with sticks but the message in my heart and mind was the same: Living a good story depends on accomplishing something material.
It’s important that I clarify that I’m by no means saying that ambition, material gain or a successful career are not worthy goals in life. As Victor E. Frankl writes in Man’s Search For Meaning, work of some kind is one of the three main avenues for finding Meaning in life. What I am saying is that if you tie your entire self worth and reason for being to the outcomes alone of that work, you’re setting yourself up for discontent. I realised that if I felt my life was well lived purely because I ticked 100 things off of my list then I would miss the real beauty in those experiences, the real life in them, because I’d be focused on the completion of the list rather than the joy of the experiences within the list, and outside of it.
To further solidify my thinking on this a good friend of mine shared this video called the Success Paradox with me that talks through the role of luck on the road to success. Watching this video and seeing how luck plays a role in our lives and the outcomes of our work highlights how dangerous a game it is to go all in on red at the roulette table of the meaning of your life and legacy.
3. The necessary intentionality of life
Something that you’ll become acutely aware of as you read this book is Donald’s intention to live a good story. He’s not satisfied with letting life take its own, unguided course. I’ve thought about this really deeply before and after reading this book. I score highly on conscientiousness and I think that definitely spills over into my desire to ‘do the task of life well’. This perspective always caused me to be surprised by those that treat life like the lazy river at Sun City, just kinda going where the water takes them.
There is empirical evidence supporting the importance and positive benefit of plotting an intentional course though. Jordan Peterson writes in his book 12 Rules for Life about the psychological impacts of designing your own future, writing your own story and then living it out. He has an online exercise he defines as a ‘guided contemplation’ that I highly recommend called Future Authoring. I’m not getting paid anything to say this, but it’s a great way to set serious intention about your life and future. Basically it guides you through a series of questions that helps you organise your thoughts about your life, what the goals are and what you need to do or overcome in order to achieve that desired future for your life.
On the Future Authoring website an experiment by Lisa King is cited, here’s the gist:
Three weeks later, those who wrote about their best possible selves scored significantly higher on measures of psychological well-being (which included such concepts as personal happiness and life satisfaction). Health records were also obtained and analysed for all participants.”
King, L. A. (2001). The health benefits of writing about life goals. Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, Vol. 27 (7), 798 – 807.
I love a good long range connection, so here’s one. In my article about the book Leadership in Turbulent Times by Doris Kearns Goodwin I talk about the importance of a clear and simple vision for the United States so clearly laid out by F.D.R, including a plan on how the country was going to achieve it. The power in the vision of an ideal future, and a plan to get there for the U.S. during the Great Depression is just as active as the power in your vision for your ideal future and your plan to get there.
Nassim Taleb writes about something called ‘fractality’ in his book Black Swan, which I read as an act of dark comedy shortly after Covid struck.
The principle of fractality (which I only somewhat understand) is effectively that certain geometric shapes stay the same shape regardless of scale. So if you think about lying on your stomach and looking at a few small rocks on a mountain, those shapes will be the same as the shapes you’ll see if you fly over the mountain with a helicopter, which will be the same shapes you’ll see if you saw the mountain from space. In effect, there are things that retain their form regardless of scale. An example from Black Swan:
This takes a bit of mental stretching, but this principle applies to Vision as much as it does to geometry. Vision is fractal. The power it holds for the individual and their life is the same ‘kind’ of power as the power it holds for the nation. If you look at the impact that a vision and a plan had on the US during the 100 Day Plan of F.D.R’s you’ll see a case study for what can be done in your own life. But it takes intention, it won’t just come to you.
Another author that applies the idea of fractality really powerfully is Tony Hsieh in his book about the story of founding Zappos, called Delivering Happiness. It’s hands down the best book on business culture that I’ve read. Tony talks about the fractality of happiness from the individual scaled up to the company, here:
I think the parallels between what the research has found makes people happy (pleasure, passion, purpose) and what the research has found makes for great long-term companies (profits, passion, purpose) makes for one of the most interesting fractals I’ve ever come across.
Hsieh, Tony. Delivering Happiness (p. 238). Grand Central Publishing. Kindle Edition.
So when you take the principle of authoring your future as a means of writing a good story, and you recognise that this principle applies to you, your family, your company and even your nation, I think you’ve got a pretty powerful weapon in life. As Miller might say, you simply can’t write a good story if you’re not writing. 
4. Story is everything
A simple truth that comes falling out of the pages of this book is that our realities are made up of the stories we tell. Whether we’re telling stories to ourselves about ourselves, to ourselves about others, to others about ourselves or to others about others; it’s narrative that often carries more weight than fact. The facts of our lives are the ‘what’, the objective, but we’re not objective, mechanical robots. We interpret things. We process and come to conclusions by taking inputs and processing them into narratives that make sense to us.
In her book Thinking In Bets, Annie Duke discusses how we form beliefs, and how little fact we actually need to form those beliefs:
It turns out, though, that we actually form abstract beliefs this way: We hear something; We believe it to be true; Only sometimes, later, if we have the time or the inclination, we think about it and vet it, determining whether it is, in fact, true or false.
When I first read this I thought about it in terms of the things we believe based on what we hear about politics or individuals we don’t know. This is true however of anything we hear, even about our own lives. We can say things to ourselves about ourselves and automatically believe it to be true without ever vetting it.
Much of our reality exists within our own minds, within our own picture of things. The way we see things, whether or not they be an accurate representation of reality, in and of itself becomes our reality. Our stories about the present, the past, the future and the people in our lives all impact our view on our lives and how it’s all going.
So how do we utilise this to our advantage? My strategy is vet the negative stories and let the positive stories run themselves into their own reality. Next time you find yourself believing something negative about yourself take the time to ask yourself whether there really exists any fact to back up that belief. Interrogate the negative stories you’re believing about your life and yourself and often you find that they have no base whatsoever. Next, begin to tell yourselves the positive stories about yourself whether or not fact exists to back them up. Our minds are powerful. They can even instruct our physiology. So instruct your mind on who you want to be, tell yourself powerful stories about yourself. Believe in positive stories about your capabilities, the future and its possibilities. Not all of your stories will come to fruition but the belief in the powerfully positive stories you tell yourself with propel you toward the future life you envision.
5. The ingredients to a great Story
In Donald Miller’s other book Building a Story Brand he describes a narrative that many of the great epics (and every The Rock movie ever) follows. It’s a plot that we find in movies, in religious writings and in life. The narrative goes, there’s a character who has a problem, and meets a guide, who gives them a plan and a call to action to achieve success and avoid failure.
Think through your favourite movies, be it The Lord of The Rings, Star Wars or the Hunger Games and you’ll find this plot embedded in the story. If you think about your own life you’ll likely also find many small, and some big stories like this playing out in your own life.
Have you ever watched a movie where the solution to the character’s problem is painfully close and shouted at the character to do what you think they should do in a situation, only to realise a few minutes later that if they did what you asked and all was resolved the movie would basically have no more purpose? Sometimes I think there’s some kind of sage truth about life in that. Not that anyone’s watching our pursuits for pleasure (although life-is-a-simulation believers will tell you different), but that the richness of our stories is wrapped up in our struggles.
I’ve often wondered what it must be like for the children of the wildly wealthy celebrities or oil tycoons who don’t enter into adulthood with at least some financial struggle. I’ve wondered what drives them, what fulfills them. Those who never have to wait tables, do data capturing (the devil’s work) for their mothers, or in my case be the receptionist at their University faculty office, and walk the 6 Kilometer round trip across campus to my boss’ car every time he forgot his blazer. I’m not bitter, Mr Skolanski. The struggle for financial freedom as the struggle through any pain and suffering, big or small, is our personal plot where we are the character with the problem.
I believe that if we resolved all the struggles in our lives the rest of the movie would lack purpose, texture and struggle for meaning. It doesn’t justify or make suffering pleasurable, but it does make us realise that for some reason suffering is a part of our lives, and maybe that reason is more than we can fully understand. Hopefully, it also makes us realise that within our lives and within our stories, we can define our character. We can choose who we want that character to be, hero or villain, and we come to realise that our character is round, not flat.
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