You can choose your story
If you were making the movie of Nelson Mandela’s life what stories would you include?
He lived to be 95. That’s over 832,000 hours. You can’t make a movie that long so you have to cut something out. What do you cut? What do you keep?
And once you pick those key moments, how do you weave them together into a story? What’s the point? What’s the message? How do you want people to feel about Nelson Mandela?
The obvious story is his fight to end apartheid. That’s a great story. But let’s say he had a few bad habits. Maybe he bit his fingernails. Maybe he never made his bed or brushed his teeth.
If you’re telling the story, you get to choose how you tell it. Would anyone choose to tell the ‘Nelson never brushed his teeth’ story? Does anyone want to hear that story? Unlikely.
Yet people do this to themselves every day. They tell the less interesting, less important, less positive story like it’s the main story.
You work hard, you help people out, you raise your kids and teach them all these things. You juggle. You balance. It may not be amazing all the time, but you do good things. Then, at the end of the day what story do you tell yourself?
A story is not a telling of events. It’s not a chronological list of occurrences. A story is a perspective on events. A selected framing of what happened with a beginning, middle and end. A story has a point, a message. At least an outcome. Perhaps a lesson.
If you think of a television series, there are multiple stories going on. The main story might be about a family that moves to a new town for a new beginning — will they find happiness?
The answer plays out bit by bit, episode by episode. They meet a neighbour, get a job, try the new school, whatever. Then something bad happens, how do they react?
By the end of season one we can judge how well this new life is working out. Season two reveals some more secrets and more challenges. And so it goes.
Over time we get a sense for these people. We know what they’re like. We know their story. We don’t yet know how it will end but we know how they’re going.
I think our lives are a bit the same. We have different plot lines running all the time. The big arc of our story tells where we are going and how we’re doing. Within that are the micro stories, like how we relate to people at work.
There are highs and there are lows. The contrast keeps it interesting, so you include both. But you get to pick the focus and create the meaning from it all. At least in your own head. You don't have to let some incident you can't control shape the plot.
I think it’s important to remember that although we’re the main character we’re also the director and editor of our story.
So yes we have to play out each scene as it comes along. We don’t always have full control over the script. But we do get to control how we act in each scene. And at the end of the day, we get to decide which scenes are most important to us, which ones contribute to the story we’re creating and which ones can be left on the cutting room floor.
Just because it got captured on film, doesn’t mean it has to be part of the final movie. Just because you had a difficult moment with some goose at the office, doesn’t mean that part has to feature in the story of your day.
When a friend asks how was your day, you can choose to edit that part out and tell a different story. Because it’s your story.
I’m not saying you should ignore the hard parts, or the parts that hurt or the boring parts. Because of course they matter too. Just that you can choose to frame them in the context of the main plot. If it were a movie, how would this scene, or this other character affect the story? Would it affect the story? Because if it’s not important to the story you can choose to focus on something else instead.
It would be pretty easy to do that with Nelson Mandela, and you’d end up with a great story. And it’s not so hard to do it for your own story too, especially if you know the editor.
