What’s Your Story?

As kid we enjoy people telling stories to us. Stories that are thrilling, exciting, and funny. We loved to imagine, a skill innate to human beings as far as science could tell. The stories used to make us feel horrified sometimes, while funny and ecstatic other times. As a social being, once living in the cave, our communication skills are built on the culture of telling stories. A Grandma from my village, being a victim of paralysis, no matter how many times we tell her to stop repeating the same phrase, she can’t resist and end of telling the same story for multiple times in a day about what she had done throughout the morning. I used to feel so irritated by that behavior, and I still do sometimes. Though, now I could correlate her behavior to the current book I am reading “Barking up the Wrong Tree”. Eric Barker, the author of the book believes we can turn around our life, if we understand and utilize this basic instinct for our own advantage. In his book, he discusses how telling stories, visualizing struggling tasks as ‘GAME’ helps Joe, to survive the insurmountable challenges to pass through the unforgiving snowy landscape to make it to the base camp despite breaking his both legs during the climbing and his friends leaving thinking he is dead. So, the author asks us to make story out of life. We might not realize it, but we already do it anyway. Try making day to day tasks, enjoyable and winnable. It presents with unique challenges while still hooking ourselves at it. Making it goal oriented and we can design unique strategy to keep up with the pace. So that we are not going in life blindly. When we make it a playable game, we have motivations. We expect new challenges. Good games presents with unexpected ups and downs. Even if we fail, we are excited. And we keep up with the pace and have a system to get feedback. If we didn’t win, we might contemplate on what might have caused our loss. How can we design the circumstances for our benefit to make it winnable next time? We might learn from previous experience on what we can do better next time. Games are exciting, aren’t they?  

But before we commit to anything (or say any GAMES), how can we be sure that it’s the right thing to commit to?

People always talk about the success stories of billionaires but for these outliers to succeed in a given field, they had endured failure in other aspects. Bill Gates didn’t show passion for college degrees, so he quit and found his passion somewhere else. The thing that we generally lag is the trying mentality. In fact we assign our mental energy so much on idealizing and thinking about something that we want to do that we are afraid even to be failed or challenged at it. If we feel as if can’t be failed or challenged at something, how can we make it as a game? Different surveys show that in a company those employees’ gets the highest raise who have already tried different jobs, their rates of promotion is staggeringly high. So, he suggests before really listening to someone about how we need to persevere or show passion on something, first we need to experiment and make sure that it’s the kind of thing that we want to do. For this, he presents a unique strategy called “WOOP”. It stands for Wish, Outcome, Obstacle, Plan. This method puts your ambitions and goals in new perspective.

What do you wish in life? If you succeed, what outcome does it bring to your life? If it’s enjoyable even while thinking at it, you can go ahead and stick to it and, we start the Game. What’s the obstacle in your way? Try figuring out plans to tackle it. Did the plans work out? No? No problem! Once you have found something to commit to, you shouldn’t be afraid to plan again and again, that’s the beauty of challenging game.

Loved the article? I am sure you will love the whole book, ‘Barking up the wrong tree’ by Eric Barker.