Everyone has a story, what’s yours?

All of us share something in common.

Some of us love to talk about it, some try to run from it, but all of us, no matter who we are — old, young, rich, poor — we all have a story.

We all share something else; we all want to live a good story. We are all striving to live the best story possible. But many of us aren’t, and we just can’t understand why.

Author Donald Miller wrote this in his blog a few months ago:

“In his book ‘The Tipping Point,’ Malcolm Gladwell references a study done by the people who created Sesame Street in which children were observed as they watched the show to see when they turned their heads and lost interest. The study showed children lost interest in the show, not when there wasn’t something exciting happening on screen, or there were boring characters, but when they didn’t understand what was happening. In other words, if they did not understand the story, even if it were a mini story of bringing two halves of a word together, they lost interest and started playing with toys.

Producers tried to remedy the lack of interest by ratcheting up conflict, but this didn’t work. Conflict without a story is still confusing. Interesting characters without a story are confusing as well. The producers at Sesame Street worked hard, then, to make every scene, every segment a very clear story, and because of their work retain the average child’s engagement an unheard of 80 percent of the time they are watching the show.”

We adults do the same thing, not with television, but in life. We check out when we don’t understand what is going on in our own story. We distract ourselves. We look for a better story outside of our own story. We chase false stories because they seem more interesting, more fun, more life giving than our own stories. I would say we check out of our own story not because it’s boring, or meaningless, but because we don’t understand it.