Time To ReWrite Your Story
Today's writing (email #5 of ten) is about one thing: story.
We’re all spinning a story, all of the time.
That you can or can’t do this or that.
Or that inevitable catastrophe waiting just round the metaphorical corner?
All this, a story.
The good news?
It can be rewritten.
You can literally rewrite the future you’re hurtling into. If you'd like me to show you how, I'm happy to. Email me here and let's rewrite you a richer, wiser, more full of calm end of '24, beginning of '25.
Now that's the a better story already. You unstuck and free of the quagmire in which you sit.
For now though…
What do a £5 note, a Wimbledon tennis champion and a cave in Lascaux, France, have in common?
Read on.
This. A £5 note.
Do you know where it comes from?
And I don't mean the bank machine, a hole in the wall. Or from a shop, given in change. Nor from my granny, stuffed into a card with birthday greetings decades ago.
I mean money. Do you know where it comes from?
Money magic.
A few years back, I spoke to Mark Anielski, an economist, on my podcast, Peripheral Thinking. We talked about money and where it comes from. Check it out (the next season of the podcast coming soon, btw. Keep ears peeled!).
Money is magic. It's imagined out of thin air. Imagined out of debt.
What does this mean?
If / when you're lucky / unlucky enough to get a mortgage, for example (or a home loan or credit on a card or an overdraft facility, at home or work) money is transferred to your account. Let's stick with the mortgage. You find a house you want to buy. You need to borrow £200,000. You apply to the bank. They asses you. They asses the house, making sure it'll not lose value, well, not too much (they own it after all) and you're in luck! You're approved. House completes, £200,000 appears in your account (actually an appointed solicitors - is the money ever really yours?). The money is then transferred onto the seller (or the sellers mortgage provider, clearing their debt)..
So, the money, the £200,000 (your new mortgage debt), where did it come from?
Was it transferred to your account from a different division of the bank or building society?
Do you even know? (I didn't!).
Nope. The money is created out of nothing. It doesn't exist before it arrives in your account. It comes into being as new numbers on a screen. It is created as debt - interest bearing debt, which means your job is to pay it back with more on top. That's a good business, huh? The bank creates money out of nothing and you pay it back with more on top.
Let's recap. The money didn't exist before you applied for it. It appears as numbers on a screen which you pay back, plus interest, so an amount of made up money becomes real money.
And that's just mortgages. Ever caught sniff of newspaper debate about national debt, often reported blandly as ‘government borrowing’?
The UK government (as with most governments) spends more than it generates every year - in the last year by a mere £50billion. Yes, Billion.
The US government overspends trillions. This translates to about $380 BILLION a day. I know, meaninglessly large numbers. Some context: the amount of money the US government overspends every day - every day! - is twice the amount the UK spends on the entire National Health Service for a whole year and 7x what the Australian government spends on war, sorry, I mean defence. Mind boggling. They must have a mighty large sofa to find those extra pennies needed to balance the books, I hear you say.
Well, they don't need a giant sofa. Or need to balance the books. They just create new money. Cos they can.
Government's borrow from themselves.
97% of all money in existence is created this way, as newly issued debt.
And 60% of all money ever created has been created in the last 15 years.
You get the idea.
I could write an entire book on money and it's peculiarities which would likely be a niche read, despite it's significance.
This is not writing about money, however. It's about story.
Which brings me back to the £5 note:
Read carefully and you'll notice the words: 'promise to pay the bearer the sum of’. This means paper (or sortof weird plastic money is these days) is no more than an IOU. You can exchange it for money somewhere else. Confused? I sure am.
So, money, is largely imagined out of nothing often manifesting as IOUs, or swipes on a phone, is not a lot more than a mighty fine story. A big one. And one we all buy into (which is necessary to keep the story going).
Money is story.
Winning Wimbledon.
In 2021 Ash Barty won Wimbledon, this the fruit of epic endeavour and effort, tailing back years.
With a pivotal stopping off point 6 months previous. In a Melbourne coffee shop.
Enter Ben Crowe, writer, storyteller and mental wellness coach. Ben grew out of Nike (not literally) and works with elite athletes and others on mindset. And story.
Ben and Ash were chewing the sporting fat in a coffee shop six months before Wimbledon. This, so the story goes, is when Ash won Wimbledon, a full six months before she hit a ball.
This is when she changed her story, like you can change yours (although I can't promise a Wimbledon win).
A deep dark cave.
Pasted onto the wet walls of deep, dark caves in southern France are pictures. There are hand prints, scribbles of deer, tales of hunting wonder, survival and thriving. These etchings are a little shy of 20,000 years old, early people, your long distant cousins, writing story of the world around them.
Stitching life into story, story onto life.
Jeremy Lent, also an early l guest on the podcast, wrote about this in the Patterning Instinct. Humans make sense of the world by story. We piece together fragments of experience into a whole, coherent to us, understood by us. We might call this storying the world.
These stories are important.
We use story to make sense of the world. We look for evidence that supports the story we're telling, and reject evidence which contradicts. This an extremely powerful and important insight.
Story helps us makes sense of the world. It's our fixed point in an otherwise fluid, dynamic, ever changing mush of sensory experience.
The story is the choreographer, the lens through which we see.
As we touched on last time, money is a large part of why people work - yet it is a made up story, imagined out of nowhere.
Our early cave cousins etched story onto their walls to shape and explain what they do.
And Wimbledon champions become champions in no small part because of the story they're telling (and a more consistent serve than mine, obvs). This what Ben Crowe and Ash Barty worked on in that Melbourne coffee shop; the story she was telling herself about what is or was not possible.
We are all telling ourselves a story, all the time. This story might be a ceiling continually bumping us down, or a springboard to our richest selves. It's a story. Your story. And it's silently choreographing who you're doing and how.
Get to know your story.
How?
Grab a piece of paper.
Shift it landscape.
Towards the left, your story begins.
To the right, your story evolves.
Somewhere in the middle you are today. Maybe just after the peak - ready to go again?
See the diagram below.
On the far, far left your grandparents are born (yep, your story starts before you).
Sometimes after that, you are born. Maybe you're the inciting incident, when it all kicks off/gets exciting.
Now plot into the page some of the highs and lows of your life. Make a note of memories which shaped you. Note your successes. Miserable defeats. Plot these onto the arc below - rising in intensity to the grand crescendo of your life to date. Make a note too of your grandparents, what they did, who they were / are. This an important part of your story too. Plot it all on the page, feeding the arc.
Like this.
Use this to tell your story so far. Next time we'll get into what next.
Now take a moment to reflect on your story. Which of these high or low points are having a disproportionate effect on what you do today? Maybe you have a niggling self doubt which follows you around? I do. Where might this story thread have birthed? Or an idea that you are a person who does x or doesn't do y? Where on the story arc might this have been born?
Remember, this all just your cave painting. You making sense the world around you. It's malleable, changeable.
You can drop what no longer serving you. Turn up what is. Draw yourself a new picture.
So, first things first, what aspects of this story no longer serve you? What do you choose to let die?
(if you're struggling, email me, and I can story you through it....).
Next time we'll get into writing your next chapters. Because you, like Ash Barty can change that too.
Until next time...