tell these storytellers that my current list of untold story ideas is more than five hundred items long. They think this number is crazy. They say it’s impossible. I think it’s crazy that they don’t do Homework for Life.
But even if you’re not in the story-collecting business (and you should be if you’re reading this book), other remarkable things will begin to happen when you do Homework for Life.
I received one of the best phone calls of my life from a Homework for Life convert. When I answered the phone, there was a woman on the other end, and she was crying. My initial thought: “Oh, no. Who is this? What terrible thing has happened?”
The woman doesn’t tell me her name. She’s just crying. A second later she starts talking. She tells me that she took a storytelling workshop with me six months before. She had listened closely as I assigned her Homework for Life, and she started doing it that night. She’s calling to tell me that she’s fifty-two years old, and for her entire life, she’d never felt like an important person in this world. She’d always thought that she was just like everyone else — simply another face in the crowd — and that one day in the future, she was going to die and “go out quietly. Unnoticed.”
Then she started doing my Homework for Life, and within three months, it had changed her life. She says that searching for stories in her everyday life and recording them has made her feel like an important person for the first time. She tells me that she has real stories — important and significant moments in her life that she had never seen before — and that she feels that they are a part of a much larger story. She says she feels like a critical cog in the gears of the universe. Her life matters. She tells me that she can’t wait to get out of bed every morning and find out what will be the thing that makes that day different than the last.
It’s probably the best phone call I’ve ever received, and I never got the woman’s name. She thanked me and hung up while she was still crying.
But it’s true. As you start to see importance and meaning in each day, you suddenly understand your importance to this world. You start to see how the meaningful moments that we experience every day contribute to the lives of others and to the world. You start to sense the critical nature of your very existence. There are no more throwaway days. Every day can change the world in some small way. In fact, every day has been changing the world for as long as you’ve been alive. You just haven’t noticed yet.
I hear accounts like this all the time. A workshop graduate once told me that she’s not doing Homework for Life to find stories, because she has no intention of ever taking the stage and performing. But Homework for Life has become therapeutic for her. It’s made her life richer and fuller, so she can’t stop now, even if she wanted to. Another workshop graduate told me, “It’s the most important thing that I have ever done in my life.” Another told me, “It saved my life.” Still another said, “It’s like I can see the air now.”
As workshop student Anne McGrath wrote in a recent blog post on Brevity:
Here’s the most incredible thing I’ve discovered: this habit of collecting ideas has changed something in my mind and how I am in the world. It has instilled in me a sense of patience, made me see with wonder, be more willing to try new things, and look with fresh, curious eyes. The process of writing has become more important than the outcome or me and I feel fortunate every day that I am able to create something. I have stumbled upon things in New York City I might have missed if I was less attentive — an exhibit of Nabokov’s butterflies at the public library, a baby squirrel fallen from its nest in Central Park, the homeless woman outside the subway station who had been a Jackie Gleason dancer. Visceral stories are floating all around us, waiting to be brought to life.
It’s not just me. This strategy works.
There’s an added bonus to Homework for Life. It’s unrelated to storytelling, but it’s worth mentioning. It might just be the most important reason to do the exercise. As you begin to take stock of your days, find those moments — see them and record them — time will begin to slow down for you. The pace of your life will relax.
We live in a day and age when people constantly say things like:
Time flies.
That last school year went by in the blink of an eye.
I can’t even remember what I did last Thursday.
I feel like my twenties went by in a flash.
I used to feel the same way. Then I started doing Homework for Life, and the world slowed down for me. Days creep by at remarkably slow speeds. Weeks feel like months. Months feel like years.
I cannot tell you what a blessing this is. I don’t lose a day anymore. I can look at any one of those entries on my spreadsheet from the years I have been doing my homework, and I am right back in that moment. And I will have these moments forever. When I am on my deathbed, I’ll be able to look back at an Excel spreadsheet filled with moments from my life. It’ll probably be a hologram by then, hovering over my body, but as I scroll through the pages, I’ll be able to return to every one of those moments. Every one of the moments that made one day different from the rest. A lifetime of storyworthy moments at my fingertips.
I found this unexpected gift while desperately searching for stories, and it has changed my life. It can change yours too.
I conducted a storytelling workshop for principals and administrators in my school district a few summers ago. I assigned them Homework for Life. Five months later, at another training session, one of the principals approached me and said, “You know why your Homework for Life works?”
“No,” I said, desperately trying to remember his name.
“I’ve missed three days since that training. Three days when I forgot to write down my story for that day, and it kills me. I lost three days, and I’m so angry about it. I’ll never get those days back. That’s how I know it works.”
Over the years, I have assigned Homework for Life to thousands of people, but only a small percentage has begun doing it. A tragically small percentage. This is because Homework for Life requires two things that are often lacking in the world today:
Commitment and faith.
Commitment that you will sit down every night and reflect upon your day. It’s crazy to think that you won’t give five minutes a day over to something that will change your life, but many won’t.
Instead, you’ll blindly give two hours of your life over to a television show that you will barely remember a year later. You’ll give at least that much time to aimless surfing of the internet and the liking of baby photos on Facebook, but you won’t give five minutes of your day to change your life.
You may also lack faith, because this change won’t happen instantly, and in this world, most people want their results instantaneously. But this process does not happen overnight. It didn’t happen immediately for me. The stories that I was finding and recording early on were not very good. I couldn’t see the moments of true meaning, nor could I distinguish them from moments that might be interesting, or even amusing, but ultimately carry no weight. My storytelling lens had not yet been focused and refined, but I was so desperate to find stories that I refused to stop. I kept on doing my homework, even when it seemed pointless, because I was desperate to remain on the stage, and I thought that finding even one story would make it all worth it.
It may take you a month, six months, or even a year to refine and focus your storytelling lens. You might give up five minutes of your day for an entire year and receive nothing in return. This process requires you to believe that eventually you will begin seeing these moments in your life, just as I and so many others have. Once it starts to happen, you will find your life changed forever.
Last week my daughter, Clara, who’s nine years old now, asked me to pick her up. It was early in the morning, and she was feeling sleepy and a little sad that the weekend was over and we were heading back to school.
I pick Clara up every time she asks, because I know that at some point, probably sooner than