How to Make the Drama Count for Something Big

Think of your favorite novels or movies. There’s no story without drama, right?

Last year I read Andy Weir’s novel, The Martian. The movie was excellent too. The trials and challenges astronaut Mark Watney faces and overcomes kept me on the edge of my seat.

But there’s another critical element: trajectory. If Mark wasn’t working toward his ultimate rescue, the drama would have eventually become tedious and boring. All drama and no direction makes for a lousy story.

Our lives can feel like that sometimes.

But they don’t have to because direction is one thing all of us are capable of bringing to our lives.

So how do we do it?

My friend Daniel Harkavy and I detail a simple method in our new book Living Forward: A Proven Plan to Stop Drifting and Get the Life You Want.

You can do it in four steps:

First, imagine your life is a book or a movie.

Flip the pages or fast forward to the end. What stands out in the narrative arc of your life? What did you accomplish?

How did your accomplishments affect those closest to you?

To really make this exercise sink in, we recommend writing the end as if it were happening today. It’s the final scene and people are speaking at your funeral. How do they remember you? What are they saying?

Get it all down.

Second, ask yourself: Do their words match how you want to be remembered?

If there’s a gap between how you think you’ll be remembered based on your life today and how you want to be remembered in the future, welcome to life.

You’re officially normal.

But don’t get used to it. You can go from normal to extraordinary by closing the gap.

How? Quit thinking of the gap as a discrepancy, and start thinking of it as a trajectory.

Third, think through the major areas of your life.

In Living Forward we call these Life Accounts. To get where we want to end up, we have to invest the appropriate amount of time and energy in each.

We can do that by ranking them.

For instance, how important is your health compared to your work, family, friends, and so on? Rank all your Accounts from most important to least. Once you’ve done that you can begin deciding what actions you need to take in each to get you where you want to go.

Fourth, act on your priorities.

And this where the drama comes in, right? There are three kinds of drama we have to pay attention to:

There’s the drama we create when we act on our priorities. This is the inevitable result of steering your life a new direction and plowing ahead. You’re Mark Watney and you’re trying to get off Mars. There will be drama. Embrace it, knowing that it’s taking you were you want to go.
There’s the drama we experience when external realities interfere with our priorities.These are the setbacks and obstacles we face trying to get to where we’re going. They could be work obligations, family needs, financial difficulties, whatever. They’re also inevitable, and the story gets better the more of these we overcome en route to our destination.
Finally, theres’s drama we either create or experience that doesn’t move us forward. This is the kind of pointless activity that makes us forget where we’re going. We get distracted or disengaged. We all face this kind third kind of drama, but when we have clarity about our trajectory it’s easier to see it as a waste of time and energy.

How can you tell the difference?

Since you know where you want to end up, you can fast forward the movie or flip to the end of the book.

Is this drama contributing to the story?

Is it getting you where you want to end up? If not, hit the delete key.

There’s no story without drama, but we need to create and respond to the right kinds of drama if we want to experience lives of meaning and lasting significance. Knowing where we’re going and ranking our priorities will help us end where we desire most.