What story do you want to tell? What a great question - Andy calls it the Legacy question. We don’t think of our lives as stories, and we don’t think about how our private decisions don’t remain private...they become part of your story, and the story of those coming after you.
Some day, you want to be able to tell your story; ALL of it. You won’t want to skip any chapters. But it is so hard, in the moment, to keep this perspective. Just as we saw in the last chapter with Confirmation Bias tainting our ability to see reality, to see truth, here we have a hard time keeping the bigger perspective, keeping in mind that we are going to one day see our lives as a story that we are going to want to tell, and we struggle because of another psychological bias called focalism. Focalism is just the tendency to get hyper-focused on this one thing, this one moment. It is when all of our ability to imagine what could be and our ability to see the big picture gets essentially taken over by a focus on the here-and-now; in the moment. And the beauty of this question is that it is almost impossible not to see the bigger picture when we ask this question...what story do I want to tell?
One thing that is difficult with this concept is that, with most stories we watch on TV or read in books, we get to the end and we lose sight of what it was like, in the moment...we are tainted by hindsight. But the next time you are reading through a book or watching a show, see if you can think to yourself, right here and now, this is when the story is being written. See if you can get yourself to think about what’s been and what’s to come, in the context of the moment. It can be a habit that translates into our personal lives then as well...we just need to form the habit of asking this question, in the moment. And, the question is so good, it doesn’t need a ton of explanation...it just takes to into the right mode of thinking.
Andy tells the story of Jospeh, and I have heard him talk about this many times...it is a GREAT illustration of this idea. The story can be stopped at multiple points and you can see this idea both being leveraged (in Joseph’s life) and being ignored (in the lives of most of the other characters in the story).