Your story is your life. As human beings, we continually tell ourselves stories — of success or failure; of power or victimhood; stories that endure for an hour, or a day, or an entire lifetime. We have stories about our work, our families and relationships, our health; about what we want and what we’re capable of achieving. Yet, while our stories profoundly affect how others see us and we see ourselves, too few of us even recognize that we’re telling stories, or what they are, or that we can change them — and, in turn, transform our very destinies.

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The Power of Your Story: Walking the Path of the Divina Commedia

I find it endlessly compelling to return to Dante’s journey in the Divina Commedia. The opening lines alone—“Midway upon the journey of our life I found myself within a forest dark, for the straightforward pathway had been lost”—capture something universal. It is the moment we each face when the path ahead seems hidden, when certainty dissolves and we realize that the comfortable structures we relied on have failed us. This is the dark wood, the place where your story begins not with triumph but with being lost, uncertain, afraid.

Our stories rarely begin on a high note. Instead, they start in the messiness of confusion, the depths of despair, or the haze of numbness. Dante understood that before purpose can emerge, before meaning can find shape, we must first confront the wilderness within ourselves. The Divina Commedia becomes a sacred guide: a journey through the rawest parts of our being, leading to profound transformation.

As you read Dante’s voyage through the realms of Hell, Purgatory, and Paradise, you realize it is much more than a theological treatise. It reflects the power of your story—the story you live and tell inside your own heart. It reminds us that no part of ourselves is off limits, no shadow too dark to bring into the light. The first and most audacious step toward purpose is the willingness to walk through your own Inferno.

The Descent into Darkness: Power in Confrontation

Imagine Dante, the pilgrim, stepping into Hell—the Inferno—a realm where souls are trapped in eternal despair, punishment, and unfulfilled desire. This journey is terrifying and necessary. Here the power of your story unfolds when you dare to face your deepest wounds, your regrets, and your fears. The circles of Hell are not mere punishments but metaphorical mirrors reflecting human flaws and consequences—lust, greed, violence, betrayal, and more.

What Dante teaches us is that purpose does not thrive in denial. It profanes no truth, hides behind no half-truths. Your story gains power through honesty—through the courageous act of naming what holds you captive. Whether it is guilt that gnaws at your peace, a toxic relationship, addictions, or old failures, this arena of darkness, no matter how painful, is the crucible for awakening.

Every hero story, every transformational narrative begins here. Alongside Dante, you descend—not to be destroyed, but to be seen, fully and without illusion. The power in your story is how you meet this descent. Do you run? Do you drown? Or do you engage, learn, and emerge? In these fires, the story of your becoming begins.

The Ascent of Transformation: Power in Struggle and Renewal

After Hell comes Purgatory, but the journey changes tone. You climb. This realm bridges despair and grace, a place of hope and effort. Dante climbs terraces where souls purge their faults, slowly shedding attachments and aversions that bind them to suffering.

Here, your story’s power comes alive in the active work of transformation. Purpose is not a static state achieved with relief. It is a continuous process of learning, forgiving, and reforming. This part of Dante’s journey reflects what many of us experience differently: not dramatic encounters but the slow, persistent choosing toward growth.

Through this ascent, Dante is guided by Virgil—the symbol of reason and wisdom. The presence of reason in the journey signals another truth: purpose is not only inspired by feeling or inspiration but grounded by reflection, discipline, and intentionality. The narrative implores you to cultivate self-awareness, to face imperfections without despair, and nurture humility.

Your story finds power here in the daily decisions—choosing kindness over anger; patience over judgment; faith over cynicism. These moments of quiet struggle shape the contours of your life’s meaning. Transformation is hard work without guarantee. Sometimes it feels small or invisible. Yet it is precisely this steady forging that carries you upward, closer to wholeness.

The Embrace of Light: The Culmination of Purpose

At last, Dante reaches Paradise, where poetic language gives way to luminous mystery. The guide shifts—Virgil, bound to reason, cannot enter. Beatrice appears, embodying grace and divine love, leading Dante—now transformed—into realms beyond understanding. Words falter before the overwhelming presence of light, beauty, and unity.

This is where the power of your story opens into something transcendent. Purpose, in its fullest expression, is the reunion of your inner and outer selves, the merging of your personal narrative with a greater whole. It is the realization that meaning surpasses your individual striving, connecting you to the depth of existence.

Dante’s final vision teaches that purpose is not about control or mastery, but surrender—a glorious, liberating surrender to the flow of life and love. Here your story’s power is in openness—the willingness to be vulnerable, to receive mystery, and to trust that your unfolding journey is enough.

The Power of Your Story in Everyday Life

What Dante’s epic ultimately gives us is permission: permission to see the entirety of our stories as sacred. Not just the parts we call “successful” or “good,” but all of it—the joys and failures, the moments of courage and the times we hid. This holistic embrace empowers you to reclaim your purpose not as a distant goal but as a presence alive in the very story you already carry.

Your story matters because it is yours. It is shaped by your choices to walk through darkness, to climb toward growth, to open to love. Its power flows not from perfection, but from authenticity. Dante’s journey reminds us that true courage asks only that we keep moving forward—step by step, through hells and paradises, alongside guides and angels, but ultimately, through our own hearts.

Your story becomes a beacon—not just for yourself but for those who need to see that transformation is possible, that awakening waits on the other side of the dark wood. It is a story not just to be told but to be lived fully.​

​In the quiet orbit of The Kiss, the sculpture becomes a map for The Hero’s Journey: a journey not of distant quests, but of inward calls and outward deeds. The two figures, pressed close as if crossing a threshold, embody the moment when the hero hears the call and chooses to step beyond comfort toward a larger purpose.

The calling: The moment you stand before the embracing forms, a whisper rises—an invitation to leave the familiar story and enter a realm where risk and vulnerability become currency. The narrative begins with recognizing a gap between who you are and who you are meant to become. In this sculpture, that gap is not a void but a doorway carved into bronze and marble, inviting you to lean toward possibility rather than retreat.

The crossing: The kiss is the threshold itself. It is a decision to move from solitary intention into shared action, from fear of exposure to the courage to engage. The hero’s journey here is not about conquest but about alignment—aligning desire with responsibility, impulse with discernment. The surface texture suggests the grip of commitment: rough patches that require patience, smoother planes that reveal clarity. Each contour is a step in crossing the unknown, performed in collaboration with another traveler—the other within the self as well as the other in the world.

The trials: After the threshold, the path is a sequence of tests and revelations. The lovers’ entwined form becomes a metaphor for resilience under pressure: the risk of dependency, the discipline of trust, the art of keeping one’s center while the world churns. The viewer is invited to bring their own trials into the gaze—questions of fidelity, purpose, and sacrifice. The sculpture refracts these queries through light and shadow, turning doubt into insight and hesitation into momentum.

The transformation: In the heart of the journey, the hero discovers that strength is not solitude but integration. The Kiss teaches that true power lies in the synthesis of passion with restraint, of longing with responsibility. The narrative you carry after viewing is enriched by the realization that relationships—whether intimate, professional, or communal—shape character as much as personal resolve shapes outcomes. The form’s continuous line suggests a becoming that never freezes, a living allegory of growth through cooperation, risk, and time.

The return: The final act is to bring the wisdom back into daily life. The hero exits the gallery with a clarified intention: to lead with compassion, to pursue goals with integrity, to build connections that endure beyond the moment of contact. The Kiss, in this light, is not a closed embrace but a doorway opened onto a future where actions align with wiser choices, and where beauty is found in the courage to continue, again and again, toward a nobler form of living.

Thus, The Kiss becomes a timeless mentor for the hero’s journey: a reminder that the most meaningful triumphs arise not from solitary triumphs but from the brave return of a self remade by encounter, responsibility, and shared purpose.

Telling ourselves stories provides structure and direction as we navigate life’s challenges and opportunities, and helps us interpret our goals and skills. Stories make sense of chaos; they organize our many divergent experiences into a coherent thread; they shape our entire reality. And far too many of our stories are dysfunctional, in need of serious editing. First, we ask you to answer the question, “In which areas of my life is it clear that I cannot achieve my goals with the story I’ve got?” We then show you how to create new, reality-based stories that inspire you to action, and take you where you want to go both in your work and personal life.

For decades I have been examining the power of story to increase engagement and performance. Thousands of individuals from every walk of life have sought out and benefited from our life-altering stories.

Our capacity to tell stories is one of our profoundest gifts. My approach to creating deeply engaging stories will give you the tools to wield the power of storytelling and forever change your business and personal life.

​In the quiet glare of a museum corridor, the Burghers of Calais stands not as history’s verdict but as a living prompt for the power of your story. The figures, each etched with a stubborn humanity, compel a closer listening to what a life chooses when it must sacrifice, stand, and hope. The story I carry before Rodin’s sculpture begins with a choice: to see the scene not as distant tragedy but as a mirror for your own daily acts of meaning.

Personal resonance comes first. The burghers’ courage is not a grand shout but a quiet, resolute keeping of promises—promises to themselves, to one another, to a future that will judge their decisions by more than outcomes. The power of the story, then, is the way that narrative steadies the hand in moments of pressure. When fear presses, the story you tell yourself about duty and dignity becomes a stabilizing axis, guiding what to do, and what not to do, in the heat of decision.

From a leadership perspective, this sculpture teaches the art of consequence. Each figure offers a different posture of risk and restraint: some weigh the cost of action, others bear the burden of restraint, and all collectively resist the urge to collapse under collective fear. The story we tell ourselves about such moments—that responsibility is not a burden to escape but a craft to cultivate—turns intention into influence. It suggests that true leadership is the ability to align a faction of hearts and minds toward a common, hard-wought good.

Rodin’s mastery of form—how light plays across weathered skin and rough drapery, how the bodies lean into one another with a shared gravity—becomes a metaphor for the discipline of narrative. The story is not a single line but a sequence of moments: the decision to step forward, the act of speaking truth to power, the stubborn endurance that follows. When the gaze lingers, the sculpture invites the viewer to imagine the afterlife of the act: the quiet hours spent in planning, the conversations that repair ruptures, the small acts of care that keep a community intact when the pressure of history presses in.

The power of your story, anchored in this work, is that it reframes sacrifice as a deliberate choice that tests and strengthens character. It asks to be told not as martyrdom but as a form of communal bravery—a willingness to hold one’s own fear at bay long enough to strengthen the fabric of society. The burghers’ tale becomes a living blueprint: to bind courage with compassion, to temper ambition with accountability, to see the future not as a prize but as something earned through shared, ongoing effort.

Thus, the sculpture transcends its historical moment to become a perpetual ally for anyone tasked with shaping a collective fate. The power of your story, when engaged with the Burghers of Calais, is the invitation to choose boldly, endure wisely, and keep faith with the good that endures beyond personal risk. In that choice lies the lasting sculpture of a life well-lead—a form that, like Rodin’s own work, remains unfinished, always inviting the next deliberate stroke.

​Part One Old Stories

Day 1. That’s Your Story?

Day 2. The Premise of Your Story, the Purpose of Your Life 

Day 3.  How Faithful a Narrator Are You 

Day 4.  Is It Really Your Story You’re Living?

Day 5.  The Private Voice

Day 6.  The Three Rules of Storytelling

PART TWO 

New Stories

Day 7.  It is not about time

Day 8.   Do You Have the Resources to Live Your Best Story?

Day 9.  Indoctrinate Yourself

Day 10.  Turning Story into Action: Training Mission and Rituals

Day 11. More than Mere Words; Finishing the Story, Completing the Mission

Day 12.   Storyboarding the Transformation Process in Eight Steps

Introduction 

I am Peter de Kuster, founder of The Hero’s Journey and The Heroine’s Journey, and for much of my life, I have believed in the transformative power of stories—especially the ones we tell ourselves. But it took a near-death experience to truly open my eyes to what I wanted to dedicate my life to: helping others discover, shape, and share their unique stories, and in doing so, to rewrite my own.

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The Thinker as a Mirror of Narrative Power

In the hushed galleries where bronze breathes and time slows to a patient rhythm, The Thinker stands not merely as a solitary intellect but as a living prompt for the Power of Your Story. To approach this sculpture is to approach a question one writes into the air with every breath: what is the shape of thought when it is tested by doubt, responsibility, and resolve?

From a personal vantage, The Thinker invites a dialogue with the self’s deepest commitments. The figure’s hunched posture and clenched fist suggest a mind wrestling with meaning, a soul weighing purpose against hesitation. The story that emerges in this encounter is a vow to treat thinking as a discipline, not a lure for easy certainty. It’s a reminder that true clarity comes through sustained inquiry, through the stubborn act of asking difficult questions and living with the discomfort those questions produce.

Leadership lessons bloom when perspective widens beyond the solitary thinker. The Thinker becomes a symbol of governance by reflective action: decisions anchored in deep moral consideration, not swayed by impulse or spectacle. The Power of Your Story, viewed through this sculpture, is the awareness that influence grows with the courage to pause, to gather evidence, to test ideas against consequences, and to articulate a vision that invites others to join in the pursuit.

The surface language of Rodin—its rough textures, the play of light and shadow on muscle and sinew—becomes a metaphor for narrative craft. A story is not a smooth veneer but a living texture, enriched by friction, sharpened by critique, and softened by empathy. Each audition of light across the thinker’s form reveals a new facet of intention: the willingness to endure controversy for a greater good, the patience to let a plan mature, the openness to revise when evidence points another direction.

In this work, the Power of Your Story is also a call to responsibility. A narrative, if it is to endure, must bear the weight of accountability—both to one’s own conscience and to the communities touched by action. The Thinker’s solitary mode invites a companion: the reader who carries the story outward, translating inward resolve into outward virtue. The journey from private conviction to public impact is not quick or flashy; it is a steady, often solitary, cultivation of character that ripples into collaborations, policies, and cultural change.

Ultimately, The Thinker teaches that a life worth living is a continuous practice of thinking well and acting justly. The Power of Your Story turns the inner debate into a tonic for collective life: a reminder that ideas, when disciplined by integrity and tested by consequence, become the shared scaffolding of a better world. The Thinker is not an end but a beginning—a perpetual invitation to keep shaping thoughts, and through them, the very course of our communities.

Lying in that hospital bed, suspended between what was and what could be, I realized how fragile and precious life is. All the plans, the business meetings, the deadlines—they faded into insignificance. What remained was a burning question: What story do I want to tell with the rest of my life? The answer was clear. I wanted to travel, to write, to tell stories. 

There is a language older than words that has always fascinated me. It speaks in images and emotions, in the quiet tightening of a throat in a dark cinema, in the sigh when the credits roll and you realize the story on the screen has quietly rewritten a sentence in the story you tell about yourself. Like in Dead Poets Society, where students seize the day, ripping out textbook pages to embrace poetry’s raw power over conformity, sparking personal rebellion and self-discovery. That is the language I am searching for with The Power of Your Story: a universal language of stories that crosses borders, backgrounds, and biographies, and invites each of us to become a better storyteller of our own life.​​

My quest runs through movie palaces in Rome, side streets in London, quiet museums in Venice, and cafés in Amsterdam, where people sit with notebooks, watching scenes from great films and quietly recognizing themselves. In these story-rich places, I walk with entrepreneurs, artists, and seekers who arrive with a familiar question hidden behind their official goals: “Why does the story I am living not feel like mine anymore?” Together we watch heroes and heroines on the screen and notice that, beneath costume and culture, they share something startlingly similar: seven great plots, twelve archetypal heroes, and again and again one great story about leaving an old life behind to claim a truer one.​

​In the quiet rooms of the Musée Rodin, Balzac sits not as a damp monument to a writer but as a living prompt about the Power of Your Story. The bronze, weathered and exact, seems to listen for the shape of intention behind every sentence Balzac ever etched into the world with his own audacious, tireless voice. To approach Balzac is to approach a life that insisted on making meaning out of misfortune, triumph, and the stubborn grit of daily labor. The sculpture invites a listener to ask: What story am I willing to live into when the ordinary disappointments of life press in?

Balzac, in Rodin’s hands, becomes a compass for purpose. His face, carved with lines that map decades of ambition, condenses the alchemy of storytelling: observation sharpened into social truth, truth tempered by empathy, empathy transmuted into characters who endure beyond the author’s breath. The Power of Your Story emerges when Balzac’s nostrils flare at a banal detail—the turn of a clerks’ handwriting, the itch of a sleeve on a crowded boulevard—and the detail is allowed to become a door. Step through, and the door reveals a city of human longing, of schemes and compromises, of a society that rewards both brilliance and perseverance.

To tell Balzac’s story through this lens is to witness how a life is forged in the furnace of relentless work. Balzac’s own legend—born into modest means, fueled by prodigious output, haunted by debt and discipline—becomes a parable about deciding, again and again, what matters most. The sculpture’s posture—a figure poised with forward momentum—echoes the reader’s own impulse: to press forward with a narrative that refuses to shrink from complexity. The Power of Your Story is not a solitary flare but a steady glow that invites others to lean in, to see themselves in the long arc of a life fully chosen.

Rodin’s Balzac is not a static monument but a conversation starter. It asks for a reader to imagine Balzac not as a distant, almost mythic genius, but as a person who loved accuracy, who cherished a sentence as a form of moral inquiry, who believed that literature could shape society as surely as law or commerce. The story that unfolds from the sculpture is a map of discipline: wake early, carry a notebook everywhere, test a scene in a crowded café, scrap what fails, polish what remains until it gleams with a truth that can outlast the writer’s own breath. The Power of Your Story, then, becomes the art of translating private persistence into communal consequence.

As a viewer, one learns to measure life by its commitments rather than its outcomes. Balzac’s gaze—intense, unyielding, almost clinical in its care for detail—reminds that a story is a practice, not a product. It is the daily choice to attend to reality with honesty, to resist the allure of easy endings, to keep the faith that characters, ideas, and societies can improve when told with patience and courage. In Rodin’s Balzac, the power of a story is tested not by triumph alone but by endurance, by the stubborn insistence that what is worth saying must be said with care, again and again, until the world cannot help but listen.

What fascinates me is how the same story patterns keep appearing in people who have never met. A designer in Berlin talks like a Warrior exhausted by endless battles for recognition. A chef in Barcelona feels like the Orphan, forever on the edge of belonging. A startup founder in Paris discovers she has been living the Ruler’s story of control when her heart longs for the Explorer’s open road. Then we sit in a cinema and watch a character in a film struggle with the very same script. In La Vita è Bella, a father shields his son from Holocaust horrors by framing camp life as an enchanted game, turning despair into defiant love and survival. In that moment, the language of story becomes universal: you no longer feel uniquely stuck; you feel spoken to. The film is no longer “about” someone else. It is a mirror, gently asking: “Is this the story you still want to live?”​

​In The Power of Your Story, I always begin with one question: “In which areas of your life is it clear that you cannot achieve your goals with the story you’ve got?” It is a brave question because it exposes the hidden contracts we live by: “I must always please,” “I must never fail,” “I am only valuable when I achieve.” As people answer, you can feel the old plot loosening its grip. Then, using the archetypes and classic plots from film, we start drafting a new premise: What if your life is not a tragedy of overwork but a quest for meaningful creation? What if your business is not a battlefield but a love story with your best customers? What if your leadership is not about power but about pilgrimage—inviting others on a journey that matters?​

In the quiet rhythm of the Musée Rodin, the Walking Man stands not merely as a study in motion but as a living invitation to the Power of Your Story. His lean, forward-leaning form seems to pulse with a purpose that defies fatigue, a reminder that every step forward is a choice to become someone new.

To view Walking Man through this lens is to see discipline as a daily act of courage. The sculpture’s rough texture and the weight of the torso suggest a life spent in pursuit of momentum despite obstacles. The Power of Your Story emerges when this figure becomes a mirror: each stride reflects a decision to endure, to keep moving toward a goal that remains just beyond reach. The story one tells oneself in the face of resistance gains shape from that forward push, turning hesitation into motion.

Balancing fragility and resolve, Walking Man teaches that progress is less a leap than a sequence of deliberate, small acts. The pathway from hesitation to action is paved by repeated choices—lacing a shoe, tightening a resolve, taking the next step when fatigue shadows the mind. The sculpture’s stance, a quiet invitation to continue, becomes a manifesto for persistence: identity is formed in the ongoing practice of showing up, even when the finish line is unclear.

Rodin’s handling of light and mass in Walking Man becomes a metaphor for narrative craft. Light carves the contours of intention, revealing the tension between tension and release that drives a story forward. A story worth telling is not a single moment of triumph but a steady cadence of decisions that accumulate into a visible path. The Walking Man embodies that cadence, urging the viewer to translate inner resolve into outward action, to let intention become movement, and to permit action to sculpt character.

In this sculpture, the Power of Your Story is the recognition that growth is earned through perseverance rather than spectacle. It asks for a narrative that honors the grit of long journeys—the quiet mornings of practice, the repeated edits of a hard-won idea, the willingness to begin again after a fall. The Walking Man becomes a companion for anyone choosing a forward life: a reminder that the meaningful arc is not completed in a single bound but forged in a series of purposeful steps.

Thus, the Walking Man reframes success as endurance, and endurance as a form of storytelling. Each step writes a line in the larger narrative of a life well-led—one that refuses to yield to convenience, yet remains open to possibility, courage, and growth. The Power of Your Story, seen in Rodin’s walking figure, is the daily claim that a life in motion can sing with integrity, clarity, and hope, long after the crowd has moved on.

What this quest can bring all of us is not a neat formula, but a toolkit and a courage. The toolkit consists of questions and structures: the premise of your story, the words on your future tombstone, the mission you dare to say out loud, the archetype that best expresses your values, the plot that truly fits the season of life you are in. The courage comes from realizing you are not alone: every great story, every great business, every meaningful relationship has had to rewrite itself at some point. When you start to see your life as a work in progress rather than a verdict, you reclaim authorship. You stop asking, “What is happening to me?” and start asking, “What story am I telling—and what story do I want to tell next?”​​

The universal language of stories is, in the end, a language of choice. You cannot control every event, every loss, every unexpected twist. But you can choose the story that gives those events meaning. My work, and my joy, is to walk with people through the great cities and great movies of the world until they can hear that language clearly in themselves. When they do, something simple and astonishing happens: they stop trying to live someone else’s script. They become the storyteller, not just the character. And from that moment on, their business, their relationships, and their inner life begin to align around a new, truer story—one only they can tell.

What do I mean by ‘story’?

What do I mean by ‘story’? I don’t intend to offer tips on how to fine-tune the mechanics of telling stories to enhance the desired effect on listeners. And I do not mean the boiler-plate, holier-than-thou brand stories often found in the Mission Statement of corporate websites, or the Here’s -why-we’ll – absolutely-meet-our-fourth-quarter numbers-narrative-yarn-turned-pep-rally that team leaders often like to spin to rally the troops. 

No, I wish to examine the most compelling story about storytelling – namely how we tell stories about ourselves to ourselves. Indeed, the idea of ‘one’s own story’ is so powerful, so native, that I hardly consider it a metaphor, as if it’s some new lens through which to look at life. Your life is your story. Your story is your life. When stories we read or watch or listen to are triumphant, they are so because they fundamentally remind us what is most true or possible in life – even when it is an escapist romantic comedy or sci-fi fantasy or fairy tale. If you are human, then you tell yourself stories – positive ones and negative, consciously and, far more than not, subconsciously. Stories that span a single episode, or a year, or a semester, or a weekend, or a relationship, or a season, or an entire tenure on this planet. Telling ourselves stories helps us navigate our way through life because they provide structure and direction. ‘Just seeing my life as a story’ said one of my clients ‘allowed me to establish a sort of road map, so when I have to make decisions about what I need to do [the map] makes it easier, takes away a lot of stress’.  

In the dim reverie of the Musée Rodin, The Three Herrings stands as a chorus rather than a solo voice—a trio of fragments that invite the Power of Your Story to join their conversation. Each figure, worn by effort and canted toward one another, echoes a different facet of purpose: risk, restraint, and resolve, all converging in a shared weathered sentence that courage can be made, not merely found.

From this vantage, the sculpture becomes a workshop for narrative discipline. The rough textures catch the light like a ledger of choices, each strike of metal insisting that character is forged through friction—between impulse and consequence, between loneliness and belonging. The Power of Your Story emerges when the Heiring figures are read as partners in a common mission: to navigate uncertainty with loyalty to a vision that endures beyond individual gain. The scene begs the question: what alliances must be formed, what promises kept, to carry a story forward when the world presses in?

The trio’s intimate proximity suggests that meaning rarely travels alone. Dialogue—spoken or unspoken—binds them, and in that binding, a reader can hear the cadence of collaboration: listening, disagreeing, reconciling, committing. The Walking Ahead in each posture signals not solitary ascent but a collective ascent, where shared purpose reframes personal victory as communal flourishing. The Power of Your Story, seen through these intertwined forms, becomes the art of choosing whom to stand beside, and what to stand for, when the path forward is uncertain.

Rodin’s mastery of form here—how the limbs lean, how the neck tilts toward a mutual horizon—acts as a parable for narrative craft. A story grows not from a single heroic beat but from the choreography of trust, critique, and courage that ripples through a group. Each line on the sculpture’s surface seems to insist on accountability: a reminder that every choice in a shared tale carries weight, and that the right alignment of people can turn potential fracture into fusion.

The Three Herrings thus become a quiet manifesto for leadership and creativity. The Power of Your Story is tested in the willingness to enter a shared frame of reference, to argue and adjust, to let tenderness temper ambition, and to keep faith with a cause larger than the self. In their compact, weathered unity, the sculpture teaches that a life well-told is not a solitary flame but a coordinated flame—bright enough to illuminate a collective tomorrow, enduring enough to outlast the day’s weather.

So the Herrings offer this invitation: tell a story that invites others to lean in, to contribute, to persevere. Let the narrative be a map and a compass—revealing both where to go and why it matters to go there—until the last word feels earned by the shared toil of a community moving toward a wiser horizon.

A story is our creation of a reality; indeed our story matters more than what actually happens. Is there really any difference, as someone famously asked, between the life of a king who sleeps twelve hours a day dreaming he’s a pauper, and that of a pauper who sleeps twelve hours a day dreaming he’s a king? 

By ‘story’ I mean those tales we create and tell ourselves and others, and which form the only reality we will ever know in this life.  Our stories may or may not conform to the real world. They may or may not inspire us to take hope – filled action to better our lives. They may or may not take us where we ultimately want to go. But since our destiny follows our stories, it is imperative that we do everything in our power to get our stories right.

For most of us, that means some serious editing.

To edit a dysfunctional story, you must first identify it. To do that you must answer the question: In which important areas of my life is it clear that I cannot achieve my goals with the story I have got? Only after confronting and satisfactorily answering this question can you expect to build new reality – based stories that will take you where you want to go.

Is this all starting to sound a little vague? I’m not surprised. But hold on. I understand you may be thinking Life as a story? The whole concept strikes you, perhaps, as a tad …. soft. I don’t look at my life in terms of story, you say. I disagree. Your life is the most important story you will ever tell, and you are telling it right now, whether you know it or not. From very early on you are spinning and telling multiple stories about your life, publicly and privately, stories that have a theme, a tone, a premise – whether you know it or not.  Some stories are for better, some for worse. No one lacks material. Everyone’s got a story.

​In the Gardens of the Musée Rodin, the landscape itself becomes a character in the Power of Your Story. Balancing grass, trees, and sculpted forms, the space invites a dialogue between restraint and revelation, between what is hidden in bronze and what blooms in silence around it. The garden is not simply a backdrop; it is a living editor, shaping how a story is read, felt, and carried outward.

Viewing Rodin’s figures amid the ebb and flow of seasonal light, one discovers that gardens teach timing. A breeze over The Thinker, a shadow crossing The Gates of Hell, or a sunlit glint on Balzac’s imagined gaze—all become narrative cues that influence the pace and tone of a story. The Power of Your Story emerges when the garden’s rhythms align with inner tempo: moments to pause and listen, moments to push forward with renewed conviction, and moments to notice the small details that reveal character under pressure.

The sculpture garden also offers a practice in humility and collaboration. Paths weave visitors past intimate vignettes: a couple sharing a quiet glance beside a marble torso, a child pressing a hand to cool stone, an elder lingeringly tracing a line with a finger. Each interaction becomes part of a chorus, teaching that a powerful story is shaped not by solitary genius alone but by the way many voices, perceptions, and gestures contribute to meaning. The Power of Your Story here depends on choosing to linger with a piece, to invite interpretation, and to let the surroundings prompt new angles on one’s own narrative.

Rodin’s mastery of texture—rough bark against smooth stone, moss thriving in crevices, and the careful interplay of light on metal—parallels the craft of story-making. A tale grows when rough edges are embraced, when light is used to reveal what is true, and when every turn of the path offers a fresh angle on motive and consequence. In the garden, the act of moving through space becomes a metaphor for the reader’s journey through a life: observation, reflection, integration, and onward movement.

The Gardens, then, amplify the central claim: a story gains power when it is nourished by place, time, and shared experience. The Power of Your Story is not just a private vow but a public invitation—an invitation to walk with intention, to notice how place shapes decision, and to let the garden’s enduring stillness steady the hand as choices are made. As the day wanes and the sun threads gold through the trees, the garden remains a quiet mentor—reminding that a life told well is learned in chapters of presence, patience, and open wonder.

And thank goodness. Because our capacity to tell stories is, I believe, just about our profoundest gift. Perhaps the true power of the story metaphor is best captured by this seemingly contradiction:  we employ the word ‘story’ to suggest both the wildest of dreams (it is just a story ……) and an unvarnished depiction of reality (okay, what is the story?). How is that for range?

The challenge? Most of us are not writers. ‘I am not a professional novelist’ one client said to me, when finally the time came for him to put pen to paper. ‘If this is the story of my life, you are damn right I’m intimidated. Can you give me a little help in how to get this out? That’s what I intend to do with the Hero’s Journey and The Heroine’s Journey project. First, help you to identify how pervasive the story is in life, your life, and second, to rewrite it.

Every life has elements to it that every story has – beginning, middle, and end; theme; subplots; trajectory; tone.  

Shakespeare and Company’s history in Paris unfolds as a twice-told tale of lineage and revival, each chapter echoing the shop’s vocation as a living literary salon. The original Shakespeare and Company was founded in 1919 by Sylvia Beach, at 8 rue Dupuytren, later moving to 12 rue de l’Odéon, and it became a beacon for the Lost Generation by publishing James Joyce’s Ulysses in 1922, an act that underscored the store’s willingness to defy censorship in defense of bold art. Beach’s shop established a template for a bookstore as sanctuary, publisher, and gathering place, where expatriate writers and curious readers mingled amid shelves that seemed to hum with conversations past and present. The store’s closure in 1941 during the German occupation left a visible gap in Paris’s literary life, but the spirit of its model did not vanish; it lingered in the memory of artists who had found shelter there and in the city’s enduring appetite for literary community.

In 1951, American George Whitman opened Le Mistral on the Left Bank, opposite Notre-Dame, in a space that would later host the reimagined Shakespeare and Company. Whitman’s vision fused a second-hand bookshop with a lending library, a concept that aligned with Beach’s ethos while expanding it into a public, participatory project: readers could borrow books with the understanding that they might, in turn, borrow from others—creating a continuous exchange of voices. In 1964, Whitman renamed the shop Shakespeare and Company to honor Beach’s original store and to mark the 400th anniversary of Shakespeare’s birth, thereby linking a new generation of readers to an older lineage. The reborn shop quickly attracted a contemporary cohort of writers and intellectuals—figures like Allen Ginsberg, Anaïs Nin, and James Baldwin—who came to browse, write, and lodge their ideas within its intimate, bookish shelter. The current Shakespeare and Company thus stands as both a memorial and an engine, preserving Beach’s pioneering spirit while inviting Whitman’s successors and today’s readers to participate in an evolving dialogue about books, memory, and community.

From a storytelling frame, the history embodies The Power of Your Story: a narrative that invites individuals to see themselves as part of a continuum rather than as isolated consumers. Each era—Beach’s publication breakthrough, Whitman’s lending-library revival, and the ongoing practice of hosting readings, conversations, and lending—offers a template for readers to test and revise their own life stories through engagement with text, others, and place. The shop’s walls function as a living archive, reminding that a life shaped by reading is inseparable from a life shaped by belonging, generosity, and shared inquiry. The result is a city-in-miniature where history and the present co-author every visit, every conversation, and every chosen book with the promise that literature can sustain courage, curiosity, and connection across generations. If a thread needs pulling, it is the thread of continuity: how Beach’s daring delivery of Joyce’s work and Whitman’s ongoing openness to new voices continue to empower readers to tell truer, braver stories in their own lives.

Story is everywhere in life. Perhaps your story is that you are responsible for the happiness and livelihoods of dozens of people around you and you are the unappreciated hero. If you see things in more general terms, maybe your story is that the world is full of traps and misfortune – at least for you – and you’re the perpetual victim (I’m always so unlucky…. I always end up getting the short end of the stick…. People can’t be trusted and will take advantage of me if I give them the chance.). 

If you are focused on one subplot – business say – then maybe your story is that you sincerely want to execute the major initiatives in your company, yet you are restricted in some essential way and thus can never get far enough from the forest to see the trees. Maybe your story is that you must keep chasing even though you already seem to have a lot (even too much) because the point is to get more and more of it – money, prestige, power, control, attention. Maybe your story is that you and your children just can’t connect. Or your story might be essentially a rejection of another story – and everything you do is filtered through that rejection.

Stories are everywhere. Your body tells a story. The smile or frown on your face, your shoulders thrust back in confidence or slumped roundly in despair, the liveliness or fatigue in your gait, the sparkle of hope and joy in your eyes or the blank stare, your fitness, the size of your gut, the tone and strength of your physical being, your overall presentation – those are all part of your story, one that’s especially apparent to everyone else. We judge books by their covers not simply because we are wired to judge quickly but because the cover so often provides astonishing accurate clues to what is going on inside. What is your story about your physical self? Does it truly work for you? Can it take you where you want to go in the short term? How about ten years from now? What about thirty?

​The Power of Your Story: The Journey in The Three Musketeers

Your story often begins with a spark—an invitation to something greater than yourself that stirs your courage and tests your loyalty. Such is the opening of Alexandre Dumas’s The Three Musketeers, a tale of friendship, honor, intrigue, and adventure set in 17th-century France. It is a story not only about sword fights and court conspiracies but about the power residing in purpose shaped by camaraderie, faith, and commitment.

Young d’Artagnan arrives in Paris, full of bravado and hope, seeking to join the King’s Musketeers. His journey begins in a frantic duel with three musketeers—Athos, Porthos, and Aramis—who become his brothers-in-arms. This meeting ignites the story’s immortal motto: “All for one, and one for all.” Your story’s strength often comes from such bonds—people who stand beside you, sharing risk, joy, and purpose.

The quartet’s adventures encompass duels, espionage, royal favor, and love, each episode layering complexity on loyalty and courage. D’Artagnan’s youthful courage matures into strategic wisdom; Athos’s noble melancholy conceals hardship and love lost; Porthos brings heart and humor; Aramis balances faith and worldly desire. Together, they navigate shifting social and political tides, embodying different facets of purpose united by shared ideals.

Your story gains power in this unity—the weaving of diverse gifts into a greater whole. Like the musketeers, purpose often requires partnership, conflict resolution, and collective trust. It flourishes not only in solitary quests but in community where strengths complement weaknesses.

Dumas’s richly painted Paris—court intrigues around Cardinal Richelieu and Queen Anne, plots involving the Duke of Buckingham and Milady de Winter—amplify the stakes. Purpose comes into sharp relief amid deception, power plays, and moral ambiguity. The musketeers’ unwavering code contrasts with court’s duplicity; your story must discern values amid complexity.

Milady de Winter, femme fatale and agent of chaos, challenges their bonds and integrity. She embodies the seductive dangers luring purpose off course—vengeance, manipulation, betrayal. Your story gains resilience when tested by such dark forces, when loyalty and honor withstand allure and threat.

D’Artagnan’s romantic pursuit of Constance Bonacieux anchors his purpose in love, offering vulnerability amid danger. Their relationship reminds us that purpose includes heart, risk, and vulnerability—that true courage is opening to connection alongside battle.

The musketeers’ trials—saving the queen’s honour, exposing plots, dueling assassins—are dramatic rites that reflect inner transformation: valor born not in impulse but in measured faith, selflessness, and wit. Your story finds energy when you move beyond impulse toward purpose aligned with moral compass and wisdom.

The novel’s triumphs are often bittersweet. D’Artagnan loses friends, confronts personal limits, and grows through hardship. In these losses and lessons, your story deepens—there is no quick victory, only relentless striving and learning.

The Three Musketeers celebrates purpose as a dance between loyalty to ideals and adaptation to circumstance. It teaches that heroism is rooted in faith—not blind, but chosen; not grandiose, but steady. Your story’s power lies in such choosing, in embodying “all for one” in the face of fear, uncertainty, and change.

Dumas’s vivid storytelling, mix of humor and tragedy, grandeur and intimacy, invites you to live your story fully—embracing friendship, honour, passion, and sacrifice. Your narrative is a sword and shield, a song and a vow.

Like d’Artagnan and his brothers, your journey summons courage—to follow calls that challenge, to stand for truths, to love despite risk, and to forge bonds that empower.

Your story is your field of battle and celebration. Carry your purpose boldly—where swords clash and hearts beat as one. Let the motto “All for one, and one for all” resonate as a compass, a promise, and a light on your path.

You have a story about your company, though your version may depart wildly from your customer’s or business partners. You have a story about your family. Anything that consumes our energy can be a story, even if we don’t always call it a story. There is the story of your relationship. The story of you and food, or you and anger, or you and impossible dreams. The story of you, the friend. The story of you,  your father’s son or your mother’s daughter. Some of these stories work and some of them fail. According to my experience, an astounding number of these stories, once they are identified, are deemed tragic – not by me, mind you but by the people living them.

Like it or not, there will be a story around your death. What will it be? Will you die a senseless death? Perhaps you drank too much and failed to buckle your seat belt and were thrown from your car, or you died from colon cancer because you refused to undergo an embarrassing colonoscopy years before when the disease was treatable. Or after years of bad nutrition, no exercise, and abuse of your body, you suffered a fatal heart attack at age fifty – nine.  ‘Senseless death’ means that it did not have to happen when it happened;  it means your story did not have to end the way it ended. Think about the effect the story of your senseless death might have on your family, on those you care about who  you are leaving behind. How would that story impact their life stories? Ask yourself, Am I okay dying a senseless death?  Your immediate reaction is almost certainly, “No!, of course not! 

I’m not trying to be morbid. Story – which dies if deprived of energy – is not about death but life. Yet if you continue to tell a bad story, if you continue to give energy to a bad story, then you will almost assuredly beget another bad one, or ten. Why is abuse so commonly passed from one generation to the next? How much is the recurrence of obesity, diabetes and certain other diseases across families a genetic predisposition, and how much is the repetition of a dangerous story about food and physical exertion. 

I see A Moveable Feast as a blueprint for living through memory, craft, and the courage to write truth into the edges of experience. Set in grimy, glorious Paris of the 1920s, Hemingway’s memoir unfolds not as a mere recall of places and dinners, but as a decisive forging of voice, discipline, and meaning under pressure. The book invites readers to see how artistry grows from restraint, yearning, and the willingness to confront failure with honesty.

The narrative core is a study in how a life becomes legible through work, friends, and the daily practice of showing up at the page. The Power of Your Story foregrounds Hemingway’s relentless return to craft—short sentences, precise detail, oblique admission of vulnerability—as a model for shaping one’s own experiences into a coherent, enduring voice. In this lens, Paris is less a backdrop than a co-author, shaping temperament, appetite, and ambition by offering both distractions and tests that refine character. The memoir’s honesty about money, loneliness, and the fragility of relationships becomes a guide to parsing similar truths in one’s own life.

Community and mentorship play a pivotal role in the book’s texture. The Power of Your Story highlights how friendships with fellow writers, editors, and patrons help bend raw experience into publishable form, while also teaching resilience—the ability to bury ego, endure rejection, and persist in the face of uncertainty. The book’s episodic structure—tiny rooms, cafes, and riverbanks—models a method for turning scattered moments into a life narrative that feels complete and earned rather than glamorous or manufactured. The Paris chapters, filled with deft observations and hard-earned wisdom, offer a template for translating memory into meaning, so that past joys and missteps illuminate present choices.

Finally, A Moveable Feast invites a broader meditation on belonging. The Power of Your Story frames the work of living as ongoing negotiation between longing and fidelity—to craft, to friends, to truth. The memoir’s luminous portrayals of love, art, and risk become a reminder that growth often comes from embracing discomfort: the pain of unrequited aspiration, the lure of distraction, the discipline to write through it all. The takeaway is a practice: capture the essence of a moment with clarity, tend relationships with care, and revisit the craft daily to turn experience into a lasting, usable story.

If there’s a specific facet you’d like emphasized—Hemingway’s technique, the Paris milieu, or the book’s influence on modern memoir—share the focus and the reflection can be sharpened further to fit your needs.

Unhealthy storytelling is characterized by a diet of faulty thinking and, ultimately,  long – term negative consequences. This undetectable, yet inexorable progression is not unlike what happens to coronary arteries from a high-fat, high-cholesterol diet. In the body, the consequence of such a diet is hardening of the arteries. In the mind, the consequence of bad storytelling is hardening of the categories, narrowing of the possibilities, calcification of perception. Both roads lead to tragedy, often quietly.

The cumulative effect of our damaging stories will have tragic consequences on our health, engagement, performance and happiness. Because we can’t confirm the damage our defective storytelling is wreaking, we disregard it, or veto our gut reactions to make a change. Then one day we awaken to the reality that we have become cynical, negative, angry. That is now who we are. Though we never quite saw it coming, that is now our true story.

It is not just individuals who tell stories about themselves; groups do it, too. Nations and religions and universities, companies and sports teams and political parties each tell stories about themselves to capture the imagination of their constituencies. Companies tell their stories to engage their customers and, increasingly, their workforce, stories which must be internally consistent and powerful if they’re to succeed over time. 

Gustave Flaubert’s Madame Bovary is renowned not just for its portrayal of Emma Bovary’s doomed quest for love and fulfillment but for the remarkable “alignment” between the novel’s overarching theme and all the scenes, characters, and moments that compose it. The story, at every level, explores the turmoil between fantasy and reality, the dangers of chasing impossible ideals, and the tragic consequences of disillusionment.

Emma Bovary, raised on sentimental novels and romantic dreams, marries Charles Bovary, a simple, well-meaning provincial doctor. Charles, content in his mediocrity, adores Emma, yet his adoration is unable to fulfill her restless spirit. The story’s setting—dreary small towns like Tostes and Yonville—reflects Emma’s own sense of entrapment. These locations contrast with the brief splendor of the aristocratic ball and her stylish lovers’ apartments, scenes Flaubert uses to highlight Emma’s relentless yearning for something sublime, just out of reach.

The novel’s central theme—the perils of living too much in fantasy—is mirrored in Emma’s every thought and action. She tries to recreate the passionate lives she’s read about, idealizing love and luxury, only to find each new affair and purchase leaves her emptier than before. Her lovers, Rodolphe and Léon, are drawn into her extravagant imaginings but always disappoint her when confronted with the prosaic realities of daily life. Rodolphe, practical and jaded, treats Emma’s devotion as a passing amusement; Léon, sensitive and poetic like Emma, nonetheless lacks the resolve to break from convention for her. Flaubert’s ruthless realism ensures even passion’s height is undermined by routine banalities—a rendezvous marred by bad weather, an awkward encounter riddled with clichés—forcing the ideal and the ordinary to clash at every turn.

No character is extraneous. Charles’s limited desires and weak will embody bourgeois mediocrity, his inability to understand Emma paralleling the world’s indifference to her dreams. Monsieur Homais, the pompous pharmacist, and Lheureux, the sly moneylender, serve as satirical echoes of middle-class vanity and cunning, manipulating Emma or Charles with relentless self-interest. Even Berthe, the neglected daughter, is a victim of Emma’s relentless chase for excitement, ultimately orphaned and cast into poverty, an innocent casualty of longing gone awry.

Flaubert’s distinctive style—ironic, detached, and meticulously descriptive—ensures that every scene (from the gray, stifling interiors of Yonville to the fleeting, glittering ball) supports his thematic vision: romantic expectation contorted by harsh reality. The mundane and the sublime continuously collide, exposing the absurdity of trying to live one’s illusions while ignoring life’s hard truths.

In the end, Emma’s escape from boredom—her affairs, her spending, her manipulations—lead only to ruin. Buried under debt and rejected by her lovers, she swallows arsenic, her death agonizing and undignified. The scenes that follow—Charles’s grief, Homais’s selfish triumph, Berthe’s abandonment—confirm the novel’s alignment: every element, every character and moment, is orchestrated in service of the fundamental theme. Madame Bovary endures not simply as the story of one woman, but as a masterful composition in which every part reflects the tragic impossibility of remaking the world, or oneself, entirely out of dreams

Throughout this seminar I will detail how such organizations and their employees have reworked their story to the great advantage of both their business and their culture. 

For twenty-five years I have studied human behavior and performance, and been privileged to witness many success stories of positive behavioral change: better relationships at home and at work, better job performance, weight loss and all-around improved health and lowering of health risks; love, excitement, joy and the discovery of talents heretofore buried. My experience has led me to see that these changes may be brought about by a unique integration of all the human sciences.  

Over the past 30 years, my work has been deeply rooted in exploring flow experiences—those moments of deep engagement and creativity where challenge meets skill perfectly, as described by Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi. What I have discovered is that flow is not just a psychological state but a transformative journey, especially when combined with the power of storytelling. Storytelling provides the narrative framework that helps individuals and leaders make sense of their experiences, integrate their passions, and sustain flow beyond fleeting moments.

In my leadership journeys I use storytelling archetypes to create conditions that naturally foster flow. These timeless narrative structures help participants embody roles and challenges that align with their skills, creating a balance that triggers flow states. Storytelling here is not just decoration—it is a tool for meaning-making and motivation, enabling people to connect their personal and professional challenges to a larger, inspiring narrative.

Client feedback has been essential throughout this journey. From the earliest workshops to the latest leadership retreats, I have consistently integrated participant reflections and stories to refine the frameworks and exercises. This iterative process ensures that the storytelling methods remain relevant, practical, and deeply resonant. Clients often report that framing their challenges within a story helps them gain clarity, see new possibilities, and sustain the passion that fuels flow. Their feedback has confirmed that storytelling is the bridge between abstract flow theory and real-world application, making flow accessible and sustainable in everyday leadership and creative work.

In sum, my three decades of work show that flow and storytelling are inseparable partners. Flow offers the experience of peak engagement, while storytelling provides the narrative structure that helps individuals understand, sustain, and share that experience meaningfully. This synergy, continuously refined through client collaboration, is at the heart of my approach to leadership and creativity.

Ladies and gentlemen, welcome to this transformative session on The Power of Your Story. Imagine turning the chaos of one ordinary day into an epic that reshapes your entire life—that’s what James Joyce does in Ulysses, and today, we’ll explore how it reveals the stories you tell yourself about yourself, to yourself, and then to others.​

Ulysses unfolds on June 16, 1904, in Dublin, tracking Leopold Bloom, a Jewish advertiser, and Stephen Dedalus, a young intellectual, through their parallel wanderings. Bloom attends a funeral, visits pubs, grapples with his wife’s infidelity, and encounters Stephen, mirroring Homer’s Odyssey where Bloom embodies Odysseus, Stephen Telemachus, and Molly Bloom Penelope. Their paths converge in brothels and hallucinations, culminating in Molly’s famous “yes” soliloquy affirming life amid loss and desire. This single day captures death, father-son bonds, sex, and empathy, proving the heroic lies in the mundane.​​

Raise your hand if you’ve ever replayed a failure in your mind all day— that’s your inner story at work, just like Bloom’s endless monologue of worries, kindness, and fantasies. Joyce’s stream-of-consciousness lays bare this private narrative: fragmented thoughts on love, guilt, and identity that shape every choice. Bloom tells himself a tale of quiet resilience despite rejection; Stephen, one of artistic torment. Ask yourself: what story does your mind repeat? Change it—from “I’m not enough” to “I choose empathy”—and watch your day become epic.​

Now, turn inward: the story you whisper to yourself alone is your most powerful editor. In Ulysses, characters hallucinate emperors and trials from unchecked thoughts, showing how unexamined narratives trap us. Joyce wrote from exile, embracing his chaotic mind to birth a masterpiece—proof that honoring your inner flow forges authenticity. Take my Power of Your Story questionnaire: it uncovers your motivations, triggers, and why certain paths call you. Today, commit: audit one limiting thought and flip it. Your private “yes” like Molly’s unlocks worlds.​

Finally, the stories you share outward—your hero’s journey—must match the inner one for true impact. Bloom’s compassion shines when he aids Stephen; misalignment breeds misunderstanding. In business or life, resonant tales of archetypes draw clients and allies, as heroes from athletes to artists prove by reframing failures into destiny. Use this: craft your narrative like Joyce—raw, mythic, true. Tell it boldly, and others see the legend in you.​

You’ve journeyed through Ulysses today—now claim your story’s power. Like Bloom wandering home, rewrite yours: inner resilience, private affirmation, outer authenticity. Who’s ready to live their epic? Let’s workshop it—share one story you’re ready to transform!

Of course, some people who have travelled with me on the Power of your Story are utterly unaffected by what we do and what they’re exposed to. Why? Some feel their ‘story’ needs no major reworking (and perhaps they’re absolutely right). Some fail to buy in to what we do because they’re just moving too fast. For some, the timing isn’t right (though, as I intend to show, it is always the right moment to change: now). Whatever the reason, for virtually every group I encounter 20% – the percentage is like clockwork – are simply not interested in what we have to say. 

I respect that. The Power of Your Story was not designed to push an agenda. While I passionately believe that the story metaphor is universal and, with awareness, can be extraordinarily beneficial, it ‘works’ only when the individual is willing to look hard at the major problem areas in his or her life, explore why they’re problems, then meaningfully change the problem elements, be they structure or content, which are causing a profound lack of productivity, fulfillment, engagement, and sense of purpose. We work with people. We don’t stand over them and make them do something they don’t want. 

Unlike many practitioners in the field of performance improvement , I do not believe you can have it all. It’s an absurd proposition. I don’t believe that every day will be a great day, that you can eliminate regret and despair and worry, that you will always be moving forward, that you will always succeed, that you won’t veer off track again. I do believe that you can have what is most important to you. And that this is achievable if you’re willing to follow the steps of the process advocated in this seminar. 

​The Power of Your Story in Les MIserables

Victor Hugo’s Les Misérables, a monumental work within Penguin Classics, stands as a towering testament to the transformative power of storytelling. The novel’s expansive narrative weaves together intricate character studies, sweeping social critique, and profound meditations on justice, mercy, and redemption. Far beyond a historical epic, Les Misérables uses story as a vehicle to explore the human spirit’s resilience in the face of suffering and the enduring quest for dignity and compassion. Through its richly drawn characters, epic scope, and moral depth, the novel exemplifies how storytelling can illuminate society’s darkest corners while affirming hope and human dignity.

From the outset, Les Misérables challenges readers with its scale and ambition. Set against the backdrop of early 19th-century France, the story traces the lives of destitute characters, political idealists, and ordinary citizens ensnared in the tides of history. Central to the novel is Jean Valjean, a former convict whose journey from condemned prisoner to compassionate benefactor encapsulates the novel’s major themes of transformation and grace. Through Valjean’s struggle, the narrative explores the possibility of redemption against the harsh realities of a judgmental society.

One of the novel’s extraordinary strengths lies in its detailed characterization. Jean Valjean’s moral evolution is rendered with nuance and depth, capturing the tensions between law and justice, punishment and forgiveness. As Valjean wrestles with his past and seeks to live virtuously, readers are invited into a profound exploration of conscience, identity, and the power of personal change. His adversary, Inspector Javert, embodies the rigid application of the law, relentless in his pursuit but ultimately trapped by his own inflexible principles. Their conflict animates the story’s moral debates, emphasizing the complexities of justice beyond black-and-white judgments.

The novel’s power is further amplified through its portrayal of other richly portrayed figures: Fantine, whose tragic sacrifice highlights the plight of women and the vulnerable; Cosette, symbolizing innocence and hope; and Marius, the passionate idealist caught in the upheavals of revolution. Each character embodies facets of humanity—suffering, love, idealism, and despair—making the story’s emotional impact deeply resonant. The ensemble cast breathes life into the social realities Hugo seeks to expose, while their intersecting stories weave a tapestry of human experience across class and circumstance.

Hugo’s storytelling is notable for its encyclopedic detail and social critique. The novel spends significant passages depicting the dire conditions of the poor, the political instability of post-Napoleonic France, and the brutality of institutions like the penal system. These sections serve not only as historical documentation but as urgent moral calls to awareness and change. The story insists that individual suffering is inseparable from social injustice, urging readers to consider broader systemic reforms alongside personal virtue.

The sprawling narrative structure, spanning decades and shifting across multiple perspectives, invites readers into a complex and layered understanding of history and humanity. Hugo uses history not merely as backdrop but as a dynamic force shaping lives and choices. The June Rebellion of 1832, vividly depicted through the barricades and revolutionary fervor, exemplifies the clash between oppressive structures and the aspirations for freedom and justice. This historical anchoring enhances the story’s stakes and allows for wide-ranging reflections on revolution, sacrifice, and social progress.

Language and style play crucial roles in shaping the novel’s emotional and intellectual power. Hugo’s prose ranges from lyrical and poetic passages to dense philosophical reflections, embodying the tension between narrative and essayistic elements. His evocative descriptions of Paris—its streets, sewers, and rooftops—transform the city into a living character that shapes and witnesses human dramas. This vivid rendering of place enriches the reader’s immersion and underscores the inseparability of environment and human fate.

The themes of mercy, compassion, and human dignity form the novel’s ethical core. Jean Valjean’s repeated acts of kindness, even at great personal risk, demonstrate how generosity can redeem and reshape both giver and receiver. This emphasis on empathy challenges punitive societal norms and offers a radical vision of solidarity. The novel also grapples with the limits of law and justice, as seen in Javert’s tragic inability to reconcile his principles with mercy. These conflicting values intersect throughout the story, inviting readers to ponder the nature of true justice.

Furthermore, the novel addresses the power of love in its many forms—romantic, familial, altruistic—and how love motivates sacrifice and renewal. The relationships between characters underscore love’s capacity to heal wounds, inspire courage, and sustain hope amidst despair. Through Cosette and Marius’s youthful love, the story also gestures toward future possibilities and societal regeneration, providing an emotional counterbalance to the harsh realities depicted.

Throughout Les Misérables, there is a persistent tension between despair and hope. Hugo acknowledges the depths of human suffering and the persistence of cruelty and injustice but refuses to succumb to nihilism. Instead, the narrative affirms the potential for change—personal, social, and spiritual. This underlying optimism imbues the story with a redemptive arc, making it not only an indictment of injustice but also a celebration of the human spirit’s capacity to rise.

The novel’s enduring power also stems from its capacity to speak across time and cultures. Its exploration of poverty, inequality, justice, and human dignity resonates universally, making it relevant beyond its historical Parisian setting. Les Misérables continues to inspire adaptations, theatrical productions, and scholarly inquiry, testament to its profound impact and narrative vitality.

In reflecting on the power of Les Misérables, it is clear that storytelling here serves multiple functions: as a vehicle for social critique, a moral inquiry, and a celebration of human resilience. Victor Hugo’s epic narrative teaches that story can confront injustice with empathy, complexity, and hope, shaping how readers grapple with the complexities of life and society.

Ultimately, Les Misérables exemplifies storytelling’s profound ability to combine the personal and the political, the tragic and the hopeful. Through its intricate characters, sweeping historical scope, and meditations on justice and love, the novel offers a vision of humanity’s capacity for redemption amidst hardship. It invites readers to witness suffering and embrace compassion, underscoring the power of story to transform understanding and inspire better futures.

​Who are the people who come to the Power of Your Story with dysfunctional life stories that need serious editing? They are, simply put, among the smartest, most talented, most ambitious, most creative people in their communities and professional circles. Some participants even bring, or return with spouses, friends or parents. They tend to have lots of responsibilities, they’re accountable for a great deal that goes on in their companies, they often make lots and lots of money….. yet, perhaps ironically, for all their accomplishments they can’t seem to get their stories right.  On the questionnaire I ask clients to fill out before they come down to a world city for our two – and – a – half – day journeys (or to the one and two day events we conduct around the world) they are asked, among other things, to write down some of the most important parts of their life story. ‘My father died young of emphysema’, wrote the CEO of his family’s company. Later on the questionnaire, he wrote ‘I smoke two packs a day.’ Still later, describing one of his goals for the now fifty-year-old company, he wrote, ‘On the evening celebrating our company’s seventy-fifth anniversary, I want to be able to look back on yet another quarter century of quality, growth and profitability’. 

How can these three sentences follow from each other without their author acknowledging that, taken together, they add up to utter nonsense? Especially when the author is superbly gifted in so many other areas? 

‘The most important thing in my life is my family, wrote one client ‘and if things continue in the direction they’re going, I’m almost certainly heading for divorce and complete estrangement from my children’. 

I’ll give him this much: At least he saw the tragedy coming. 

In a previous book I argued that one of our biggest problems is rooted in our flawed belief that simply investing time in the things we care about will generate a positive return. That belief and the story that flows from it are simply not true. We can spend time with our families, be present at dinnertime, have lunches with our direct colleagues, remember to call home when traveling, put in 45 minutes on the treadmill five days a week – we can all do all of it but if we’re too exhausted, too distracted, too frustrated and angry when ‘doing’ these things, the positive return we hoped for will simply not materialize. Without investing high-quality, focused energy in the activity before you, whatever it may be, setting time aside simply takes us from absenteeism to presenteeism. 

Patrick Süskind’s Perfume: The Story of a Murderer reveals the profound and dangerous power of the stories individuals tell themselves—the internal narratives that shape identity, drive action, and ultimately define destiny. At its heart, this classic novel is not merely about a murderer obsessed with scent but about how Jean-Baptiste Grenouille constructs a self-justifying myth of genius and destiny that propels him toward monstrosity. Through Grenouille’s warped inner narrative and the stories others tell about him, Perfume demonstrates how the tales we whisper to ourselves can become both prison and liberation, creation and destruction.​

Grenouille’s journey begins with the story he tells himself from infancy: that he is uniquely destined for greatness despite his rejection by the world. Born without scent in the stench-filled slums of 18th-century Paris, he internalizes society’s dismissal not as personal failure but as evidence of his superiority. This foundational narrative—”I am different, therefore I am chosen”—becomes the lens through which he interprets every experience. The power of this story lies in its ability to transform victimhood into purpose, alienation into mission. Grenouille doesn’t merely lack a scent; in his internal narrative, he transcends the vulgar sensory world that rejects him.​

This self-constructed identity narrative drives every major plot point. When Grenouille discovers his extraordinary olfactory genius, it confirms his inner story of exceptionalism. The putrid streets of Paris, the tanneries, the perfumeries—all become chapters validating his mythos. Each new scent he catalogs reinforces the tale: “I alone perceive the world’s true essence.” This internal monologue becomes his reality, blinding him to moral boundaries. The novel reveals how the stories we tell ourselves can rewrite ethical landscapes, turning observation into possession, appreciation into predation.​

The murders themselves emerge directly from Grenouille’s evolving personal narrative. Having inhaled the perfect scent of a young virgin, he doesn’t merely desire to preserve it—he must become it. His internal story shifts: “I am not merely a perceiver; I am the creator of perfection.” Each killing becomes a sacred act in his self-mythology, a necessary sacrifice on the altar of his genius. Süskind masterfully illustrates how internal narratives can justify atrocities when they align perception with destiny. Grenouille doesn’t see himself as monster but as artist, his victims not people but raw materials for his olfactory symphony.​

The power of Grenouille’s self-story extends beyond his actions to shape how others perceive him. When Baldini the perfumer encounters him, Grenouille’s silent confidence and uncanny skill compel Baldini to tell himself a story of discovering a prodigy. Later, in Grasse, the master perfumer Giuseppe Baldini constructs a narrative of reluctant admiration for this strange apprentice who revolutionizes his craft. Even the authorities, investigating the murders, tell themselves stories of a rational world where such evil cannot exist. Perfume reveals the contagious nature of personal narratives—they infect others, creating collaborative myths that enable destruction.​

Süskind’s genius lies in contrasting Grenouille’s internal narrative with the external world’s sensory reality. While Grenouille tells himself a story of transcendence through scent, 18th-century France reeks of decay, commerce, and human frailty. The novel’s vivid olfactory descriptions serve dual purposes: they immerse readers in Grenouille’s perceptual world while simultaneously exposing its delusion. The reader experiences both the intoxicating beauty Grenouille perceives and the horrifying reality of his actions, highlighting the disconnect between internal story and external truth.​

The narrative structure reinforces this theme of competing stories. The novel unfolds episodically, each chapter marking a new phase in Grenouille’s self-mythology—from abandoned infant to scent-obsessed orphan, from apprentice to murderer, from fugitive to perfumer. This progression mirrors how personal narratives evolve, each experience reinterpreted to fit the larger tale of destiny. The mountain cave episode, where Grenouille survives in isolation smelling his memories, literalizes this concept: detached from human society, his internal story becomes his entire reality.​

Grenouille’s ultimate perfume represents the apotheosis of his self-narrative. Having distilled the scents of thirteen virgins into a single fragrance, he tells himself, “Now I possess perfection; all will love me.” When he unleashes it during the climactic market scene, the crowd’s frenzied adoration validates his story completely. For one transcendent moment, his internal myth manifests externally—society worships him as god. Yet this validation reveals the narrative’s fragility: built on murder and deception, it collapses instantly when reality intrudes. The power of self-story shines brightest in its illusion and darkest in its inevitable unraveling.​

The novel extends this theme beyond Grenouille to explore how all characters construct identity through narrative. Laure Richis tells herself a story of protecting her daughter through isolation and marriage. The Marquis de La Taillade-Espinasse constructs an elaborate theory of “suprasensitive beings” to explain Grenouille, preserving his worldview. Even minor characters—the fishmongers, the tanners—narrate their existence through class, survival, and routine. Perfume suggests that self-storytelling is the fundamental human mechanism for creating meaning amid chaos.​

Language itself becomes a metaphor for narrative construction. Süskind’s prose obsessively catalogs scents, mirroring how Grenouille categorizes experiences to fit his internal story. The precise, almost clinical descriptions create a dual effect: they validate Grenouille’s perceptual genius while distancing readers morally from his actions. This linguistic strategy demonstrates storytelling’s power to simultaneously persuade and repel, to make the monstrous comprehensible.​

The novel’s ending delivers the ultimate commentary on self-narrative. Having achieved his goal of universal love through perfume, Grenouille experiences not fulfillment but disgust. The adoration he engineered feels false because it validates the wrong story—he sought genuine connection, not manufactured worship. In his final act of self-destruction, he rejects both his created myth and biological reality, consumed by the hounds. This ending reveals the tragedy of unchecked self-storytelling: when internal narrative divorces completely from external reality, only annihilation remains.​

Perfume resonates culturally because it speaks to universal experiences of self-narration. Modern readers recognize Grenouille’s pattern: constructing identity through perceived uniqueness, justifying questionable actions through personal destiny, seeking external validation of internal myths. The novel warns of social media age narcissism, influencer culture, and ideological echo chambers where self-stories harden into destructive realities.​

Structurally, the novel’s circular narrative reinforces this theme. Grenouille’s birth amid fish guts mirrors his death by consumption, suggesting that extreme self-narratives inevitably return to primal reality. The false happy ending—where he seems triumphant—followed by sudden reversal exemplifies how self-stories maintain illusion until reality intervenes. This narrative architecture teaches that stories shape experience but cannot ultimately defy existence.​

The power of Grenouille’s story lies in its universality: everyone tells themselves narratives of purpose, destiny, and exceptionalism. Perfume asks what happens when these stories become totalizing, when self-understanding excludes empathy, morality, and reality. The novel answers through Grenouille’s trajectory—from abandoned child to devoured monster—that such narratives lead to isolation and destruction.​

Through its olfactory innovation, psychological depth, and narrative sophistication, Perfume reveals storytelling’s dual nature: the stories we tell ourselves create identity and meaning, but also delusion and danger. Süskind crafts a cautionary masterpiece demonstrating how internal narratives can justify monstrosity while seeking universal connection, making Perfume not just a story about a murderer, but a profound meditation on the stories that make us human.

Presenteeism is a condition increasingly plaguing entrepreneurs, a vague malady defined as impaired job performance because one is medically or otherwise physically or psychologically compromised.  Is an entrepreneur who is too fatigued or mentally not there for eight hours really better than no one? How about a parent? A spouse? Time has value only in its intersection with energy; therefore, it becomes priceless in its intersection with extraordinary energy – something which I call full engagement. Or flow. Or bliss. 

In what areas are you disengaged right now. Whatever the answer, you’re likely to lay a good deal of the blame for this disengagement on external facts – overwork, the time and psychic demands of dealing with aging parents, frequent travel, an unsupportive spouse, not enough hours in the day, debt, not my fault, out of my hands, too much to do, always on the call – but such excuse-making is neither helpful nor accountable. 

We enjoy the privilege of being the hero, the final author of the story we write with our life, yet we possess a marvelous capacity to give ourselves only a supporting role in the ‘storytelling’ process, while ascribing the premier, dominant role to the markets, our family, our kids, fate, chance, genetics.  Getting our stories straight in life does not happen without our understanding that the most precious resource that we human beings possess is our energy. 

The energy principle still holds, and is crucial to ideas in this seminar, too; I maintain that it is at the heart of the solution not only to our individual problems but also to our collective, national ones – our health care problem, our obesity problem, our stress problem, our multi-tasking problem.  

In recent years I’ve come to see that, amazingly, the key to almost all of our problems, more fundamental even than poor energy management, is faulty storytelling, because it is storytelling that drives the way we gather and spend our energy. I believe that stories – again, not the ones people tell us but the ones we tell ourselves determine nothing less than our personal and professional destinies. And the most important story you will ever tell about yourself is the story you tell to yourself. (Mind if I repeat that: the most important story you will ever tell about yourself is the story you tell to yourself). 

Candide begins in the idyllic castle of Thunder-ten-Tronckh, Westphalia, where the naive protagonist absorbs tutor Pangloss’s philosophy: “all is for the best in this best of all possible worlds.” Expelled for kissing the Baron’s daughter Cunégonde after she spies Pangloss with maid Paquette, Candide wanders starving until Bulgar (Prussian-like) recruiters force him into army service. Flogged for desertion, he survives a savage Bulgar-Avar battle, reunites briefly with Pangloss (now diseased), then earthquakes ravage Lisbon—killing thousands in an auto-da-fé meant to avert disasters, where Candide is whipped and Pangloss hanged.​

Fleeing to South America with loyal valet Cacambo, Candide seeks Eldorado’s utopia but leaves its gold for Cunégonde. Jesuits capture them; shockingly, the commandant is Cunégonde’s brother, the Baron, who refuses Candide’s marriage proposal despite his sister’s ravaging. Candide stabs him in self-defense. They flee to Buenos Aires, abandon Cunégonde to the governor for safety, then voyage onward amid shipwrecks—Jacques the kind Anabaptist drowns saving them. In Paris, Candide falls for con artists, contracts syphilis, and escapes to Venice with pessimist Martin, encountering deposed kings, bored noble Pococurante, and fallen Paquette now prostituting with monk Giroflée.​

The finale reunites all in Turkey: enslaved Cunégonde (aged, ugly from trials), galley-slave Pangloss and Baron, old woman (daughter of pope, raped, cannibalized survivors), and Cacambo. Candide buys freedoms, rejects Pangloss’s reformed optimism, and settles per the old Turk’s wisdom: “we must cultivate our garden.” They work simply, silencing idle chatter, affirming action over philosophy.​

Candide embodies naive purity—honest, brave, kind-hearted yet gullible, trusting strangers from philosophers to thieves. His “candidus” name signals white-hot innocence; trials erode blind faith, forging pragmatic resolve by novel’s end. Pangloss, the syphilis-riddled optimist, survives hanging, dissection, and slavery, endlessly rationalizing evil as “necessary”—a parody of Leibniz, irritating survivors with blather instead of labor.​

Cunégonde starts as beauty idealized by Candide, but war rapes, stabs, and sells her to Jew Don Issachar and Inquisitor (whom Candide kills). Passed to captains and governors, she hardens, prioritizing security over love, her blandness satirizing romantic obsession. The Baron and brother obsess over noble blood, refusing alliances; the former enslaved, both embody rigid entitlement.​

Supporting cast amplifies absurdity: old woman, pope’s illegitimate daughter surviving rape, slavery, and shipwreck, her resilience laced with bitterness; Cacambo, clever mestizo servant outwitting foes; Martin, cynical Venetian decrying humanity’s evil; Paquette, once Pangloss’s lover, now miserable prostitute faking joy; Giroflée, hypocritical monk; Pococurante, jaded Venetian scorning his luxuries.​

These arcs spotlight The Power of Your Story: Pangloss’s mantra breeds Candide’s early passivity—”everything’s best”—mirroring victim scripts we whisper inwardly. Cunégonde’s beauty tale crumbles into survival grit; the old woman’s hidden nobility fuels endurance. Voltaire demands: audit your narrative—does it justify suffering or spur action?​

Candide’s odyssey proves epics hide in chaos. Claim yours: uproot illusions, cultivate truth. Who’s sharing their Pangloss to prune today?

So, you would better examine your story, especially this one that is supposedly the most familiar of all. ‘The most erroneous stories are those we think we know best – and therefore never scrutinize or question’ said paleontologist Stephen Jay Gould.  Participate in your story rather than observing it from afar, make sure it is a story that compels you. Tell yourself the right story – the rightness of which only you can really determine, only you can really feel – and the dynamics of your energy change. If you are finally living the story you want, then it need not – it should not and won’t – be an ordinary one. It can and will be extraordinary. 

After all you are not just the author of your story but also its main character the hero. Heroes are never ordinary.

In the end your story is not a tragedy. Nor is it a comedy or a romance or a thriller or a drama. It is something else. What label would you give the story of your life, the most important story you will ever tell. To me that sounds like a hero’s journey.

End of story.

PART ONE 

Old Stories

If an idiot were to tell you the same story every day for a year, you would end by believing it – Horace Mann

That’s Your Story? 

Slow death. 

An uglier two-word phrase it’s hard to find. But if you’re at all like the people I see in the Hero’s Journey & Hero’s Journey seminars, then I’m afraid you understand the phrase all too well. 

How did it come to this?

What am I doing?

Where am I going?

What do I want?

Is my life working on any meaningful level? Why doesn’t it work better? 

Am I right now dying, slowly, for something I’m not willing to die for 

Why am I working so hard, moving so fast, feeling so lousy

Slow death: what a harsh phrase. Is that really what is happening to all those people, the ones who start out contended by what is good and pure in life – a simple cup of coffee, a few seemingly reasonable life goals (a nice salary, say, and one’s own home) – and who , once they have achieved those goals, can’t even be satisfied because they’ve already moved on to life’s next-sized latte (six figure salary, second home, three cars) only to move on to something double-extra grand when that’s achieved, a continual supersizing that guarantees one can’t ever be fulfilled?  

Okay. Not everyone I see or hear about is dying slowly. But to judge from the responses I get, workshop after workshop, year after year – and each year it gets worse – whatever it is they’re doing sure doesn’t sound fun. It doesn’t even sound like getting by. I read the frustration and disappointment in their self-evaluations and hear it in their own voices, if and when they’re comfortable enough to read aloud from their current dysfunctional story, the autobiographical narrative they attempt to write the first day at the Power of Your Story, but usually don’t finish until the night before our last day together.

​​Ladies and gentlemen, welcome to this riveting session on The Power of Your Story. Envision a world of whispered letters and calculated seductions where every glance crafts a narrative of conquest or ruin—that’s Pierre Choderlos de Laclos’s Dangerous Liaisons, and today we’ll dissect how it unmasks the stories you tell yourself about yourself, to yourself, and then to others.

Dangerous Liaisons, an epistolary novel from 1782, unfolds through 150 letters among France’s decadent aristocracy on the eve of revolution. The Marquise de Merteuil, a cunning widow, enlists her ex-lover, the Vicomte de Valmont, to seduce the virtuous Madame de Tourvel and destroy the innocence of young Cécile de Volanges. Valmont, a rakish libertine, pursues the chaste Tourvel while bedding Cécile, all to reclaim Merteuil’s favor and boast conquests. Letters reveal betrayals: Merteuil’s hidden pregnancy, Valmont’s feigned piety, and Cécile’s convent retreat after scandal. Climaxing in Valmont’s fatal duel with Cécile’s suitor Danceny, the tale ends with Merteuil disfigured by smallpox and social exile, her empire crumbling.​

Picture the voice in your head proclaiming “I control my fate” amid chaos—that’s Merteuil’s inner script, forged from a forced marriage that birthed her vengeful autonomy. She narrates herself as invincible strategist, turning wounds into weapons, yet her letters betray terror of vulnerability. Valmont mirrors this: his boasts mask a thrill for Tourvel’s purity, hinting at genuine desire he dare not admit. Audit your core tale: does it armor pain as power, like theirs, or embrace flaws for true strength? Rewriting from “I must dominate” to “I connect authentically” liberates, as their facades prove—unyielding control invites downfall.

In solitude, the stories you pen inwardly dictate reality. Merteuil journals her “education” as triumphant revenge on patriarchal chains, whispering superiority to steel herself against loneliness. Valmont’s private admissions reveal a soul craving redemption through Tourvel, clashing with his public libertine pose. Laclos, drawing from real scandals, warns: unchecked inner dialogues breed isolation, like Merteuil’s syphilitic ruin symbolizing corrupted ideals. In The Power of Your Story, probe these shadows—what lie do you repeat alone? Flip it: from Merteuil’s “men are fools to conquer” to “vulnerability forges bonds.” Your unshared narrative is your first battlefield; claim it boldly.

Outward tales demand alignment for legacy. Merteuil’s epistles dazzle with wit, seducing allies into her schemes, yet misalignment—her true malice leaking—sparks backlash. Valmont’s pious letters to Tourvel ensnare, but authenticity glimmers when he confesses love, too late. Danceny’s naive honor contrasts, winning sympathy. In business or romance, Laclos teaches: weaponized stories topple empires, but honest ones endure. Heroes reframe seductions as service—craft narratives that reveal, not conceal. Tell yours like a reformed Valmont: raw ambition tempered by heart, drawing true alliances.

You’ve navigated Dangerous Liaisons’ treacherous letters—now author your authentic epic. Ditch Merteuil’s masks; embrace unmasked power. Inner truth, private honesty, outer alignment: that’s your revolution. Who’s ready to burn a false letter and write anew? Share one story you’re rewriting right now!

As the Power of Your Story seminar progresses and people’s defenses start to melt away, I hear more and more of these stories. By almost any reasonable standard, these stories exemplify failure; in many cases, disaster. There is no joy to be found in them, and even precious little forward movement. In every workshop, nearly everyone has a dysfunctional story that is not working in at least one important part of his or her life: stories about how they do not interact often or well with their families; about how unfulfilling the other significant relationships in their lives are; about how – despite all that extracurricular failure – they’re not even performing particularly well at work, or, if they are, about how little pleasure they gain from it; about how they don’t feel very good physically and their energy is depleted. 

On top of all that (isn’t that enough?), they feel guilty about their predicaments.They know, on some almost buried level, that their life is in crisis and the crisis will not simply go away. Their company is not going to make it go away. And so they wake up one morning to the realization that the bad story they for so long only feared has finally become their life, their story. Not that this development is their fault. No. Nor is there a heck of a lot to be done about it. 

It is a competitive, cutthroat world out there

God knows, I want to change but I simply can’t. I’ll get eaten up and beaten by someone who’s willing to sacrifice everything.

The world moves faster today than it did a generation ago

What am I supposed to do – quit my job?

These are the facts of my life. There’s nothing I can do about them.

My life is a known quantity; so why mess with it even if it’s killing me?

Let me repeat that one: …… even if it’s killing me. 

People don’t need new facts – they need a new story. 

Ladies and gentlemen, welcome to this profound session on The Power of Your Story. Imagine a life stripped bare, where indifference clashes with a world’s demand for meaning—that’s Albert Camus’s The Stranger, and today we’ll uncover how it lays raw the stories you tell yourself about yourself, to yourself, and then to others.

The Stranger (1942) follows Meursault, an emotionally detached Algerian clerk, through a sun-scorched odyssey of alienation. After his mother’s death in a nursing home—where he smokes and drinks coffee indifferently—he resumes beach life in Algiers. He begins a casual affair with Marie, befriends neighbor Raymond (a pimp), and intervenes in a conflict with Raymond’s Arab mistress’s brother. Blinded by glare and heat, Meursault shoots the Arab on the beach, claiming the sun provoked him. Arrested, he faces trial not for the murder but for his lack of grief, honesty, and social conformity—smiling at his mother’s funeral seals his “monster” status. In prison, he confronts the chaplain’s faith, embracing life’s absurdity with defiant calm, rejecting false narratives for raw existence.​

Ever catch your mind whispering “nothing matters” during drudgery? That’s Meursault’s core script: a blank canvas of sensation over sentiment, narrating life as neutral facts—sun’s heat, sea’s salt—without imposed meaning. His indifference shields from pain but invites judgment, mirroring our defenses against chaos. Yet Camus reveals power here: unfiltered inner truth defies societal scripts of mourning or ambition. Audit yours: does it numb with “it is what it is,” or ignite with purpose? Shift to Meursault’s lucid gaze—”I’ve been happy”—and apathy becomes freedom, turning strangers into self-masters.

Alone in the dark, your private monologue crafts reality. Meursault’s cell reflections reject remorse, affirming sensory truth over guilt—stars, women’s bodies, salt meat sustain him against eternity’s indifference. Camus, echoing his absurd philosophy, shows unexamined tales breed prisons; Meursault’s embrace of meaninglessness liberates. Like auditing Power of Your Story triggers, probe: what illusion do you cling to solo? From chaplain’s heaven to your “someday success,” discard for now’s stark beauty. Your silent narrative isn’t void—it’s canvas; paint boldly, or fade faceless.

Outward alignment—or defiance—defines legacy. Meursault’s flat testimony baffles: no tears for mother, no regret for killing, exposing others’ fragile fictions. Society convicts his authenticity, preferring pious lies; Marie glimpses his freedom, Raymond exploits it. In careers or connections, Camus warns: mismatched tales isolate, but radical honesty magnetizes—like absurd heroes owning alienation to inspire. Craft yours Meursault-style: not performative grief, but vivid presence. Aligned narratives shatter norms, forging tribes of the real amid strangers.

Embrace Your Absurd Epic Now

You’ve stared into The Stranger‘s glare—now author your unblinking tale. Ditch conformity; claim indifference as power. Inner lucidity, private embrace, outer defiance: that’s your revolt. Who’s ready to face the sun? Share one “story” society’s demanding you fake!

Is Your Company Even Trying to Tell a Story?

We’ve examined the corporate story the worker hears. Let’s see what story the company is typically telling. 

First they need you and you need them. (Ideally, they also want you and you also want them, but that may not be part of your company’s story). The typical company is saying that the fast-paced business world being what it is – what with globalization and outsourcing and downsizing and sustainability and AI and synergies and streamlining – it must make increasing demands on your life. Keep swimming or die. Which means longer hours for you, ergo less time for your family and yourself. It means holding meetings during lunch or before or after the workday proper, which essentially kills your chance to exercise and stay in shape. (and let’s just order in any food that’s fast during meetings to maximize efficiency). Oh, right: and while all this is going on, the company – continually stressing its imperative to move forward if it is to survive at all – also demands that you frequently change directions, reinvent the very way you operate, completely alter how you conduct business. 

Everyone who likes that story, raise your hand. 

Older workers,  in particular – those who have seen it all before – are likely to undermine the story for such a company. So, too, anyone else who fears that he or she may be easy to eliminate, or may have a diminished role in the transformed company. To these employees the story their company is telling may be exciting in the abstract, or to investors, but it’s potentially humiliating for them. Among these workers, suspicion, cynicism and distrust run rampant. While the defiant worker publicly may appear vested in the change process, privately he tells himself: New thinking be damned. He works subversively to undermine the new directive. He knows that, for the new initiatives to take, everyone must embrace them. Not him. He will go through the motions but he is not going to make any real course corrections. 

And so, like a dinosaur, he moves closer and closer to extinction. 

The employee loses and the company loses as well. Entire organizations have been undermined by storytelling that excludes a significant portion of their workforce.  Failure to align the evolving corporate story with the aspirations of the individual employees, up and down the workforce – the very ones who have been enjoined to help write that new, improved story – has systemic implications. Athletes routinely give up on playing hard for coaches they deem excessively punitive or inconsistent; the bond of their mutually aligned stories – to win a championship – is undermined because the coach’s story does not seem to allow for the inevitable particularities of any individual athlete’s story.  Mutiny is not just what happens when ship captains indefensibly change or robotically stick to the rules but also when CEO’s and schoolteachers do it. Organizations have been undermined by refusing to alter their story when it clearly wasn’t working. 

If alignment of stories, yours and your company’s, is to be achieved – and I believe it’s neither as lofty nor as complicated a task as it may sound – then it is ideally generated both from top down (the company side) and bottom up (the workers side). But let’s not get carried away. For our purposes, we’ll presume zero input form the company. It is, after all, corporate culture. 

That means the burden to change stories is on you. 

Presenteeism 

What if the most important adventure of your working life was not about the projects you complete, the titles you hold, or even the outcomes you deliver—but about the story you tell yourself? What if the office, with its familiar routines and relentless pace, is both your crossroads and your call to adventure?

Those who know me understand I see life and work as journeys—epic quests each of us must undertake. Every working person is a hero in the making. And every workplace challenge is a shadowy threshold, begging us to re-examine the story we live by—and the roles we choose.

In my journeys with creative professionals, entrepreneurs, leaders, and artists worldwide, I notice a repeating theme: too many of us are living by default stories, not the ones we would choose if we remembered we had the pen in our hand. Even the most ambitious, purpose-driven individuals fall prey to this trap.

We tell ourselves stories like:

• “I am valuable because I am always here.”
• “If I slow down or admit I’m struggling, I’ll be replaced.”
• “To be a hero is to put others before myself, no matter the cost.”

These are powerful myths, but not always true or empowering for the modern workplace hero. They lead us straight to the quicksand of presenteeism, where showing up becomes a prison, not a purposeful journey.

​Ladies and gentlemen, welcome to this electrifying session on The Power of Your Story. Picture ambition igniting like wildfire in a rigid world, where a young man’s cunning tale propels him from sawdust to salons—only to crash against truth’s blade. That’s Stendhal’s The Red and the Black, and today we’ll dissect how it exposes the stories you tell yourself about yourself, to yourself, and then to others.

The Red and the Black (1830) chronicles Julien Sorel, a brilliant, handsome son of a provincial carpenter in post-Napoleonic France, dreaming of glory amid Bourbon restoration’s clerical black and military red. Tutored by self, Julien secures a tutor post at Mayor de Rênal’s Verrières home, seducing the mayor’s wife, Louise, in a whirlwind of passion and calculation. Fleeing scandal, he enters seminary, conquers the pious director’s heart, then dazzles in Paris as secretary to scheming Marquis de La Mole. There, Julien woos the marquis’s fiery daughter Mathilde, reenacting Bonapartes amid aristocratic ennui. Triumph nears—noble title, Mathilde’s child—but Rênal’s vengeful letter exposes him. In a courtroom blaze, Julien rejects repentance, claims class war, and meets the guillotine unbowed, his story etched eternal.

Ever narrate yourself as a destined conqueror trapped in mediocrity? Julien’s core script roars this: mirroring Napoleon’s rise from nothing, he whispers “genius defies birth,” fueling audacious climbs despite poverty’s sting. Yet pride blinds him—seductions mask terror of inferiority, turning lovers into conquests. Stendhal lays bare the peril: unchecked inner epics breed isolation, as Julien’s “I am eagle, not worm” justifies deceit. Audit yours: does it propel like his red fire, or scorch with delusion? Rewrite from “class chains me” to “wit frees me,” channeling ambition into authentic ascent.

Solitary whispers forge fate. Julien journals triumphs as heroic solos, steeling against seminary sneers and Parisian scorn, yet doubts creep—am I actor or soul? Stendhal, veteran of Napoleonic wars, probes this: private tales sustain amid hypocrisy’s fog, but denial of vulnerability topples thrones. Like Power of Your Story deep dives, interrogate: what heroic lie do you rehearse alone? From Julien’s “all conquer” to “honor in humility,” prune illusions. Your unvoiced narrative is your scaffold—build true, or it crumbles like his scaffold of lies.

Outward narratives demand cunning alignment. Julien’s pious facade fools priests, magnetic charm sways Louise and Mathilde—Mathilde craves his Corsair passion, Louise his purity myth. Missteps leak: Rênal glimpses the predator, jury the rebel. In careers or courts, Stendhal teaches: mismatched tales invite axes, but masterful ones elevate—like Julien’s final truth-telling, martyring him legend. Heroes reframe climbs as shared quests; craft yours boldly: not veiled schemes, but vivid valor. Authentic ambition rallies empires.

You’ve scaled The Red and the Black’s heights—now seize your story’s sword. Ditch Julien’s fatal pride; claim balanced fire. Inner drive, private truth, outer mastery: that’s your revolution. Who’s ready to rewrite their ladder? Share one ambition you’re narrating anew!

The First Threshold: Awakening to the Call

Every hero’s journey begins with a call to adventure—a crisis that shakes up the old world and offers a chance, however frightening, for transformation. Presenteeism is this crisis. What if you saw your own disengagement or declining health not as a personal failing, but as a summons? A moment to examine the story you’re living.

Are you actually answering your call, or are you stuck reliving someone else’s tired script?

Pause for a moment at your desk. Close your eyes. Ask: What is the true story I’m living here? Am I the weary warrior constantly pressing on, or the resourceful hero who knows when to rest, renew, and return with deeper gifts?

Allies and Mentors: The Importance of Leaders, Teams, and Self-Compassion

No hero travels alone. In epic tales and in real life, allies and mentors make all the difference. The modern workplace often pushes us into isolation—presenteeism thrives when we are most disconnected, convinced we are in this alone. But what if your story included allies?

Allies can be:

• A leader who models vulnerability and honesty about limits
• A team that values open conversation, not just relentless performance
• A workplace culture that considers well-being non-negotiable

Or, perhaps most importantly, an inner mentor: your wiser self who reminds you that even heroes need healing. When we share our struggles honestly, we invite others to do the same; we rewrite a culture of silent suffering into one of shared humanity.

Ladies and gentlemen, welcome to this gripping session on The Power of Your Story. Envision a father’s sacrificial tale fueling ruthless ambition in Paris’s glittering sewers—that’s Honoré de Balzac’s Le Père Goriot, and today we’ll unravel how it exposes the stories you tell yourself about yourself, to yourself, and then to others.

Le Père Goriot (1835), cornerstone of Balzac’s Human Comedy, pulses in a rundown Paris boardinghouse, Maison Vauquer. Widower Goriot, once pasta tycoon, squanders fortune on daughters Delphine de Nucingen and Anastasie de Restaud, bankrolling their lavish aristocratic lives despite their neglect. Enter Julien-like Rastignac, ambitious law student from provinces, befriending dying Goriot and scheming socialite Vautrin (master criminal). Rastignac romances Delphine for entry into high society, witnesses Anastasie’s gambling ruin, and attends Goriot’s pauper funeral—attended by none but Rastignac and Bianchon. Climaxing in Rastignac’s defiant gaze over Paris—”Now we shall dine together”—he plunges into the fray, embodying Balzac’s vision of money as society’s god.

Ever whisper “family justifies all” while eroding your core? Goriot’s narrative roars paternal myth: “my daughters are angels, my ruin their glory,” blinding him to ingratitude as he pawns silver for their gowns. This fuels Rastignac’s counter-script—”wealth conquers class”—propelling calculated seductions amid poverty’s grind. Balzac strips bare the trap: inner tales of noble sacrifice or raw ambition isolate, turning love to leverage. Audit yours: does it echo Goriot’s self-erasure or Rastignac’s ego blaze? Rewrite from “others define me” to “I fuel my rise,” balancing heart with hustle for sustainable fire.

In lonely vigils, private monologues forge empires or graves. Goriot rants delirious devotion from sickbed, steeling against daughters’ slights; Rastignac weighs Vautrin’s criminal pact inwardly, rejecting murder for “honest” predation. Balzac, chronicler of Restoration greed, warns: unexamined whispers breed downfall—Goriot’s dies whispering “Anastasie,” Rastignac’s births resolve. Like Power of Your Story mirrors, probe solitude: what parental plea or golden lie do you rehearse? Flip to “sacrifice serves self-growth”; your silent script is your fortune’s architect—build resilient, or bankrupt like Goriot.

Outward alignment carves legacies. Goriot’s doting facade fools borders none, repelling as weakness; daughters peddle filial myths for dowries, exposed in scandal. Rastignac masters duality—charm for Delphine, grit for Vautrin—ascending salons, yet Vautrin’s underworld truths magnetize darkly. In boardrooms or ballrooms, Balzac teaches: mismatched narratives sink ships, masterful ones conquer capitals—like Rastignac’s bold toast rallying allies. Heroes reframe ambition as noble quest; craft yours vividly: not veiled pleas, but commanding visions drawing dynasties.

You’ve traversed Père Goriot’s boardinghouse inferno—now author your ascent. Ditch blind sacrifice; claim balanced ambition. Inner resolve, private reckoning, outer command: that’s your feast. Who’s ready to dine with Paris? Share one “Goriot story” you’re transforming today!

Crossing Into the Unknown: Changing the Story from Within

The core message of the hero’s journey is this: Transformation is possible. Not by fleeing our struggles or pretending they don’t exist, but by facing them honestly and letting them change us.

Presenteeism, at heart, is a warning flag. It signals a misalignment: between your body and your story, your willingness and your capacity, your presence and your true purpose. To change this, you do not need a grand gesture—just a willingness to edit the script:

• Instead of “I must always be present,” try: “My best work comes from knowing when to engage and when to replenish.”
• Instead of “Heroes never falter,” try: “True heroism is knowing my limits and helping others respect theirs.”

This is not self-indulgence. Research shows that places prioritizing well-being see higher productivity, lower turnover, and more vibrant, creative workplaces. Your organization benefits when its people are truly present.

Ladies and gentlemen, welcome to this transformative session on The Power of Your Story. Step into the grimy pits of a 19th-century mining town where raw fury ignites a revolution, exposing the stories that chain or liberate us—that’s Émile Zola’s Germinal, and today we’ll excavate how it reveals the stories you tell yourself about yourself, to yourself, and then to others.

Germinal (1885), pinnacle of Zola’s Rougon-Macquart cycle, erupts in the coalfields of northern France. Étienne Lantier, unemployed mechanic and distant nephew of Nana, arrives jobless at Le Voreux pit, befriending resilient miner Maheu family—father Maheu, stoic wife Maheude, fiery daughter Catherine. Brutal conditions spark strikes: meager wages, child labor, cave-ins crush lives amid capitalist greed of owner Hennebeau and his adulterous wife. Étienne, inspired by socialist dreams, leads 2,000 miners in revolt, smashing machines and marching to Paris, but hunger and troops shatter them. Betrayals abound—Souvarine the anarchist dynamites the pit, Catherine dies underground, Maheude buries children. Yet a seed (“germinal”) of future uprising endures, as Étienne departs vowing renewal.

Ever narrate yourself as underdog destined to topple giants? Étienne’s core script blazes this: whispering “workers unite, capital crumbles,” his inherited alcoholism fuels rage against inherited misery, turning despair to defiance. Maheude counters with maternal steel—”survive for the children”—sustaining amid starvation. Zola’s naturalism bares the trap: inner tales of victimhood paralyze, revolutionary fire empowers but blinds to nuance. Audit yours: does it smolder in “system beats me,” or erupt like Étienne’s “we rise together”? Rewrite from oppression’s ash to collective spark, forging resilience without ruin.

In suffocating shafts or hunger vigils, private monologues mine truth. Étienne pores over books alone, steeling socialist zeal against doubt; Maheude whispers endurance to empty bellies, rejecting despair for duty. Zola, documenting real strikes, warns: unexamined depths breed explosions—Souvarine’s nihilism destroys, Chaval’s jealousy poisons. Like Power of Your Story excavations, probe shadows: what worker’s lament or boss’s greed do you rehearse solo? Flip to “labor births light”; your silent forge crafts fate—hammer unity, or shatter alone.

Outward narratives fuel or fracture movements. Étienne’s fiery speeches ignite masses, Maheude’s pleas bind families, but bourgeois mockery and troop rifles expose fragility. Hennebeau’s paternalist lies repel; Rasseneur’s moderation divides. In unions or uprisings, Zola teaches: misaligned tales invite bayonets, visionary ones sow germinal seeds—like survivors’ quiet resolve inspiring generations. Heroes reframe struggle as saga; craft yours boldly: not whispered woes, but thunderous calls rallying revolutions.

You’ve descended Germinal’s depths—now surface with your story’s flame. Ditch defeat; claim communal fire. Inner resolve, private endurance, outer unity: that’s your uprising. Who’s ready to strike anew? Share one chain your narrative’s breaking today!

Trials and Temptations: The Lure of Busyness and the Fear of Absence

No journey is without its temptations. In the world of work, “busyness” and “constantly being seen” are seductive false gods. We look for validation by logging long hours, replying to emails at midnight, never daring to say “I need a break.” This is presenteeism in its purest form.

But every story has a turning point—a moment when the hero sees through the illusion and claims a deeper power. What if you challenged the myth that visibility equals value? What if leadership meant championing cycles of exertion and renewal—for yourself and those you lead?

Ladies and gentlemen, welcome to this transformative session on The Power of Your Story. Step into the sun-baked harbor of Marseille in 1815, where sails snap like flags of fortune and betrayal lurks beneath azure waves—that’s Alexandre Dumas’ The Count of Monte Cristo, and today we’ll navigate how it reveals the stories you tell yourself about innocence lost, vengeance forged, and mercy reclaimed.

The Count of Monte Cristo (1844), Dumas’ swashbuckling epic of retribution and redemption, launches with Edmond Dantès, a promising young first mate on the Pharaon. Docked after his captain’s death, Edmond earns command from loyal shipowner Morrel, rushing to wed beautiful Mercédès amid sailor cheers. But envy coils: scheming second mate Danglars forges a Bonapartist treason letter, jealous suitor Fernand denounces him, and ambitious prosecutor Villefort—blackmailed by his father’s politics—condemns the innocent to life in Château d’If’s island hell. Fourteen years of solitary darkness break him, until ally Abbé Faria tunnels through, imparting sciences, languages, swordplay, and Spada’s island treasure map before dying. Edmond escapes in Faria’s shroud, finds fortune, reinvents as the enigmatic Count of Monte Cristo—worldly sophisticate weaving intricate revenge. He ruins Danglars via stock crashes, exposes Fernand (now Count de Morcerf) as a Greek traitor, torments Villefort with switched babies and poison. Yet innocents suffer—lovers Valentine and Maximilien despair; Mercédès pleads mercy. Abyss strikes: cavern collapse mirrors hollow vengeance. Reborn, Edmond spares remnants, sails with Haydée, gifting “wait and hope.”

Ever narrate yourself as betrayed innocent chained by fate? Edmond’s core script thunders this: from “honest toil rewards” shattered by irons, to “knowledge avenges,” his inherited trust fuels calculated fury against the trio’s greed, lust, ambition. Morrel counters with steadfast loyalty—”survive for honor”—sustaining amid ruin. Dumas’ adventure-naturalism bares the trap: inner tales of victimhood fester in dungeons, providential fire empowers but risks monstrosity. Audit yours: does it rust in “betrayers win,” or ignite like Edmond’s “treasure tempers justice”? Rewrite from cell’s shadow to count’s command, forging patience without perdition.

In iron solitude or yacht salons, private monologues mine providence. Edmond scratches escape tallies alone, steeling Faria’s wisdom against madness; Haydée whispers devotion to her liberator, rejecting enslavement’s script. Dumas, drawing real Napoleonic intrigues, warns: unexamined vaults breed vendettas—Danglars’ avarice devours, Fernand’s jealousy suicides, Villefort’s hubris maddens. Like Power of Your Story navigations, probe abysses: what traitor’s whisper or shipmate’s envy do you rehearse solo? Flip to “chains birth compasses”; your silent voyage crafts destiny—sail unity, or sink solitary.

Outward narratives fuel or fracture empires. Edmond’s cryptic toasts disarm foes, Morrel’s pleas rally allies, but bourgeois suspicions and duel challenges expose peril. Villefort’s legal lies repel; Albert’s hot blood divides. In courts or caverns, Dumas teaches: misaligned tales invite irons, masterful ones sow “wait and hope” seeds—like survivors’ quiet fortunes inspiring legends. Heroes reframe betrayal as ballad; craft yours boldly: not whispered wounds, but thunderous oaths rallying restorations.

You’ve navigated Monte Cristo’s seas—now dock with your story’s sail. Ditch despair; claim providential wind. Inner patience, private wisdom, outer justice: that’s your treasure. Who’s ready to escape anew? Share one chain your narrative’s breaking today!

The Return: Sharing the Boon

The final stage of the hero’s journey is the return—the bringing back of newfound wisdom to the tribe. If you can transform your story around presence at work, you bring back a gift that can transform the culture around you.

This might look like:

• Leading discussions on workplace health and well-being
• Creating or supporting initiatives for flexible work and mental health support
• Building teams where checking in on someone’s state of being is as normal as checking their to-do list

You return, not depleted but richer, with a boon to share: the realization that the true power of presence is quality, not quantity. One engaged hour, one honest conversation, one real act of self-care can be worth days spent pretending.

Ladies and gentlemen, welcome to this transformative session on The Power of Your Story. Step into the shadowed drawing rooms and sun-dappled gardens of fin-de-siècle Paris, where a madeleine dipped in lime tea unlocks time’s floodgates—that’s Marcel Proust’s In Search of Lost Time, and today we’ll immerse in how it reveals the stories you tell yourself about memory’s tyranny, love’s illusions, and art’s eternal redemption.

In Search of Lost Time (1913–1927), Proust’s monumental seven-volume helix (À la recherche du temps perdu), spirals through the narrator—let’s call him Marcel—a frail, asthmatic youth in Combray summers, obsessed with his mother’s goodnight kiss. Ordinary world: bourgeois idylls with Swann’s unrequited love for Odette (via Swann’s Way), salon intrigues at Mme. Verdurin’s (petty exclusions), Balbec seaside flirtations with Albertine (jealousy’s labyrinth), wartime Paris deceptions, and Venice’s watery mirages. Jealousy devours: Marcel spies on Albertine, interrogates servants; Swann pines amid Vinteuil’s sonata. Betrayals abound—Saint-Loup’s affairs, Charlus’ masochism, Gilberte’s indifference. Abyss peaks: Albertine’s “flight,” Marcel’s aging despair, Combray’s dead revisited. Elixir dawns: epiphany amid a salon stumble—memory involuntary resurrects youth, art alone defies time. Volumes culminate: Marcel writes, redeeming loss in pages eternal.

Ever narrate yourself as memory’s prisoner, chasing lost kisses or phantom loves? Marcel’s core script whispers this: from “mother’s kiss completes me” chained by separation anxiety, to “jealousy proves passion,” his inherited neurosis fuels obsessive spirals against time’s thief. Swann counters with melancholic grace—”love’s pain refines taste”—sustaining amid rejection. Proust’s involuntary memory bares the trap: inner tales of nostalgia paralyze in madeleines, redemptive art empowers but demands renunciation. Audit yours: does it drown in “time stole my bliss,” or resurrect like Marcel’s “pages conquer oblivion”? Rewrite from Combray’s bed to novel’s command, forging insight without imprisonment.

In velvet salons or cork-lined rooms, private monologues mine essence. Marcel pores over jealous reveries alone, steeling aesthetic judgment against doubt; grandmother whispers endurance to illness, rejecting fragility for fortitude. Proust, bedridden genius documenting Dreyfus-era snobberies, warns: unexamined recollections breed solipsism—Odette’s deceptions multiply, Albertine’s shadows haunt, Charlus’ secrets corrode. Like Power of Your Story immersions, probe petals: what kiss withheld or sonata strain do you rehearse solo? Flip to “memory births manuscripts”; your silent corking crafts immortality—write unity, or wilt isolated.

Outward narratives fuel or fracture societies. Marcel’s subtle observations disarm cliques, Swann’s pleas bind salons, but aristocratic snubs and wartime lies expose fragility. Verdurin’s exclusions repel; Robert de Saint-Loup’s charm divides. In Guermantes’ drawing rooms or war-torn boulevards, Proust teaches: misaligned tales invite oblivion, visionary ones sow time-defying seeds—like Marcel’s final pages inspiring generations. Heroes reframe reminiscence as resurrection; craft yours boldly: not whispered wistfulness, but thunderous volumes rallying rediscoveries.

You’ve immersed in Lost Time’s tides—now emerge with your story’s quill. Ditch decay; claim mnemonic mastery. Inner epiphany, private persistence, outer opus: that’s your madeleine. Who’s ready to write anew? Share one memory your narrative’s redeeming today!

Writing Your Next Chapter

Let me ask you, as you read this: What would it mean to become the hero of your own workplace story? To notice, name, and gently edit the scripts that lead you to presenteeism?

If you see yourself in these words, you’re not alone. Millions experience this struggle daily, and its impacts are enormous—not just financially but emotionally, socially, and creatively for ourselves and our organizations. But you have the power to change your story, to step onto a new path.

Start by asking:

• What am I really seeking in my work?
• What stories about value, effort, and worth am I living by—and are they serving me?
• Where might I invite more honesty, more compassion, more allyship?

The future of work—and the future of your own hero’s journey—depends on the stories we choose. May yours be one of presence, purpose, and authentic creative transformation.

The Hidden Costs of Presenteeism: Why Organizations Pay a High Price for a Poor Story

In every organization, there is a visible ledger: bottom lines, turnover numbers, and absentee days. But lurking beneath that surface, unnoticed, is a silent leviathan gnawing at profits, morale, and growth: presenteeism. In my work on “The Hero’s Journey,” I remind leaders that the real tale of any organization is not just about presence—it’s about meaningful engagement, energy, and stories that fuel innovation. Presenteeism is what happens when people show up, but leave their passion, focus, or wellbeing at home.

The cost? More than you might imagine—and far greater than the mere sum of sick days or missed meetings.

A Tale of Two Cities by Charles Dickens offers a powerful exploration of the stories we tell ourselves—personal narratives that shape identity, morality, sacrifice, and ultimately, redemption. This classic novel, set against the tumultuous backdrop of the French Revolution, reveals how internal stories entwined with historical events can drive individuals toward acts of profound courage and selflessness.

At the heart of the novel is the contrast between two cities, London and Paris, symbolizing stability and chaos, order and rebellion. Dickens uses these cities not just as settings but as metaphors for the conflicting narratives that shape the characters’ lives. The story is one of resurrection and transformation, illustrating how personal tales of suffering and hope intertwine with larger historical forces.

The journey begins with Dr. Alexandre Manette, whose story is one of imprisonment and rebirth. Wrongfully incarcerated for eighteen years, his internal narrative initially centers on trauma, silence, and despair. Yet, through love and nurture, he reconstructs a narrative of healing and purpose, anchoring his identity in family and justice. His story shows how even the deepest personal wounds can be rewritten through care and connection.

Charles Darnay represents a narrative of identity conflict and moral choice. Born into French aristocracy but rejecting its cruelty, he tells himself a story of exile and integrity. His migration to England and marriage to Lucie Manette mark attempts to forge a new self-story, distancing from his past. Yet, his return to Paris and trial during the Revolution expose the fragility of personal narratives when caught in the sweep of collective vengeance.

Lucie Manette embodies the narrative of love as sustaining force. Her story revolves around devotion, resilience, and compassion, serving as emotional anchor for those around her. Through Lucie, Dickens shows the power of relational narratives—how the stories we tell ourselves about love and loyalty can foster hope amidst chaos.

Sydney Carton’s story offers perhaps the most profound meditation on self-perception and redemption. Initially a dissolute, cynical lawyer, Carton’s internal narrative is one of despair and self-loathing. Yet, his unrequited love for Lucie propels him toward a transformative story: one of sacrifice for a greater good. Carton’s ultimate self-narrative culminates in the famous act of substitution at the guillotine, embodying resurrection not just personally but symbolically for the nation.

Dickens masterfully contrasts these individual self-stories with the collective narrative of revolution—a tumultuous, violent tale of oppression, uprising, and justice. The novel’s portrayal of the French Revolution explores how shared grievances and stories of suffering ignite collective action but can also spiral into retribution and terror. Through evocative imagery of the storming of the Bastille and the rising crowd, Dickens illuminates how historical narratives grip individual destinies.

Language and structure deepen the thematic exploration. The opening lines—“It was the best of times, it was the worst of times”—signal the novel’s thematic dichotomies. Dickens’s alternating chapters between London and Paris reinforce the duality of stability and upheaval. Rich symbolism—the spilled wine signifying bloodshed, the knitting women representing fate, the resurrection motif permeating characters’ arcs—enables a layered understanding of storytelling’s power to reveal hidden connections.

The stories the characters tell themselves about identity, loyalty, and destiny drive their actions and shape their fates. Through A Tale of Two Cities, Dickens shows that while we cannot control historical forces, we can choose the narratives that give our lives meaning—be it love, sacrifice, or hope. The novel challenges readers to consider how their own self-stories might inspire courage in the face of adversity.

Reflecting on A Tale of Two Cities reveals storytelling’s dual nature: it can imprison through fatalism or liberate through self-authorship. Dickens’s narrative affirms that transformation is possible even amid devastation, provided one chooses a redemptive internal story. This message continues to resonate because it speaks to universal human experiences of suffering, change, and the search for purpose.

Ultimately, A Tale of Two Cities is a profound meditation on narrative’s power to shape history and soul alike, urging readers to become conscious authors of their stories in a world of shifting tides.

Old Stories 

With relatively few variations, heroes and heroines tell stories about basically five major subjects.

1. Business
2. Family
3. Health
4. Friendships
5. Happiness

By asking yourself basic questions about how you feel about what you do and how you conduct yourself – and by trying honestly to answer them, of course – you begin to identify the dynamics of your story.

Jules Verne’s Around the World in Eighty Days is a captivating narrative that exemplifies the power of the stories we tell ourselves—our internal narratives about possibility, determination, and adventure—that shape both our identity and our engagement with the wider world. This classic novel weaves a tale of an extraordinary journey, illustrating how the story one believes in can propel relentless action, inspire resilience, and redefine the boundaries of human potential.

At the center of the novel is Phileas Fogg, whose internal narrative is one of precision, resolve, and rational certainty. Fogg’s wager to circumnavigate the globe in eighty days springs from a self-story rooted in control and order: “I am a man of logic and discipline who can master time and fortune.” This self-assured internal monologue shapes every decision he makes, fuels his confidence amid obstacles, and reframes challenges as solvable problems. Verne demonstrates how a clear, focused personal narrative can serve as a compass, guiding one through uncharted territories.

Fogg’s narrative is not solitary but deeply relational, reflecting how the stories we tell ourselves influence and are influenced by others. His valet, Passepartout, initially skeptical, inhabits a self-story marked by loyalty and adaptability, growing through the journey into a hero in his own right. Their shared narrative intertwines, revealing how supportive relationships strengthen and expand individual stories.

The story’s episodic structure—traveling from London to Suez, Bombay, Hong Kong, Yokohama, and back—mirrors the unfolding of Fogg’s narrative. Each locale presents unique trials that test and refine the self-story of mastery and perseverance. Verne uses the physical geography as metaphor for life’s diverse challenges, showing how the story we carry must be flexible and resilient, adjusting without losing core purpose.

Crucially, Verne introduces tension by forcing Fogg to confront unpredictability. Delays, transport strikes, cultural barriers, and the relentless detective Fix believing Fogg a criminal inject uncertainty. These external forces pressure Fogg’s internal story, yet he holds fast, illustrating how faith in one’s narrative sustains endurance. Where others might be forced to rewrite their story, Fogg’s belief propels him forward, highlighting narrative tenacity.

The novel also explores cultural narratives—how various societies’ stories create the backdrop to Fogg’s journey. Through interactions in diverse regions, Verne paints a tapestry of customs and beliefs, underscoring that personal stories are embedded within a global mosaic of narratives. Fogg’s journey thus becomes a narrative about crossing not only physical but cultural boundaries through openness and respect.

Language and style augment the thematic depth. Verne’s clear, descriptive prose evokes vivid images and brisk pacing, mirroring Fogg’s efficient character. The novel’s use of suspense and timing—counting down the days—engages readers in an unfolding story that mirrors human concerns about time and achievement. The famous twist ending, where Fogg believes he has lost but discovers he arrived early, brilliantly emphasizes the role of perspective and the surprises inherent in narrative and life.

Fogg’s wager is itself a meta-narrative—he invests in a story about possibility that others deem implausible. His victory affirms that the stories we commit to can redefine what is achievable, transforming the mundane into extraordinary. This metafictional element invites reflection on how belief shapes reality.

Verne’s Around the World in Eighty Days invites readers to examine their own internal stories. It champions narratives of courage, optimism, and tenacity but also warns of the need for adaptability and relational connection. Fogg’s journey exemplifies how the stories we tell ourselves about who we are and what we can do determine not only personal destiny but also how we touch others’ lives.

Ultimately, Around the World in Eighty Days demonstrates storytelling’s unique power to inspire action and transformation across boundaries. Verne’s enduring tale remains a vibrant reminder that our self-stories are the vehicles through which we traverse life’s landscapes—with their challenges, wonders, and surprises.

This novel, with its themes of time, journey, and belief, underscores that the power of your story lies not just in its telling but in the courage to live it fully.

Your Story around Work

You have a story to tell about your passion for your work and what it means for you. And because more than half our waking life is consumed by working at your business, how we frame this story is critical to our chance for passion and happiness.

How do you characterize your relationship to your work? Is it a burden or a joy? Deep fulfillment or an addiction? What compels you to get up every day and go to work? The money? Is the driving force increased prestige, power, social status? A sense of intrinsic fulfillment? The contribution you are making? Is it an end in itself or a means to something else? Do you feel forced to work or called to work? Are you completely engaged at work? How much of your talent and skill are fully ignited?

What is the dominant tone of your story – inspired? challenged? disappointed? trapped? overwhelmed?

Does the story you currently tell about work take you where you want to go in life? If your story about work is not working, what story do you tell yourself to justify it, especially given the tens of thousands of hours it consumes?

Suppose you did not need the money: Would you continue to go to work every day? Write down five things about working at your business that, if money were no issue, you would like to continue.

1. _____________________________________________________
2. _____________________________________________________
3. _____________________________________________________
4. _____________________________________________________
5. _____________________________________________________

Leo Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina stands as a monumental exploration of the devastating power of the stories we tell ourselves—internal narratives about love, duty, identity, and destiny—that propel us toward ecstasy or ruin. This Russian masterpiece reveals how self-constructed myths, when clashing with societal expectations and personal truths, can unravel lives and relationships with tragic inevitability.

At the novel’s heart is Anna Karenina, whose story begins as one of quiet resignation within a loveless aristocratic marriage. Her internal narrative shifts dramatically upon meeting Count Vronsky: “This is true passion, the fulfillment my soul has craved.” She tells herself a romantic myth of transcendent love overriding convention, justifying adultery as authentic self-realization. This self-story blinds her to consequences, transforming initial ecstasy into isolation as society’s judgment reinforces her victim narrative: “The world condemns what it cannot understand.” Tolstoy illustrates how intoxicating personal myths eclipse reality, converting desire into destiny.​

Anna’s narrative arc exemplifies storytelling’s destructive potential. Her escalating internal monologue—from “Vronsky completes me” to “All reject me but him”—spirals into paranoia and despair. Pregnancy reinforces her myth (“Our child proves divine union”), yet childbirth and social ostracism fracture it. Child custody battles birth new story: “Sacrificed mother fighting injustice.” Ultimately, isolation breeds fatal narrative: “Death redeems my passion.” Anna’s suicide embodies unchecked self-storytelling’s tragedy—romantic idealization yielding self-annihilation.​

Parallel runs Levin’s contrasting journey, embodying constructive narrative evolution. Rural landowner, Levin initially inhabits story of existential futility: “Land, labor, life meaningless without purpose.” Courtship with Kitty sparks relational rewrite: “Love anchors existence.” Marriage confronts domestic realities, prompting laborer dialogues revealing peasant wisdom. Levin’s ultimate epiphany—faith beyond reason—completes reconstruction: “Universal love transcends personal struggle.” Tolstoy contrasts Anna’s static romantic delusion with Levin’s dynamic philosophical growth.​

Vronsky represents flawed masculine narrative. Military officer telling himself “Passion conquers convention,” he pursues Anna impulsively, later guilt-ridden: “My selfishness destroyed her.” Military escape attempts rewrite as duty, but suicide shadows persist. Vronsky’s arc reveals relational storytelling’s limits—personal myths damaging others demand accountability beyond self-justification.​

Kitty’s transformation showcases redemptive relational narrative. Spoiled debutante narrating “Perfect match secures happiness,” rejection by Vronsky shatters delusion. Nursing service births service-story: “Selflessness heals wounds.” Marriage to Levin integrates growth: “Partnership builds meaning.” Kitty models narrative adaptability—rejection yielding maturity.​

Societal narratives amplify individual stories. Russian aristocracy’s “Honor demands propriety” clashes with Anna’s passion myth, fueling hypocrisy (Karenin’s public piety masking private resentment). Peasants’ cyclical labor-story contrasts urban romanticism, grounding Levin’s epiphany. Tolstoy weaves personal tales within cultural frameworks, showing self-stories never exist in isolation.​

Structure reinforces thematic duality. Alternating Anna/Vronsky passion-plot with Levin/Kitty domestic arc mirrors narrative tension—ecstasy versus stability. Circular endings—Anna’s death, Levin’s revelation—contrast tragic closure with open-ended growth. Tolstoy’s omniscient narration dissects interior monologues, exposing delusion: Anna’s romantic fever dreams versus Levin’s philosophical wrestlings.​

Language amplifies psychological depth. Anna’s sensual prose (“Fire consumed her”) contrasts Levin’s analytical musings (“Life’s essence eludes reason”). Railway symbolism recurs—progress/escape motif for Anna, philosophical crossroads for Levin—literalizing narrative tracks. Tolstoy’s realism grounds mythic self-stories in physiological detail: Anna’s migraines signaling narrative fracture.​

Religious themes elevate narrative stakes. Levin’s crisis—“Science yields no meaning”—resolves through peasant faith: “Do good instinctively.” Anna rejects institutional religion for personal passion-myth, isolation deepening. Tolstoy probes storytelling’s spiritual dimension: self-narratives versus transcendent connection.​

Karenin embodies institutional narrative rigidity. Bureaucrat telling himself “Duty upholds order,” his post-scandal piety (“Forgiveness sanctifies”) masks resentment. Failed reconciliation attempts reveal narrative limits—public morality cannot heal private wounds.​

Dolly’s domestic endurance provides grounding counterpoint. Narrating “Family survival demands compromise,” she manages Oblonsky’s infidelities pragmatically. Her story validates relational realism over romantic absolutism.​

Train motif culminates thematic convergence. Anna’s final railway suicide rejects forward momentum, embracing stasis-death narrative. Levin’s station epiphany propels life-affirmation. Railways symbolize irreversible narrative choices—passion’s collision course versus philosophical evolution.​

Anna Karenina resonates universally because it dissects timeless narrative pathologies: romantic delusion, existential void, societal hypocrisy. Modern parallels abound—social media passion-myths, quarter-life crises echoing Levin, cultural conformity battles. Tolstoy warns of self-storytelling’s peril while celebrating reconstructive potential.​

Through psychological precision, structural duality, linguistic virtuosity, Anna Karenina reveals storytelling’s supreme duality: internal narratives forge identity and destiny but demand ruthless self-examination lest they destroy. Tolstoy crafts tragic masterpiece affirming conscious narrative authorship as life’s highest art—choosing growth over delusion, connection over isolation.​

Your Story Around Family 

What is your story about your family life? In the grand scheme, how important is family to you?  So … is your current story about family working? Is the relationship with your husband, wife, or significant other where you want it to be? Is it even close to where you want it to be? Or is there an unbridgeable gap between the level of intimacy, connection and intensity you  feel with him or her and the level you would like to experience?

Is your story with your children working? How about your parents? Your siblings? Other family members?

If you continue on your same path, what is the relationship you are likely to have, years from now with each of your family members? If your story is not working with one or more key individuals, then what is the story you tell yourself to allow this pattern to persist? To what extent do you blame your business for keeping you from fully engaging with your family? (really?) Your business is the reason you are disengaged from the most important thing in your life, the people who matter most to you? How does that happen? According to your current story, is it even possible to be fully engaged at work and also with your family?

Ladies and gentlemen, welcome to this transformative session on The Power of Your Story. Step into the shadowed spires and teeming streets of 1482 Paris, where a cathedral’s bells toll over hunchbacked hearts and forbidden passions—that’s Victor Hugo’s Notre-Dame de Paris (The Hunchback of Notre-Dame), and today we’ll ascend how it reveals the stories you tell yourself about ugliness embraced, love’s deformity, and stone’s silent salvation.

Notre-Dame de Paris (1831), Hugo’s gothic masterpiece, erupts amid Medieval Paris’s Festival of Fools. Quasimodo, deformed bell-ringer of Notre-Dame, is crowned “King of Fools” in mockery, son of archdeacon Claude Frollo, raised in the cathedral’s shadows. Ordinary world: Quasimodo swings from gargoyles, deafened by bells he loves as brothers, loyal to Frollo as father-god. Enter Esmeralda, gypsy dancer with golden goat Djali, captivating poet Gringoire, captain Phoebus, and Frollo’s repressed lust. Frollo, alchemist-priest torn by vows and desire, orders Quasimodo to kidnap her; rescued by Gringoire, she loves Phoebus. Betrayals cascade—Phoebus frames her for witchery, Frollo stabs him, Quasimodo saves her in sanctuary. Trials rage: King’s men storm Notre-Dame, Frollo’s sorcery accusations, Esmeralda hanged, Quasimodo hurls Frollo from battlements, dies cradling her corpse. Cathedral endures, bells tolling eternal witness.

Ever narrate yourself as gargoyle gazing from heights, loving unseen? Quasimodo’s core script thunders this: from “I am monster, bells my only kin” chained by deformity, to “protect the beautiful,” his inherited isolation fuels selfless devotion against rejection’s lash. Esmeralda counters with defiant grace—”dance frees the caged”—sustaining amid chains. Hugo’s romanticism bares the trap: inner tales of worthlessness hunch in towers, redemptive loyalty empowers but blinds to reciprocity. Audit yours: does it hunch in “ugly unloved,” or toll like Quasimodo’s “strength shelters fragile”? Rewrite from belfry gloom to sanctuary’s vow, forging belonging without bondage.

In gargoyle perches or sanctuary vaults, private monologues mine mercy. Quasimodo converses with bells alone, steeling paternal loyalty against Frollo’s poison; Esmeralda whispers hope to Djali, rejecting witch-labels for spirit’s flight. Hugo, campaigning for monuments, warns: unexamined deformities breed fanaticism—Frollo’s “Latin saves soul” corrupts to lust, Phoebus’ bravado poisons trust, Gringoire’s verses evade reality. Like Power of Your Story ascents, probe grotesques: what hunchback scorn or gypsy exile do you rehearse solo? Flip to “deformity births devotion”; your silent tolling crafts community—ring unity, or echo isolated.

Outward narratives fuel or fracture realms. Quasimodo’s roars repel besiegers, Esmeralda’s dances bind crowds, but clerical lies and royal edicts expose peril. Frollo’s sermons repel; Phoebus’ oaths divide. In Paris streets or cathedral nave, Hugo teaches: misaligned tales invite scaffolds, heroic ones sow sanctuary seeds—like Notre-Dame’s stones inspiring restorations. Heroes reframe repulsion as refuge; craft yours boldly: not whispered deformities, but thunderous tolls rallying redemptions.

You’ve ascended Notre-Dame’s heights—now descend with your story’s bell. Ditch distortion; claim grotesque glory. Inner devotion, private persistence, outer haven: that’s your sanctuary. Who’s ready to toll anew? Share one hunch your narrative’s embracing today!

Your Story Around Health

What is your story about your health? What kind of job have you done taking care of yourself? What value do you place on your health, and why? If you continue on your same path, then what will be the likely health consequences? If you are not fully engaged with your health, then what is the story you tell yourself and others – particularly your spouse, your kids, your doctor, your colleagues and anyone who might look up to you – that allows you to persist in this way? If suddenly you awoke to the reality that your health was gone, what would be the consequences for you and all those you care about? How would you feel if the end of your story was dominated by one fact – that you had needlessly died young?

Do you consider your health just one of several important stories about yourself but hardly toward the top? Does it crack the top three? top five? If you have been overweight, or consistently putting on weight the last several years; if you smoke; if you eat poorly; if you rest infrequently and never deeply; if you rarely, if ever, exercise; what is the story you tell yourself that explains how you deal, or don’t deal, with these issues? Is it a story with a rhyme or reason? Do you believe that spending time exercising or otherwise taking care of yourself, particularly during the workday, sets a negative example for others?

Given your physical being and the way you present yourself, do you think the story you are telling is the same one that others are hearing? Could it be vastly different, when seen through their eyes?

Think to a time when you were very ill, so sapped of energy that you didn’t even feel like reading a book in bed. Do you remember any promises you made to yourself while lying in bed? As in ‘I don’t ever want to feel this way again. If and when I regain my health, I’m going to ….?  Write down three promises you made. 

1. _________________________________________________________________
2. _________________________________________________________________
3. _________________________________________________________________

​

Ladies and gentlemen, welcome to this transformative session on The Power of Your Story. Step into the starlit sands of an asteroid garden where a golden-haired child tends a vain rose and seeks the essence of what matters—that’s Antoine de Saint-Exupéry’s The Little Prince (Le Petit Prince, 1943), and today we’ll voyage how it reveals the stories you tell yourself about innocence lost, love’s fragility, and the heart’s invisible truths.

The Little Prince, Saint-Exupéry’s poetic fable drawn from desert crash survival, launches with a pilot-narrator sketching a boa digesting elephant, dismissed as hat by adults. Ordinary world: grown-up absurdities—numbers rule, imagination starves. Enter the Little Prince from asteroid B612, ruler of baobab-pruned rocks, tending his single rose—beautiful yet demanding, thorned with pride. Homesick, he departs: visits King (commands empty), Vain Man (claps for praise), Drunkard (shame cycles), Businessman (counts stars owned), Lamplighter (duty unending), Geographer (maps untraveled). Earth arrival: fox teaches taming bonds (“essential invisible to eye”), snake offers return, well reveals hidden water. Rose regrets vanity; Prince allows snake bite, “body too heavy,” vanishing to stars. Pilot mourns, sees sheep in constellations.

Ever narrate yourself as baobab-blind adult, missing rose’s essence? Prince’s core script sparkles this: from “I tame what I love” chained by rose’s thorns, to “heart sees true,” his inherited curiosity fuels childlike quests against grown-up gravity. Fox counters with relational wisdom—”responsible forever for what you tame”—sustaining amid goodbyes. Saint-Exupéry’s aviation lyricism bares the trap: inner tales of ownership hoard stars, tamed hearts empower but ache in separation. Audit yours: does it count in “possess to matter,” or gaze like Prince’s “draw sheep for rose”? Rewrite from asteroid isolation to starry connection, forging vision without vanity.

In baobab vigils or desert wells, private monologues mine meaning. Prince converses with rose alone, steeling affection against prickles; pilot whispers doubts to stars, rejecting adult hats for boa truths. Saint-Exupéry, downed pilot-philosopher, warns: unexamined egos breed drunkard loops—Vain Man’s applause starves, Businessman’s counts blind beauty, Lamplighter’s duty exhausts. Like Power of Your Story voyages, probe petals: what rose demand or fox farewell do you rehearse solo? Flip to “tame to treasure”; your silent tending crafts constellations—bind hearts, or drift asteroid-alone.

Outward narratives fuel or fracture worlds. Prince’s questions disarm kings, fox’s lessons bind pilots, but adult dismissals and snake finality expose fragility. Geographer’s maps repel; King’s scepter divides. In asteroids or Saharan sands, Saint-Exupéry teaches: misaligned tales invite boa hats, essential ones sow tamed seeds—like laughter in stars inspiring generations. Heroes reframe trivial as treasure; craft yours boldly: not counted claims, but thunderous “what’s essential” rallying rediscoveries.

You’ve voyaged Little Prince’s stars—now land with your story’s gaze. Ditch dismissal; claim heart’s sight. Inner tending, private taming, outer essence: that’s your B612. Who’s ready to draw anew? Share one “hat” your narrative’s seeing through today!

Your Story about Happiness 

What’s your story about happiness? How would you rate your happiness over the last six months? Is your answer acceptable to you? According to your story, how important is happiness and how do you go about achieving it? Are you clear about where or how happiness might be realized for you? If there is something out there – some activity, some person – that dependably brings you happiness, how long has it been since you encountered it or her or him?  What do you think is the connection, if any, between engagement and happiness? If your level of happiness is not where you want it to be, then what’s the story you tell yourself that explains why it’s not happening at this point in your life? If you continue on the same trajectory, then what kind of happiness do you expect is likely in your future, short-term and long. 

Do you consider you own happiness an afterthought? An indulgence? A form of selfishness? Have you removed joy joy, as opposed to contentment – from the spectrum of emotions you expect and wish to experience during the remainder of your life? 

Jot down ten moments/occassions during the last thirty days where you experienced joy: 

1. ________________________________________________________
2. ________________________________________________________
3. ________________________________________________________
4. ________________________________________________________
5. ________________________________________________________
6. ________________________________________________________
7. ________________________________________________________
8. ________________________________________________________
9. ________________________________________________________
10. _____________________________________________________

​Ladies and gentlemen, welcome to this transformative session on The Power of Your Story. Step into the gaslit shadows of Belle Époque Paris, where a top-hatted gentleman thief dances through châteaux and safes with Sherlockian flair—that’s Maurice Leblanc’s Arsène Lupin, Gentleman-Cambrioleur (1907 onward), and today we’ll prowl how it reveals the stories you tell yourself about roguish reinvention, honor’s edge, and the thrill of outwitting fate.

Arsène Lupin, Gentleman Burglar, Leblanc’s serialized escapades launching with “The Arrest of Arsène Lupin,” unleashes a master thief born Raoul de la Rochefoucauld, orphaned noble turned phantom cracksman. Ordinary world: Edwardian high society—dukes’ vaults, opera galas, Riviera yachts—where Lupin, disguised as aristocrat, detective, or chauffeur, pilfers jewels with panache. Allies: loyal sidekick Wilson (bumbling foil), love interests like impulsive Sonia, rival Herlock Sholmes (Holmes parody). Enemies: bumbling Ganimard inspector, greedy baronesses. Feats dazzle: “L’Arrestation d’Arsène Lupin” sees him jailed yet escaping via newspaper code; 813 unmasks Blonde Lady; The Hollow Needle hides French crown jewels. Betrayals twist—framed murders, lost loves—but Lupin reframes: “Steal from the corrupt, gift to the worthy.” Abyss tempts in The Countess of Cagliostro: identity crisis, but rebirth as eternal phantom. Elixir: chivalric code—”never harm the innocent”—legacy in Lupin’s sons, endless disguises.

Ever narrate yourself as locked-room victim, or key-turning phantom? Lupin’s core script sparkles this: from “orphan noble fallen” chained by fate, to “gentleman thief redeems,” his inherited audacity fuels elegant heists against stodgy law. Sonia counters with redemptive heart—”love thaws the rogue”—sustaining amid pursuits. Leblanc’s pulp lyricism bares the trap: inner tales of victimhood padlock vaults, masterful masks empower but risk solipsism. Audit yours: does it rust in “caught by circumstance,” or prowl like Lupin’s “disguise defeats”? Rewrite from barred cell to ballroom glide, forging flair without felony.

In safe-cracking solos or yacht escapes, private monologues mine mastery. Lupin deciphers codes alone, steeling chivalry against greed’s pull; Sonia whispers loyalty to shadows, rejecting damsel for partner. Leblanc, feuilleton king inspired by real anarchists, warns: unexamined aliases breed Ganimard chases—Herlock’s logic traps, barons’ greed poisons trust, Wilsons’ naivety exposes. Like Power of Your Story prowls, probe masks: what barred door or stolen jewel do you rehearse solo? Flip to “theft births justice”; your silent sleight crafts legacies—gift hearts, or hoard isolated.

Outward narratives fuel or fracture high society. Lupin’s calling cards disarm foes, Sonia’s pleas bind accomplices, but inspector snares and rival thefts expose peril. Blonde Lady’s seductions repel; Herlock’s deductions divide. In Paris penthouses or needle hollows, Leblanc teaches: misaligned tales invite handcuffs, phantom ones sow chivalric seeds—like Lupin’s escapes inspiring anti-heroes. Heroes reframe robbery as romance; craft yours boldly: not whispered wants, but thunderous “checkmate” rallying reinventions.

You’ve prowled Arsène Lupin’s shadows—now emerge with your story’s mask. Ditch drudgery; claim gentlemanly glide. Inner audacity, private panache, outer plunder: that’s your B612 vault. Who’s ready to slip locks anew? Share one “cell” your narrative’s picking today!

Your Story about Friends

What is your story about friendship? According to your story, how important are friends? How fully engaged are you with them? (that is don’t calculate in your mind simply how often you see them but what you do and how you are when you’re together). If close friendships are important to you, yet they are clearly not happening in your life, what is the story you tell yourself that obstructs this from happening?

To what extent are friendships important to your realizing what you need and want from life? If you have few or no friends, why is that? Is this a relatively recent development – that is, something that happened since you got married for example, or had a family, or got more consumed by work, or got promoted, or got divorced, or experienced a significant loss, or moved away from your hometown?

When you think of your closest friendships over the last five years, can you say any of them has grown and deepened? People who have a best friend at work are seven times more likely to be engaged in their work, get more done in less time, have fewer accidents and are more likely to innovate and share new ideas.

Suppose you had no friends – what would that be like? This may seem like a morbid exercise but write down three ways in which being completely friendless might make your life poorer (no one to turn to in times of crisis and celebration, no one to mourn your passing, etc.)

1. _________________________________________________________________
2. _________________________________________________________________
3. _________________________________________________________________

Ladies and gentlemen, welcome to this transformative session on The Power of Your Story. Step into the scandal-scented salons and ink-stained newsrooms of Belle Époque Paris, where a handsome opportunist scales society on charm and cunning—that’s Guy de Maupassant’s Bel-Ami (1885), and today we’ll climb how it reveals the stories you tell yourself about ambition’s allure, seduction’s ladder, and the hollow crown of conquest.

Bel-Ami, Maupassant’s razor-sharp satire of journalistic vice and social ascent, catapults Georges Duroy, a strapping ex-soldier from Normandy’s mud, into Paris’s glittering grind. Ordinary world: dingy Latin Quarter garret, scraping as clerk on meager pay, eyeing café beauties while poverty bites. Enter allies: old army pal Forestier, editor at La Vie Française, introduces wife Madeleine (sharp-witted writer) and her rich friend Mme. Walter (devout but desirous). Enemies lurk: rival journalists, jealous husbands, truth itself. Duroy—Bel-Ami to lovers—seduces Madeleine for ghostwritten articles exposing Moroccan intrigues, beds Mme. Walter for insider scoops, discards Forestier (dying of TB), weds virgin heiress Clotilde for title. Trials dazzle: duels dodged, scandals spun, crowds cheer his fabricated heroism. Betrayals peak: Madeleine’s affairs exposed, Mme. Walter discarded post-menopause. Abyss glares in wedding pomp—vast cathedral, empty soul. Elixir: Baron Georges Du Roy de Cantel, parliamentary power, but inner void yawns. Legacy: cynical empire, wife’s pleas ignored.

Ever narrate yourself as garret dreamer destined for glory? Duroy’s core script gleams this: from “Normandy peasant outcast” chained by class, to “beauty conquers all,” his inherited grit fuels seductive climbs against bourgeois barriers. Madeleine counters with intellectual steel—”words wield power”—sustaining amid compromises. Maupassant’s naturalist bite bares the trap: inner tales of entitlement devour souls, chivalric charm empowers but erodes authenticity. Audit yours: does it grovel in “birth bars me,” or strut like Duroy’s “mirror mirrors mastery”? Rewrite from Latin Quarter rags to Faubourg throne, forging ascent without atrophy.

In mirror gazes or newsroom intrigues, private monologues mine manipulation. Duroy rehearses seductions alone, steeling vanity against rejection’s sting; Clotilde whispers devotion to her “baron,” rejecting spinster fate for gilded cage. Maupassant, Flaubert’s protégé chronicling press corruption, warns: unexamined egos breed Walter falls—Forestier’s loyalty poisons via death, rivals’ envy sparks duels, Madeleine’s brains expose frauds. Like Power of Your Story climbs, probe vanities: what garret slight or salon snub do you rehearse solo? Flip to “charm births crowns”; your silent strut crafts coronets—woo alliances, or wither isolated.

Outward narratives fuel or fracture empires. Duroy’s headlines disarm foes, Madeleine’s pens bind patrons, but exposé scandals and husband rages expose fragility. Mme. Walter’s piety repels; Forestier’s cough divides. In press palaces or wedding vaults, Maupassant teaches: misaligned tales invite gutters, masterful ones sow titled seeds—like Duroy’s baronage inspiring anti-heroes. Heroes reframe rags as rocket; craft yours boldly: not whispered wants, but thunderous “editor’s pet” rallying rises.

You’ve climbed Bel-Ami’s ladders—now summit with your story’s strut. Ditch drudgery; claim seductive sovereignty. Inner vanity, private polish, outer pomp: that’s your Faubourg. Who’s ready to seduce anew? Share one “garret” your narrative’s conquering today!

Write Your Current Story (or try to) 

The following are the steps in a process we’ve devised and refined over the years, from feedback our clients have provided. It starts with you writing your current story – a first draft. Eventually, after some  hard and honest work – and several drafts – you’ll have produced a story that accurately reflects the way things have been going in your life. Then you’ll discard this current story, recasting it now as your ‘old story’ and replace it with your new, forward – moving story. 

But that’s getting ahead of ourselves – especially considering that the majority of those I’ve worked with have not quite ‘gotten’ their current story on the first attempt. 

STEP 1:  Identify the important areas of your life where the stories you tell yourself or others are clearly not working. They simply do not take you where you ultimately want to go – for example, with personal relationships, work, financial health, physical health, with your boss, your daughter, your morning routine. Ask yourself: in what areas is it clear I can’t get to where I want to go with the story I’ve got? 

1.  ________________________________________________________________
2. _________________________________________________________________
3. _________________________________________________________________
4. _________________________________________________________________
5. _________________________________________________________________

Keep going, if you have more. 

STEP 2.  Articulate as clearly as possible the story you currently have that isn’t working. Put it down on paper. Eventually we’ll refer to this as your Old Story. 

Before you begin writing your own Old Story: 

Really bring it to life. Express your logic, your rationale, your thinking process about why you’ve been living the way you have. By getting it down on paper, you can see it, study it, break it down, judge how it flows (or stumbles) as a story. Write in the voice you typically use privately with yourself. Don’t hold back. If it’s a rationalizing, scapegoating voice, then use that. If it’s bitter or prideful, use it. This story – initially, anyway is for your eyes, no one else’s, so don’t write your story scared; no need to be diplomatic or politically correct. At some point you may wish to share it with others, as many people do in our workshops. 

Some tricks to a more authentic story: 

Exaggerating your voice often makes it easier to recognize how destructive or illogical the story you’ve been telling yourself actually is. For example, if you feel used and taken for granted, listen to the voice and capture both the message and the emotion in your writing. Get down and dirty. Tell the story you really think – no matter how ugly it sounds – capture it. 

Just as novelist and screenwriters go through dozens of drafts before they get it right, prepare to go through several rewrites before you can effectively capture the voice, content, and essence of your faulty Old Story. Clients tell me they go through three, eight, fifteen drafts. When it’s right, you’ll know it. 

Just as writers emphasize detail, you, too, should get as specific and concrete as you can with your Old Story. Capture the nuances of how you talk to yourself and the logic of your thinking. The elements of a story that make it persuasive or not – theme, tone, major characters, pace – provide color and texture to life, so try to capture them on paper. 

Ladies and gentlemen, welcome to this transformative session on The Power of Your Story. Step into the gaslit boulevards and velvet boudoirs of Second Empire Paris, where a courtesan’s beauty devours men and empires alike—that’s Émile Zola’s Nana (1880), and today we’ll descend how it reveals the stories you tell yourself about desire’s dominion, beauty’s blade, and the rot beneath gilded flesh.

Nana, Zola’s explosive Rougon-Macquart novel, explodes with Nana Coupeau, laundress’s daughter turned Second Empire siren. Ordinary world: Montmartre slums—alcoholic mother Gervaise (L’Assommoir), brutal lovers, theater chorus girl scraping amid squalor. Rise catapults: ravishing Opéra beauty captivates Count Muffat (devout noble), Comte de Vandeuvres (decadent aristocrat), banker Steiner (Jewish financier), actor Fontan (temperamental brute). Allies flicker: laundress friend Victorine (loyalty amid vice), rival courtesans (jealous solidarity). Enemies swarm: jealous wives, bankrupt lovers, syphilis ravaging. Trials dazzle: Muffat funds her Chantecler mansion, horse races bankrupt Vandeuvres, orgies corrupt youth Georges. Betrayals cascade—Muffat pimped to virgins, Steiner ruined, Nana births deformed child, contracts pox. Abyss consumes: mansion auctioned, brothel-bound, rotting face mirrors soul’s decay. Elixir glimmers darkly: “beauty slays”—her deathbed laugh echoes empire’s fall.

Ever narrate yourself as slum rose destined to rule salons? Nana’s core script blazes this: from “Montmartre mud rat” chained by birth, to “beauty conquers kings,” her inherited vice fuels seductive sovereignty against moral chains. Muffat counters with pious torment—”sin refines soul”—sustaining amid degradation. Zola’s naturalist fury bares the trap: inner tales of invincibility corrupt flesh, animal magnetism empowers but devours. Audit yours: does it fester in “birth dooms me,” or bloom like Nana’s “flesh commands”? Rewrite from laundry tub to Chantecler throne, forging allure without annihilation.

In mirror trysts or auction ruins, private monologues mine magnetism. Nana rehearses conquests alone, steeling vanity against lovers’ pleas; Muffat whispers penance in confessionals, rejecting piety for passion. Zola, documenting courtesan scandals, warns: unexamined appetites breed Vandeuvres suicides—Steiner’s gold poisons trust, Fontan’s rages divide, Georges’ youth corrupts. Like Power of Your Story descents, probe petals: what slum scorn or salon snub do you rehearse solo? Flip to “beauty births balance”; your silent sway crafts coronets—seduce wisely, or succumb isolated.

Outward narratives fuel or fracture empires. Nana’s laughs disarm nobles, Victorine’s pleas bind remnants, but pox scandals and creditor sieges expose fragility. Wives’ vengeances repel; Steiner’s ledgers divide. In theaters or auction blocks, Zola teaches: misaligned tales invite rot, magnetic ones sow seductive seeds—like Nana’s legend inspiring demi-mondaines. Heroes reframe vice as vitality; craft yours boldly: not whispered wants, but thunderous “kneel” rallying realms.

You’ve descended Nana’s boudoirs—now ascend with your story’s glow. Ditch decay; claim fleshly fire. Inner magnetism, private poise, outer empire: that’s your Chantecler. Who’s ready to captivate anew? Share one “slum” your narrative’s slaying today!

Okay. Now take a stab at your Old Story. 

Old Story 

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Note your feelings as you’re reading and writing your old story. Clients often experience shock, embarrassment, even self-loathing when they write and read their Old Stories as they genuinely face their rationale for the first time. ‘This story is making me sick as I write it’. one client wrote as part of his story. 

You can only write your New Story – eventually – if you’ve isolated what it is about your Old Story that’s faulty. (If there’s nothing faulty in it, then there’s no reason to write a new one, right?).  How do you do that?

STEP 3:  Identify the faulty elements of your old story by asking yourself three questions, about both the total story and each of the individual points it makes:  

1. Will this story make me where I want to go in life (while at the same time remaining true to my deepest values and beliefs?)
2. Does the story reflect the truth as much as possible?
3. Does this story stimulate me to take action? 

These three questions are the foundations for the three rules of good storytelling, which I will cover in detail. Your Old Story usually flouts one or more of these rules, often all three. I refer to them shorthanded as Purpose, Truth and Hope-Filled Action. It is the lack of one or more of these criteria that makes your Old Story flawed and ultimately unworkable. In your New Story, on the other hand, all three rules will be addressed and conformed to. You simply cannot tell a good story without satisfying each and every one of these three elements. 

So: Does your Old Story work for you?

The answer will be found by  holding it up, first, against your purpose in life. Is this story you wrote above, the one you’re right now living and have been for some time, moving you toward fulfilling and remaining true to that great purpose? 

Two 

The premise of your story, the purpose of your life 

Imagine this: You find yourself atop a tall building in the heart of a bustling city, gazing across to another rooftop. A single wooden board stretches between you and the other structure—a flimsy bridge suspended high above the streets.

A man in a suit—let’s call him “The Banker”—appears beside you. He invites you, with a charismatic grin, to cross the board. “Walk across,” he says, “and win a fantastic prize: €1,000. Or €10,000. Or €1,000,000! Name your reward, and it shall be yours.”

You peer down. The city is blurry with distance, the board barely more than a tightrope. Your heart races at the possibility… but also at the risk. No matter how tempting the prize, your feet remain glued to the rooftop. The money—so alluring in the abstract—has no real pull here, where the danger is undeniable and the reward can’t overcome the instinct to protect yourself.

You are not alone. Around you, others decline. A poll of would-be adventurers, dreamers, and pragmatists reveals a near-universal reluctance to cross, regardless of how high the stakes climb in their favor. The threat outweighs the promise; money is not enough.

The Hero’s Heart Revealed

Now, let’s shift the story.

Flames erupt in the building across from where you stand. Through the smoke, you spot your loved ones: the people who matter most to you—your family, your child, your partner, your friend—are trapped, calling for help.

A new choice presents itself: the same wobbly board, the same dizzying void below, but the stakes are remade. The risk remains, but the reward is no longer money—it is love, connection, the irreplaceable presence of another human in your life.

Suddenly, legs that were frozen before begin to move. People discover courage they did not know was in them. They cross the board—not for gold, but because the story they are living is no longer about “winning” or self-preservation, but about purpose, meaning, and the heroic heartbeat that comes alive when what (and who) they value is truly at stake.

Lessons from the Board

• Motivation is Meaningful: Money often fails to move us when real personal risk is involved. Our actions are shaped more by meaning than by material promises.
• The Power of Story: The tale you tell yourself—of who you are, what matters, and what you’re willing to risk or save—changes everything.
• The Hero’s Journey: When the call is strong—when our family or values are on the line—we find the will to face even our greatest fears.

This is the difference between living for external rewards and living for what truly lights your fire. Sometimes, what gets you to cross the board isn’t at the end—it’s already in your heart

Your Hero’s Journey

He who has a why to live, said Nietzsche, can bear with almost any how. I have yet to meet a person who, given the proposition laid out above – risk your life or the lives of your family members – has said that he or she would not walk that narrow plank and a one – in – five – chance of dying. I present the wood plank example not to show clients that saving their family from harm is their ultimate purpose in life – it’s a purpose, a vital one, but not the purpose, not the reason you are on this earth – but to show just how dramatically our story, and our willingness to spend energy and take risk, change when there is a great purpose. In short, when the stakes are a large sum of money – almost never a transcendent purpose – no one walks across that plank. When the stakes are love and life and that which has incalculable value, everyone goes. 

A great purpose is the epicenter of everyone’s life story. Purpose is one of the three foundations of good storytelling  

Without purpose, no character in a book, or movie or in art would do anything interesting, meaningful, memorable, worthwhile. Without purpose , our life story has no meaning. It has no coherence, no direction, no inexorable momentum. Without purpose, our life still ‘moves’ along – whatever that means, but it lacks an organizing principle. Without purpose, it is all but impossible to be fully engaged. To be extraordinary.

With purpose, on the other hand, people do amazing things: good, smart, productive things, often heroic things, unprecedented things. 

Gaston Leroux’s The Phantom of the Opera hauntingly unveils the destructive power of the stories we tell ourselves about genius, love, deformity, and possession—internal narratives that twist obsession into tragedy amid the glittering Paris Opera House. This gothic thriller reveals how self-delusions masquerading as destiny consume both teller and told.

At its masked core lurks Erik, the Phantom, whose narrative is one of monstrous entitlement: “My musical genius demands Christine’s voice and soul; deformity curses me, but love redeems through possession.” Hidden beneath catacombs, Erik authors romantic delusion—”I am her Angel of Music, destined savior”—blinding him to consent. Leroux exposes storytelling’s peril: unexamined self-mythology births captivity disguised as salvation.

Christine Daaé embodies innocent aspiration corrupted by narrative dependency. Orphaned dancer tells herself: “The Angel’s voice elevates me beyond mediocrity; his lessons birth my destiny.” Phantom’s manipulation fractures her autonomy, spiraling from gratitude to terror: “His love imprisons what it claims to free.” Her oscillation—Raoul’s safe affection versus Erik’s intoxicating mystery—illustrates relational storytelling’s seductive entrapment.

Raoul de Chagny represents conventional heroism’s narrative limits. Aristocratic lover narrates: “Duty and passion compel rescue; true love conquers subterranean madness.” Yet his rational persistence underestimates Erik’s obsessive authorship, revealing privileged stories’ blind spots against pathological delusion.

Madame Giry’s pragmatic survival tale provides grounding counterpoint. Box-keeper whispers: “The ghost pays; silence preserves livelihood.” Her transactional narrative contrasts Erik’s operatic absolutism, highlighting storytelling’s spectrum from myth to Realpolitik.

The Opera House symbolizes architectural narrative layers—opulent auditorium masking labyrinthine depths, mirroring characters’ public facades concealing private torments. Leroux’s episodic structure builds suspense through diary entries, police reports, Persian chronicles—fracturing singular truth into contested narratives.

Language amplifies psychological intensity: Erik’s operatic arias (“Music shall save me!”) contrast Christine’s trembling recitatives; chandelier crashes literalize narrative collapse. Mask symbolism recurs—concealment versus revelation—as mirror scene shatters Erik’s self-deception: “I see the monster others flee.”

Secondary tales enrich operatic complexity: Carlotta’s diva ego (“My voice reigns supreme”); Moncharmin/Richard managers’ bureaucratic “ghost-as-hoax” rationalization. Auction finale reframes tragedy as artifact—Christine’s ring symbolizing unresolved narrative longing.

The Phantom of the Opera resonates through universal pathologies: unrecognized genius’s rage, beauty’s perilous allure, love’s boundary violations. Modern echoes proliferate—stalker fandoms, toxic mentorships, creative obsession’s dark underbelly.

Leroux mourns storytelling’s fatal irony: narratives promising transcendence often forge prisons. Erik’s final release—”Let her go”—arrives as hollow epiphany, too late for redemption. Christine’s survival affirms fragile agency amid narrative violence.

Through subterranean grandeur, vocal virtuosity, and tragic inevitability, The Phantom of the Opera enshrines storytelling’s operatic duality—internal myths birthing genius or monstrosity, demanding ruthless self-confrontation lest they consume creator and captive alike.

​Sometimes a person does not lack a purpose, it seems he has one – at least claimed to have one – but then he went about living his life and telling a story that supported that purpose hardly at all.  And if that’s so, then what does it mean, really, to have a purpose? Or do you just say you have a purpose to cover yourself? Or do you not understand the meaning of the word ‘purpose’? 

Purpose is the thing in your life story you will fight for. It is the ground you will defend at any cost. Purpose is not the same as ‘incentive’, but rather the motor behind it, the end that drives why you have energy for some things and not for others.

To find one’s true purpose sometimes takes work. Fortunately, the skill it requires is one that every person is blessed with.

For a few people, naming one’s purpose comes with remarkable ease. The individual feels it in the deepest part of his or her soul; the purpose has always been there, even if it got lost for a very long while, remaining unexpressed to oneself and to those who are the objects of one’s purpose. Deep enduring purpose is virtually always motivated by a desire for the well-being of others.

You know purpose when you see it.

To author a workable, fulfilling new story, you will need to ask yourself many questions and then answer them, none more important than those that concern purpose. Purpose is the sail on the boat, the yeast in the bread. Once you know your purpose – that is, what matters – then everything else can fall into place. Getting your purpose clear is your defining truth. What is the purpose of your life? To be the most successful earner in your circle? To leave the world a better place than when you entered it? To honor God? To live to a hundred? To seek out adventure and risk? Whatever it is, it had better be something for which you will move mountains, cross deserts, seven days a week, no questions asked.

Once you find your purpose, you have a chance to live a story that moves you and those around you.

Ladies and gentlemen, welcome to this transformative session on The Power of Your Story. Step into the abyssal depths where a steel Nautilus slices through ocean mysteries, captained by a vengeful visionary—that’s Jules Verne’s Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea (Vingt mille lieues sous les mers, 1870), and today we’ll dive how it reveals the stories you tell yourself about exploration’s call, isolation’s armor, and the sea’s unforgiving truths.

Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea, Verne’s submarine odyssey, plunges with Professor Pierre Aronnax, ichthyologist narrating a “narwhal” terrorizing ships. Ordinary world: 1860s Paris salons and Lincoln’s Abraham Lincoln—scientific curiosity amid maritime panic. Captured with harpooner Ned Land and servant Conseil during chase, they board Nautilus, commanded by Captain Nemo (no one), exiled genius avenging imperial navies. Allies form: Conseil’s loyalty, Ned’s rebellion. Enemies: ocean pressures, Nemo’s monomania. Trials enthrall: coral cemeteries, Atlantis ruins, South Pole ice-trap, giant squid battle. Nemo reveals: Indian prince scarred by British colonialism, Nautilus his vengeance ark. Betrayals surface—Ned plots escape, Aronnax torn between wonder and freedom. Abyss engulfs in Maelstrom vortex; escape via current. Elixir gleams: Nemo’s “Mobilis in mobili” (moving in mobile)—freedom’s paradox.

Ever narrate yourself as surface dweller fearing depths? Nemo’s core script thunders this: from “empire crushed me” chained by loss, to “science conquers seas,” his inherited genius fuels submersible sovereignty against surface tyrants. Aronnax counters with rational awe—”wonder without war”—sustaining amid pressures. Verne’s scientific romance bares the trap: inner tales of victimhood submerge in Nautilus hulls, exploratory fire empowers but isolates. Audit yours: does it float in “waves drown me,” or plunge like Nemo’s “depths deliver”? Rewrite from deck panic to periscope command, forging discovery without drowning.

In pressure hulls or observation salons, private monologues mine mysteries. Nemo charts vengeances alone, steeling erudition against solitude’s crush; Aronnax journals wonders, rejecting captivity for curiosity. Verne, visionary predicting subs, warns: unexamined grudges breed squid grapples—Ned’s rebellion risks all, Conseil’s duty blinds peril, imperial ghosts poison peace. Like Power of Your Story dives, probe currents: what surface storm or abyss fear do you rehearse solo? Flip to “depths birth discoveries”; your silent plunge crafts horizons—chart unity, or drift isolated.

Outward narratives fuel or fracture voyages. Nemo’s organ laments disarm captives, Aronnax’s lectures bind crew, but escape plots and ice entrapments expose fragility. Lincoln’s harpoons repel; Maelstrom’s whirl divides. In Atlantic trenches or polar caps, Verne teaches: misaligned tales invite implosions, visionary ones sow mobilis seeds—like Nemo’s legacy inspiring submariners. Heroes reframe rage as revelation; craft yours boldly: not whispered wrecks, but thunderous “dive” rallying depths.

You’ve dived Twenty Thousand Leagues’ abyss—now surface with your story’s periscope. Ditch drift; claim oceanic odyssey. Inner vision, private pressure, outer expanse: that’s your Nautilus. Who’s ready to submerge anew? Share one “surface” your narrative’s plumbing today!

The Words on Your Tombstone 

Remember when your mother asked you, “Are you telling me a story or is that really true?” The assumption being: A story is what you concoct to keep yourself out of trouble. But your mother’s error was the same one many of us make when we think about stories. We fail to recognize that everything we say is a story – nothing more, nothing less. It would have been more accurate for Mom to have said, “I know you’re telling me a story but I need to know if your story truly reflects the facts or if you’re intentionally making things up to get out of trouble or to get what you want”. Happily no mother talks like that. 

Ladies and gentlemen, welcome to this transformative session on The Power of Your Story. Step into the shadowed dungeons and velvet excesses of 18th-century France, where a noble libertine shatters taboos with philosophical fury—that’s the Marquis de Sade’s Justine, or The Misfortunes of Virtue (1791) and kindred works, and today we’ll descend how they reveal the stories you tell yourself about virtue’s torment, vice’s triumph, and desire’s unbridled dominion.

Justine, Sade’s infamous gothic odyssey amid Revolution’s eve, hurls Justine (Thérèse), orphaned convent girl, into a hellscape of predatory aristocracy. Ordinary world: pious virtue in post-mortem parental poverty, fleeing to Paris with sister Juliette (choosing vice). Justine’s quest for honest work spirals: raped by monks, tortured by libertine count, imprisoned by sadistic judge, enslaved on pirate ship, ravaged in Italian castle orgies. Allies flicker: fleeting rescuers (repentant libertines), enemies swarm: Sadean archetypes—philosophers preaching “Nature’s cruelty rewards vice,” executioners of innocence. Trials escalate: flagellation racks, electric experiments, bestial violations. Juliette thrives opulently; Justine, virtuous martyr, endures 200 pages of escalating atrocities. Abyss consumes: hanged beside Juliette’s brothel window, lightning “proves” divine justice mocks virtue. Elixir glimmers darkly: Sade’s thesis—”crime is Nature’s command”—legacy in Juliette’s fortune, Justine’s eternal lament.

Ever narrate yourself as virtuous victim crushed by wicked world? Justine’s core script thunders this: from “piety protects” chained by fate, to “suffer for heaven,” her inherited faith fuels masochistic endurance against vice’s lash. Juliette counters with defiant glee—”vice liberates”—sustaining amid debauchery. Sade’s materialist atheism bares the trap: inner tales of martyrdom glorify torment, libertine audacity empowers but devours souls. Audit yours: does it bleed in “good suffers,” or revel like Juliette’s “vice victorious”? Rewrite from dungeon chains to orgy throne, forging liberty without libertinage.

In rack confessions or castle soliloquies, private monologues mine misery. Justine rehearses piety alone, steeling faith against tormentors’ “reason”; Sade’s narrators expound atheism solo, rejecting morality for Nature’s tooth-and-claw. Sade, Bastille inmate channeling prison rage, warns: unexamined virtues breed Justine’s pyre—monks’ hypocrisy poisons trust, judges’ logic justifies rape, pirates’ anarchy divides. Like Power of Your Story descents, probe perversions: what convent scourge or dungeon doubt do you rehearse solo? Flip to “vice births vitality”; your silent sadism crafts coronets—embrace desire, or endure isolated.

Outward narratives fuel or fracture libertinages. Justine’s pleas disarm momentarily, Juliette’s seductions bind cabals, but scaffold hangings and mob riots expose fragility. Philosophers’ tracts repel; executioners’ blades divide. In Bastille cells or revolutionary guillotines, Sade teaches: misaligned tales invite racks, transgressive ones sow Justine seeds—like Juliette’s empire inspiring Sadeans. Heroes reframe suffering as sovereignty; craft yours boldly: not whispered woes, but thunderous “Nature commands” rallying revelries.

You’ve descended Sade’s dungeons—now ascend with your story’s lash. Ditch dogma; claim desirous dominion. Inner audacity, private perversion, outer empire: that’s your Justine. Who’s ready to transgress anew? Share one “virtue” your narrative’s violating today!

With every story, it is vital clear that one understand the purpose behind what is being said. The critical first step to getting our stories right is ensuring that the story we are telling at the moment is aligned with our ultimate mission in life, a phrase I use largely interchangeably with ‘purpose’ – as in the purpose. Not just a purpose. Your hero’s journey Your ultimate mission is the thing that continually renews your spirit, the thing that continually renews your spirit, the thing that gets you to stop and smell the roses. It is the indomitable force that moves you to action when nothing else can, yet it can ground you with a single whisper in your quietest moment; it is at once the bedrock of your soul and (as the phrase goes) the wind beneath your wings. It spells out the most overarching goals you want and need to achieve in your time here, and the manner in which you feel you must do it (that is, you pursue these goals in accordance with your values and beliefs). 

Honoré de Balzac’s The Human Comedy is an extraordinary exploration of the stories we tell ourselves about ambition, power, social mobility, and human nature—internal narratives that define identity amid the rapidly changing society of 19th-century France. This sprawling cycle of novels reveals how individual fictions intertwine in a vast social tapestry, shaping destinies and reflecting the complexity of human desire.

At the center are characters constructing self-stories to navigate Parisian life, whether through relentless ambition, romantic idealism, or moral compromise. Balzac’s protagonist Eugène de Rastignac epitomizes the young aspirant’s narrative: “I will conquer Paris by wit and will; social ranks are but stories waiting to be rewritten.” His journey from provincial obscurity to political influence illustrates how personal storycraft enables social transformation, yet also tests integrity amid temptation.

Contrast this with the tragic Lucien de Rubempré, whose self-story is one of romantic delusion and desperate yearning for recognition. His illusions about art, love, and status collide with harsh realities, exposing the peril of narratives untethered from truth. Lucien’s downfall underscores storytelling’s dual nature—constructive or self-destructive depending on awareness.

Balzac presents society itself as a vast narrative machine where stories circulate in salons, courts, and streets, shaping reputation and opportunity. Characters manipulate and consume social narratives, reinforcing status quo or catalyzing change. Madame de Beauséant’s cynical reflections reveal how narrative control wields power over identity and destiny.

The extensive structure of The Human Comedy, with interconnected tales, mirrors life’s narrative complexity—individual stories intersecting, overlapping, sometimes clashing, underscoring that no story exists in isolation. Balzac’s realism offers detailed psychological portraits, revealing how characters’ internal monologues reflect broader social fictions.

Language balances precise social commentary with rich character introspection, enlivening the narrative texture. Paris itself becomes a character—a city of hope, despair, and relentless reinvention—its changing streets and salons literalizing narrative flux.

Secondary characters such as the calculating Vautrin and the idealistic Goriot personify divergent narrative archetypes: the manipulator scripting survival through deceit; the devoted father writing a story of sacrifice and love.

The Human Comedy resonates because it captures eternal human struggles: ambition against ethics, love versus social ambition, individual agency against systemic constraints. Its themes echo modern dilemmas of identity construction in a media-saturated, socially stratified world.

Balzac ultimately affirms storytelling as both a personal art and a social force, capable of elevating or ensnaring. Eugène’s closing reflections—”To succeed, one must be both author and actor in the vast human comedy”—remind us that we continually rewrite our role amid the grand play of life.

Through panoramic social scope, psychological depth, and ambitious narrative interweaving, The Human Comedy celebrates the power of internal narratives to shape life’s stage, urging conscious authorship over passive roles in the unfolding human drama.

Our ultimate mission must be clearly defined. If you find this difficult to do, ask yourself: “If I was standing at the rear of the chapel listening to people eulogize me at my own funeral, like Tom Sawyer and Huck Finn get to do, what would it gladden me to hear? What might someone say up there, or around my burial plot, that would make me think, ‘Hey, I guess I really did lead a worthwhile life?” By envisioning the end of your life, by coming to terms with the question ‘How do I want to be remembered? or ‘What is the legacy I most want to leave? you provide yourself with your single most important navigational coordinate: fundamental purpose, which henceforth will drive everything you do. By envisioning the end of your life, you are in simplest terms, pausing to define what could reasonably be called a purposeful life, as lived by you. 

After you finish this part of the journey, close your eyes. Visualize a tombstone: your. It’s got your name engraved in it, the year of your birth and (imagined) year of death. Can you see it? What does it say underneath? Is it simply the word ‘beloved’ and numerous familial relationships? Is that okay? Does it work for you? Does it say more? Does it say more? Does it need to? 

Now I know that tombstones almost never state the deceased’s ultimate purpose (Every now and then you’ll one that says something like ‘He lived to help others’ though it’s hard to know whether that was really their purpose or the purpose the survivors wanted etched for perpetuity. Stil, it doesn’t hurt to imagine your own tombstone, if for no reason other than to think about where you’re headed. 

It is the ultimate game; the ultimate endgame. You must answer this seemingly simple, maddeningly simple query in a way that fully satisfies you. If you don’t then you’ll find it pretty nearly impossible to make the necessary course corrections your life almost certainly requires. 

Ladies and gentlemen, welcome to this transformative session on The Power of Your Story. Step into the blood-soaked streets of Revolutionary Paris in 1792, where a foppish English baronet dons a scarlet bloom to rescue aristocrats from the guillotine—that’s Baroness Orczy’s The Scarlet Pimpernel (1905), and today we’ll evade how it reveals the stories you tell yourself about disguise’s daring, loyalty’s league, and heroism’s hidden flourish.

The Scarlet Pimpernel, Orczy’s swashbuckling tale of derring-do amid Terror’s Reign, launches with Sir Percy Blakeney, wealthy dandy hosting lavish London soirees, mocked as brainless fop. Ordinary world: aristocratic salons where French exiles whisper of guillotine horrors—Citoyenne Chauvelin hunts the Pimpernel, elusive savior smuggling nobles via “we seek him here, we seek him there.” Enter Lady Marguerite Blakeney, Percy’s clever wife (sister of slain aristocrat), torn by republican sympathies and spurned love. Allies form: Percy’s league—Craven, Tony, Elmsley—poets and sportsmen doubling as rescuers. Enemies prowl: Robespierre’s spy Chauvelin, French agents. Trials dazzle: Pimpernel’s verses taunt (“They seek him here, they seek him there”), midnight rescues from tumbrils, fisherman disguises. Betrayals sting—Marguerite unwittingly aids Chauvelin via family letter, Percy captured in French inn. Abyss grips: guillotine looms, league storms Boulogne. Elixir blooms: Pimpernel unmasks, Marguerite redeems, scarlet flower waves triumphant.

Ever narrate yourself as foppish facade hiding fierce resolve? Percy’s core script sparkles this: from “dandy distracts” chained by secrecy, to “league liberates,” his inherited chivalry fuels masked missions against Terror’s blade. Marguerite counters with redemptive wit—”loyalty mends betrayals”—sustaining amid regrets. Orczy’s romantic adventure bares the trap: inner tales of frivolity fool foes, heroic guile empowers but isolates. Audit yours: does it simper in “fop forgotten,” or flourish like Pimpernel’s “scarlet saves”? Rewrite from London levee to Boulogne breach, forging flair without folly.

In levee laughs or tumbril shadows, private monologues mine mettle. Percy recites doggerel alone, steeling league vows against capture’s risk; Marguerite whispers remorse to stars, rejecting spy’s snare for spymaster’s spouse. Orczy, Hungarian exile channeling émigré tales, warns: unexamined poses breed Chauvelin traps—agents’ spies poison trust, league’s oaths divide, Robespierre’s rage blinds. Like Power of Your Story evasions, probe petals: what levee jest or tumbril taunt do you rehearse solo? Flip to “disguise births daring”; your silent flourish crafts rescues—rally leagues, or languish isolated.

Outward narratives fuel or fracture rescues. Pimpernel’s poems disarm spies, Marguerite’s pleas bind husbands, but betrayal notes and guillotine deadlines expose fragility. Chauvelin’s edicts repel; Elmsley’s blades divide. In Paris prisons or Channel fishing boats, Orczy teaches: misaligned tales invite tumbrils, pimpernel ones sow scarlet seeds—like Blakeneys’ union inspiring adventurers. Heroes reframe foppery as flourish; craft yours boldly: not whispered weaknesses, but thunderous “we seek him here” rallying rescues.

You’ve evaded Scarlet Pimpernel’s snares—now flourish with your story’s bloom. Ditch dandyism; claim daring disguise. Inner guile, private poetry, outer panache: that’s your league. Who’s ready to rescue anew? Share one “fop” your narrative’s flourishing today!

Your Ultimate Mission, Out Loud 

When I work to get clients to define and refine their Ultimate MIssion, their Quest I almost always have to get tough with them. I put them through a vigorous interrogation to make sure that when they’ve reached their ‘answer’ they haven’t done so by fooling or mischaracterizing themselves. Amazingly, almost no one gets his or her ultimate mission on the first attempt. Often, an individual will come up with a purpose that sounds deep and good – My ultimate mission is to give my family the financial security I never had, by becoming a managing director of my firm – but which, upon scrutiny, is flimsy or undercooked, not yet at the most fundamental level of purpose – e.g. My quest is to be an extraordinary storyteller, leader in field and a role model for generations to come. 

The story of How Green Was My Valley carries a profound lesson about the power of your story—the story you tell yourself about yourself, first to yourself, and then to the world. When I first read Richard Llewellyn’s classic as a boy, it struck a deep chord, long before I fully knew why. I understood that identity is born not just of facts or circumstances but of the stories woven through memory, relationship, and meaning. This valley, the lives lived inside it—the love, the grief, the change—all became a masterclass in how narrative shapes reality.

At the heart of the novel is a young boy named Huw Morgan, growing up in a coal-mining village nestled among the rolling green hills of Wales. From the earliest pages, Huw’s voice pulses with the pride and deep belonging that come from telling yourself, “I come from this valley. These hills and this family are part of me.” This isn’t simple nostalgia; it’s the foundation of identity—a narrative fortress built from the sights, sounds, and rhythms of daily life. The green valley becomes not just a place but a story that sustains.

Huw’s father, Gwilym Morgan, is a pillar in this narrative. Through his stern morality and strength, he tells himself the story of honorable labor and family devotion, even as the darkening reality of the mines threatens their lives. For Gwilym, and for Huw watching closely, work is more than toil: it is dignity, purpose, and legacy. When strikes divide the village and danger darkens their doorsteps, Gwilym doesn’t waver. His story—a steady beacon—whispers, “We endure. We stand for what is right.” And Huw begins to carry this story forward, seeing in his father not just a man but a legend of steadfastness.

The family becomes a crucible where stories intertwine. Huw’s brothers spread themselves across paths shaped by their own narratives—whether Ivor seeking fame far from home, Ianto fleeing hardship abroad, or Davy caught in the sacrifice of the union fight. While they drift, Huw stays, telling himself again and again, “This valley is who I am. My roots run deep here.” His mother, Bronwen, weaves her own stories of strength and sustenance, transforming grief from the loss of Ivor into a narrative of resilience, saying softly, “Our suffering becomes our strength.” Family stories, like river tributaries, join into the river of identity carrying each member forward.

How Green Was My Valley is alive with community stories, too—tales told and retold over chapel fires and mining meals. The local preacher, Mr. Gruffydd, battles his own narrative crisis, struggling to reconcile faith with the harshness that surrounds him. His sermons evolve from condemning wrath to comforting compassion, reminding us that stories are never fixed but change with understanding and experience. Huw absorbs these shifts, learning that even sacred narratives are written and re-written, that belief itself is a story we choose to carry.

The valley landscape itself is a character in this story. Richard Llewellyn paints the green hills, the blooming heather, the roaming sheep with such vividness that the place becomes memory personified. This natural world holds the narratives of generations—its beauty is the physical manifestation of the stories cherished by its people. But as mines grow and black dust settles, this green narrative confronts the dark forces of change. “Am I still the boy of these hills,” Huw wonders, “or a cast-shadow silhouette of coal?” The valley asks for a new story, one combining past and present.

One of the most powerful moments is Huw’s moment in the boxing ring—an image of bodily courage echoing narrative courage. The physical fight is more than sport; it is the body giving life to the story of endurance, of standing tall when crushed by circumstance. That fight teaches a universal truth: the story your body enacts—the repeated narrative of rising after each fall—is as potent as the story your mind tells.

The Decameron taught me that stories can sustain all kinds of transformations, and in How Green Was My Valley, Llewellyn shows how stories sustain even when everything else shifts. As neighbors emigrate to distant lands, Huw’s choice to stay anchors a powerful narrative of rootedness—“My story cannot be bought with gold; it lives in these hills and hearts.” The march of the modern world tries to rewrite their stories, but personal narrative pushes back.

The enchanting rhythm of Llewellyn’s prose mirrors the cycles of memory itself—family dinners flickering with joy and pain, chapel bells tolling the passage of time, the valley’s green as the pulse that carries the community’s heartbeat. My own mind drifts back to my childhood town, to my own valleys—kitchens filled with smells, the quiet strength of family stories, the daily toil woven with love. That connection was not a happenstance; it was narrative resonance.

The way community binds through shared stories is another profound lesson. Even the small scandals, like the preacher’s kiss on Huw’s sister Angharad, ripple through the social story, shaping relationships and moral lessons. Each individual narrative shapes the collective one, revealing that no story lives alone.

Romance and love stories in the book reveal layers of narrative maturity—childhood friendship becoming adult partnership, waiting with patience rather than clinging to possessiveness. Huw’s love for Bronwen exemplifies how relationships are narratives in motion. They teach me that stories are not fixed but alive, evolving with time and truth.

When disaster strikes—the mine collapses, lives lost and changed forever—Huw’s survival is a metaphor for narrative resilience. Though covered in coal dust, his story is green still inside. That crisis moment whispers a lesson for every life: realities may blacken your body, but your self-narrative can remain untarnished if you author it with courage.

The future and changes to the valley challenge inherited stories. Huw’s steadfastness amid mass emigration becomes a choice about what story to hold onto, mirroring the global tensions between migration and rootedness. His legacy speaks to all who face uprooting: your narrative soil determines whether you thrive or merely survive.

The chapel scenes in the novel perfectly symbolize the power of shared stories—hymns and prayers become collective affirmations that nourish soul and community alike. The chapel’s presence throughout the narrative is a reminder that our stories live not just inside us but in the sacred spaces we create together.

Reflecting on this book as the foundation of my own journey, I recognize how deeply it moved me. My father, a factory worker, embodied the proud resilience of working-class stories. My mother’s kitchen stories became my own legends. Like Huw in the ring, I learned early that embodying my story with strength changes the world around me.

In my coaching today, I return to these themes: the power of the story you carry, how you shape it daily, and the legacy you author beyond your own life. Every one of us faces valleys—moments of darkness and dust—but, like Huw Morgan, the green inside our soul comes from the stories we dare to believe and tell.

The question I always ask clients is: What color is your valley? Is it shadowed by coal dust or glowing with the green of memory and hope? Because the power of your story—your internal narrative told first to yourself and then to others—ultimately transforms not just your life but the lives around you.

This is the timeless gift of How Green Was My Valley: it shows that no matter how hard the world tries to rewrite your story, you hold the pen. Your valley, your life, can always be as green as the stories you choose to tell.

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This story honors how How Green Was My Valley shaped my understanding of narrative’s transformative power—showing that identity and resilience arise from how we tell our story to ourselves and the world.

Given its influence over you – its often invisible influence – your ultimate mission merits being written down as early in life as possible, and modified and deepened with every passing year until death. 

Yet most people never write down their purpose. Or say it out loud. Or even think about what it might be in its purest form. Often the first time an individual’s purpose is articulated is at his or her funeral, and then only if he or she is lucky enough to have a eulogizer who saw his or her purpose for what it was. During my three day workshops I encourage – okay, require is more like it – clients to write their ULTIMATE QUEST, just as they must write their Old Story and New Story, just as they will write their Training MIssions and Rituals (more on those later). Committing your Ultimate Quest to writing, year after year, keeps the most navigational tool we human beings possess always within our reach. 

Because your Ultimate Quest is concerned with the biggest ticket stuff, not small-scale goals, the language employed when writing it is often grand, perhaps even grandiose.  While we of course encourage participants to come up with their own words to express themselves, the word ‘extraordinary’ recurs by far the most often.  

• “Learning to make films is very easy. Learning what to make films about is very hard.” – George Lucas​
• “I believe it is the pre-production planning that is the most important aspect of filmmaking.” – Roger Corman​
• “Anybody can direct a picture once they know the fundamentals. Directing is not a mystery, it’s not an art.” – John Ford​
• “Time is gold in filmmaking. The ability to not walk away from a scene before its perfected.” – Stanley Kubrick​
• “The essence of cinema is editing.” – Francis Ford Coppola​
• “You’ve got to put everything into the one movie and just try and make a great movie because you may not get this chance again.” – Christopher Nolan​
• “If it can be written or thought, it can be filmed.” – Stanley Kubrick​
• “Pick up a camera. Shoot something. No matter how small, no matter how cheesy… Now you’re a director.” – James Cameron​
• “A director must be a policeman, a midwife, a psychoanalyst, a sycophant and a bastard.” – Billy Wilder​
• “The good ideas will survive.” – Quentin Tarantino​
• “You have to find something that you love enough to be able to take risks.” – George Lucas​
• “When given an opportunity, deliver excellence and never quit.” – Robert Rodriguez​
• “If you just love movies enough, you can make a good one.” – Quentin Tarantino​
• “I would travel down to hell and wrestle a film away from the devil if it was necessary.” – Werner Herzog​
• “People will say, ‘There are a million ways to shoot a scene’, but I don’t think so. I think there’re two, maybe. And the other one is wrong.” – David Fincher​
• “The moment you start a film you take a deep breath and leap off into a big black hole of uncertainty and doubt.” – Alan Parker​
• “On every film you make you set out in search of ‘Rosebud’. It can be very elusive.” – Alan Parker​
• “Making movies, momentum is everything.” – Alan Parker​
• “For me, a film is not written by the screenplay or the dialogue, it’s written by the way of the filming.” – Agnes Varda​
• “I give it everything I have. I think everyone should.” – Francis Ford Coppola

What is your Ultimate Quest?  Before you write it down – using whatever words that speak to you and move you; you’re writing this, after all, for yourself, no one else – ask yourself these questions:

• How do you want to be remembered?
• What is the legacy you most want to leave for others
• How would you most like to hear people eulogize you at your funeral?
• What is worth dying for?
• What makes your life really worth living?
• In what areas of your life must you truly be extraordinary to fulfill your destiny?

My Ultimate Quest is ___________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________

As clients try to get at their Ultimate Quest, one of my responsibilities is to do all I can to ensure that he or she doesn’t (continue to) spend the rest of his or her life chasing a fraudulent purpose.

The novel War and Peace by Leo Tolstoy is a vast epic set during the Napoleonic Wars in early 19th century Russia. The story weaves together the lives of aristocratic families, chiefly the Rostovs, Bolkonskys, and Bezukhovs, amidst the chaos of war and the rhythms of everyday life. Central characters include Pierre Bezukhov, the awkward but sincere heir struggling to find meaning; Prince Andrei Bolkonsky, a proud soldier wrestling with ambition and loss; and Natasha Rostov, a passionate young woman learning love and heartbreak.

The novel explores not only historical events and battles but also profound philosophical questions about fate, free will, and the nature of history itself. Tolstoy delves deeply into the inner lives of his characters, revealing how personal growth and human connection persist in the shadow of war’s vast forces. From grand ballrooms to muddy battlefields, the narrative examines how individuals navigate destiny, purpose, and the search for truth in an unpredictable world.

Pierre’s arc reveals a restless soul seeking spirituality and purpose beyond privilege. His encounters with Freemasonry, imprisonment, and ultimate redemption exemplify the inner transformation Tolstoy champions—finding meaning through moral awakening and compassion. Prince Andrei’s journey charts pride humbled by suffering and the rediscovery of love’s redemptive power. Natasha’s vibrant spirit represents hope and renewal, even amid pain and disillusionment.

Amid sweeping historical detail, War and Peace becomes a meditation on time and history. Tolstoy critiques the idea of great men shaping history, instead portraying history as a tide of countless individual wills and actions. He asserts that true purpose lies not in power or fame but in the everyday acts of kindness, courage, and love that weave the fabric of life.

War and Peace teaches that purpose is less a destination than a lifelong journey of becoming. Pierre, Andrei, and Natasha are mirrors of ourselves—each seeking meaning beyond the surface, wrestling with despair, hope, pride, and humility. Their stories intertwine history with inner transformation, reminding us that purpose blossoms when we embrace the mystery of life rather than command it.

Purpose here asks us to lean into struggle—be it battle or heartbreak—with honesty and courage. Pierre’s spiritual awakening, borne from crisis and compassion, shows that true freedom arises when ego falls away. Andrei’s painful growth reveals how vulnerability expands the heart. Natasha’s joy and resilience remind us that renewal always follows loss.

Tolstoy portrays purpose as deeply relational and profoundly practical. It is found in our connections, our commitments, and in the gentle insistence to choose love over indifference every day. The novel invites us to see that history is shaped by ordinary acts of will—small choices that ripple outward.

In the vast tapestry of war and peace, Tolstoy finds grace in human imperfection—the willingness to strive, forgive, and grow despite confusion and chaos. Purpose is, above all, a call to awaken to life as it is, to embrace its beauty and suffering fully, and to walk steadily toward a deeper truth.

Outing False Purpose 

You can’t have a great story unless you get your purpose right. Here are examples of outing a false story. 

There are books that do not merely tell a story; they unmask the stories we have been telling ourselves. Henry James’s The Portrait of a Lady belongs to that rare order of novels that act less like a mirror than a slow, revealing light. It is a masterpiece of seeing—not merely what appears, but what pretends to be purpose. Beneath its polished civility, James wrote an X-ray of ambition, desire, and self-deception. It is a novel about the subtle art of lying to oneself beautifully—until one cannot lie any longer.

In the heart of the story stands Isabel Archer, a young American possessed of curiosity and independence. When we first meet her, she is transported from the New World to the old estates of England, an environment of calm manners and layered conventions. Everything in her radiates possibility. She is intelligent, spirited, and certain that life holds a special design for her. The world seems to whisper: she will be extraordinary.

But the problem with destiny, as Henry James understood, is that it can sound remarkably like vanity in disguise. Isabel’s hunger to live “freely” and “largely” conceals a subtler motive — to appear meaningful, to sculpt a self admired by others. From the beginning, she is haunted not by ignorance but by imagination. Her imagination is both her crown and her snare, giving beauty to her vision yet blinding her to what lies beyond it. The novel is, at its center, the story of a woman discovering that what she has been calling freedom was simply another kind of captivity: the captivity of false purpose.

James introduces Isabel not as a passive heroine but as a moral experiment in progress. She rejects suitors not out of coldness but out of fidelity to her ideal. Lord Warburton, kind and noble, offers her the safety of respect. Caspar Goodwood, passionate and American, offers her the security of devotion. She refuses both, because their visions of her seem smaller than the one she has built for herself. She wants to live by thought, not convention—to test life rather than be comforted by it.

There is something magnificent in this refusal, yet something perilous too. For in saying no to the obvious compromises of others, Isabel opens herself to the seductive compromises of self-delusion. She mistakes rebellion for authenticity. She imagines that she will find truth simply by negating what others expect of her. It is the first mask of false purpose—the belief that sincerity can be achieved by opposition rather than awareness.

Fate, in James’s world, is made not of storms and crimes but of character. When Isabel inherits a large fortune from her dying uncle, her possibilities multiply, and so do the hazards of illusion. Money liberates her from necessity, but it also enlarges her stage. She can now perform the drama of independence more perfectly than before. In Florence she meets Gilbert Osmond, a figure out of some Renaissance portrait—polished, intellectual, self-contained, a man who speaks of art, taste, and refinement as if he had patented beauty. To Isabel, he seems the embodiment of thought made flesh: a man of quality rather than appetite.

In truth, Osmond is an actor in his own gallery, curating life as though it were a collection to impress invisible judges. His refinement masks a moral emptiness so complete that he requires admiration to exist. He is Henry James’s most poisonous creation: a man for whom everything valuable must become an ornament. Isabel falls in love not with Osmond himself but with what she imagines he represents — a destiny worthy of her intelligence. She weds the portrait, not the man.

Thus begins her education in illusion. The villa in Rome where the newlyweds settle soon reveals itself as a museum of poisoned grace. Osmond’s culture is sterile, his passion tyrannical. He molds her like a figure to be framed, not a soul to be known. What Isabel once called “freedom of mind” now turns into the claustrophobia of decorum. And so James reveals the cruel cycle of false purpose: to live for beauty without love is to suffocate in elegance.

From afar, friends watch her shine fade. Ralph Touchett—her cousin, gentle, ironic, dying—sees through the artifice. He had once loved her precisely because she was unpracticed in the deceptions of society. Now he sees her spirit dim beneath the exquisite surface of Osmond’s world. Madame Merle, the woman who presented Osmond as an ideal match, is unmasked as his accomplice—and worse, the secret mother of his daughter. The realization breaks Isabel’s dream open. Every element of her life reveals itself as an arrangement of appearances. The fortune that was meant to free her has purchased her imprisonment. The refinement she sought has become a weapon wielded against her.

Outing false purpose always begins with pain. Isabel’s awakening is neither loud nor dramatic—it is inward and irreversible. Standing at the threshold of her shattered ideals, she sees with unbearable clarity the deception she has lived. Yet, James never mocks her. He reserves his compassion for those who wake up within the ruins of their own ideals. Isabel’s tragedy is moral, not social. She does not lose her fortune or status; she loses the illusion of self that sustained her.

When her cousin Ralph lies dying in England, Isabel defies her husband to visit him. In his silent gratitude, she finds again the lightness of her earlier self, stripped of vanity, emptied of ambition. Ralph’s death serves as the quiet catalyst of her freedom. For the first time, Isabel recognizes that meaning cannot be manufactured through rebellion, wealth, or refinement—it must emerge from the authenticity of choice.

The novel’s ending remains deliberately open. After returning to Rome—to Osmond, to the suffocating villa, to all she has come to see as false—she crosses a line unseen by others. Some readers call it a return to captivity; others, the assertion of conscience. To Henry James, it is the moment of self-possession. Having outed her false purpose, Isabel re-enters her old life with new vision. She can no longer be deceived by its artifice. She goes back not in blindness but in awareness. That is her freedom.

In this refusal to offer rescue or redemption, James affirms the quiet bravery of awakening without escape. He teaches that truth does not always liberate us from our circumstances but from the illusions we carried into them. Isabel’s journey is not from innocence to experience, but from performance to presence.

Outing false purpose is never a single act; it is a slow exile from one’s admired self. It requires abandoning not only the lies others tell about us but the grander fictions we compose for ourselves—the noble sufferer, the independent spirit, the exceptional mind. James’s genius was to expose how these poses, however beautifully made, often imprison us more tightly than society ever could.

In The Portrait of a Lady, the truest rebellion is inward. When the masks fall, what remains is not triumph, but clarity. The grandeur of Isabel Archer’s story lies not in her defiance, but in her seeing. To see the false purpose for what it is—to trace how it was made, why it was loved, and why it no longer holds—this is the heroic act James celebrates.

And so the novel closes not with resolution, but with vision: a woman walking knowingly into her imperfect life, the surface unchanged, the interior made new. She has stepped, at last, beyond performance—into the quiet, unguarded territory of truth.

For entrepreneurs, their Ultimate Quest may be to own their own business, to become partner, to become financially independent, to retire early. When I press them to scrutinize whether these aspirations can really serve to define ultimate success in their lives, they quickly retreat from their initial answers, but often they must come to that painful conclusion very much alone. At the closing session of one workshop a successful entrepreneur told that the previous night he was able to articulate what his Ultimate Quest had always been. “To devote all my energy and creativity to my business, and do it while still reasonably young, and worry about my kids unless there’s a real crisis” he said. Then he said, as an aside ‘I knew that my wife, who’s tremendous would take care of them, and that I would get back to all of them when I was financially secure.” He paused, ‘I am fifty-two and it is never going to end. I missed the opportunity to know my kids”.  Whenever someone makes such an admission, of course it is deeply uncomfortable – but not so much because of what the confessor just said but because so many others, often hard driving entrepreneurs, are coming to grips with the fact that they have been following similarly faulty purposes. They must acknowledge that they no longer know what they need; that the bigger home they just bought, mostly means a continuing escalation to their life; that they, too, will just continue to work harder and longer, no matter what they tell themselves. And that’s the reason they’re alive? Men, in particular, think that they can’t be good parents unless they are great financial providers; then one day they wake up to the reality that the day – to – day needs of their children count for something, too. And they’re fify-two. Or sixty-three. 

No novel exposes the cruelty of illusion more relentlessly than Tess of the d’Urbervilles. Thomas Hardy subtitled it A Pure Woman, a defiant challenge to the moral pretenses of Victorian England. Beneath its Wessex landscapes—of misty valleys, ancient barrows, and relentless rains—lies a story not of sin but of revelation: the unmasking of false purposes that society, family, and self impose upon the innocent. Hardy wrote as prophet and judge, stripping away the veils of respectability to reveal how every noble ideal can become a weapon of destruction.

The narrative opens in rural innocence. Tess Durbeyfield, daughter of a poor, feckless family, learns of a distant noble ancestry—the d’Urbervilles. Her parents, dazzled by faded glory, send her to reclaim kinship with the wealthy Alec d’Urberville. This is the first false purpose: heritage as salvation. The name promises elevation, but Hardy shows it as delusion. Ancestry, like all borrowed meaning, offers no protection—only vulnerability. Tess, pure-hearted and trusting, embarks on her quest believing nobility might redeem poverty. In truth, she carries only her own unguarded soul.

Alec d’Urberville awaits not as kinsman but predator. His “family” estate is a modern sham, funded by trade rather than blood. He seduces Tess under the pretense of affection, but his purpose is possession disguised as romance. Hardy frames the violation not as melodrama but inevitability—the clash of rural virtue against urban appetite. Tess returns home shattered, her innocence stolen, yet she bears no guilt. Society’s false purpose here is purity as performance: a woman’s worth measured by her untouched body, not her spirit. Tess internalizes this lie, fleeing to solitude, believing herself tainted beyond repair.

Pregnancy and the child’s death deepen her isolation. Yet Hardy refuses sentimentality. Tess seeks honest labor as a dairymaid, where nature offers temporary solace. In the lush Talbothays valley, she meets Angel Clare, the idealistic clergyman’s son rejecting doctrine for personal truth. Angel embodies another false purpose: love as intellectual ideal. He worships Tess as symbol of pastoral purity, blind to her history. Their courtship unfolds in pastoral idyll—milking cows, moonlit dances—but illusion governs it. Angel seeks not Tess the woman, but Tess the archetype. When she confesses her past on their wedding night, his idealism shatters. He cannot reconcile the real Tess with his fantasy.

Angel abandons her, fleeing to Brazil, leaving Tess to moral wilderness. Hardy’s genius emerges in this fracture. Angel’s “advanced” views—tolerance preached, not practiced—reveal hypocrisy’s sharpest form: enlightenment as selective mercy. Tess, meanwhile, wanders through phases of false purpose. At Flintcomb-Ash, the desolate farm where she threshes wheat under machine whips, labor becomes dehumanizing ritual. Society demands penance without forgiveness; poverty enforces survival without dignity. Alec reappears, now converted preacher, his piety a transparent mask for renewed lust. He offers security in exchange for submission—the oldest false purpose: redemption through surrender.

Tess rejects him repeatedly, clinging to loyalty for the absent Angel. Her endurance is heroic, yet tragic: fidelity to a love built on illusion. Hardy paints Wessex as indifferent witness—stone circles, brooding skies, pagan echoes mocking Christian morality. Nature knows no false purposes; humanity invents them all. Tess’s mother urges pragmatism: marry Alec for stability. Her father’s pride clings to phantom nobility. Even Angel’s family preaches forgiveness they withhold. Every voice peddles a counterfeit meaning.

The climax arrives in desperate clarity. Reunited with Angel, weakened by starvation and despair, Tess submits to Alec once more for her family’s sake. When Angel recommits, too late, Alec’s murder follows—not vengeful passion, but exhausted release. Tess and Angel flee to the ancient stones of Stonehenge, where she rests as pagan queen before capture. Hardy’s symbolism is unsparing: Christianity’s false purpose—judgment over compassion—claims her at dawn. Execution follows swiftly, her brief idyll with Angel a fragile truth amid lies.

Through “Outing False Purpose,” Tess becomes ethical autopsy. Society’s morality is respectability masquerading as virtue; men’s love is possession veiled as idealism; women’s duty is sacrifice without agency. Tess exposes them all. Her “purity” endures not despite violation, but because it defies measurement by others’ standards. Hardy indicts the world that demands performance—chastity, repentance, nobility—while crushing the spirit beneath it.

Angel’s redemption comes too late, his growth born of Tess’s suffering. Returning changed, he marries her sister Liza-Lu, projecting onto her the purity he denied Tess. The gesture is tender yet hollow, false purpose recycled. Hardy ends not in hope but quiet defiance: “Justice was done,” the narrator intones, sarcasm dripping from the words. Society triumphs, but truth lingers in Tess’s unbowed memory.

Hardy’s Wessex is no idyll but moral laboratory. Every character serves revelation: Alec’s cynicism unmasks predatory faith; Angel’s hypocrisy exposes intellectual vanity; the Durbeyfields’ delusions reveal class fantasy’s futility. Tess alone lives without pretense—her actions instinctive, her suffering authentic. Outing false purpose costs her life, yet immortalizes her. Hardy forces confrontation: whose purposes truly serve life, and whose merely preserve power?

The novel’s power lies in restraint. No sermons interrupt the narrative; landscapes speak judgment. Rain drowns illusions; sun pierces deception. Pagan roots mock Christian facades. In this fatalism, Hardy affirms freedom: to see through lies, even if society punishes vision.

Tess of the d’Urbervilles endures as tragedy without catharsis. Readers close it not uplifted, but awakened. False purposes—ancestry, purity, love, redemption—crumble under scrutiny. Tess’s story warns that borrowed meanings destroy; only unadorned humanity endures. Hardy, the architect-turned-novelist, built no escape. His pure woman dies, but her truth accuses eternally.

Society evolves, yet repeats the cycle: new ideals, same hypocrisies. Tess remains mirror for every age mistaking performance for purpose. Outing false purpose demands Tess’s courage—living transparently amid condemnation. In her final sleep at Stonehenge, amid timeless stones, she claims the authenticity denied in life. The world moves on, veils intact; her revelation echoes undimmed.

Hardy closes with unflinching gaze: truth costs everything, yet costs nothing to behold. Tess teaches that purity is not virginity, but vision unclouded by others’ scripts. In Wessex’s shadow, false purposes lie exposed—shattered relics of human pretense.

Purpose is Never Forgettable

As its very name suggests, a movie’s primary intention is to move the audience emotionally. Story is the vehicle through which the movement occurs. Story is what stirs us, terrifies us, breaks our heart. A boring story fails because it doesn’t move us, doesn’t tap our capacity for empathy. Think of the very best stories you’ve ever seen or read or heard, and you remember the depth of your feeling for one or more of the characters.

No novel dissects the human comedy of illusion with such patient precision as George Eliot’s Middlemarch. Subtitled “A Study of Provincial Life,” it is less chronicle of a town than anatomy of the soul’s quiet deceptions. In its web of marriages, ambitions, and reforms, Eliot unmasks false purpose at every scale: the grand dreams that propel us forward, only to reveal themselves as mirrors of vanity. Middlemarch becomes moral laboratory, where characters pursue vocations, loves, and ideals, each unmasked by time’s unsparing light.

The narrative orbits dual quests. Dorothea Brooke, ardent idealist, seeks purpose through union with the elderly scholar Casaubon, believing his “Key to All Mythologies” elevates her to intellectual sainthood. Tertius Lydgate, ambitious doctor, arrives to revolutionize medicine, seduced by the myth of progress through science. Both embody false purpose’s allure: the conviction that grand projects redeem ordinary existence. Eliot, with omniscient compassion, traces their unraveling—not through catastrophe, but incremental disillusion.

Dorothea’s marriage begins in fervor. She imagines Casaubon’s dry scholarship as divine labor, herself as Beatrice to his Dante. Honeymoons in Rome shatter the vision: his work reveals itself as pedantic futility, a labyrinth of footnotes chasing shadows. Casaubon’s jealousy—fearing her liveliness eclipses him—forces her silence. False purpose here is altruism as self-erasure: Dorothea mistakes subservience for nobility, projecting purpose onto a man too insecure to possess it. Casaubon’s codicil, posthumously trapping her inheritance unless she obeys his ghost, exposes his final deceit: legacy as control.

Lydgate’s arc parallels in miniature. Charismatic reformer, he weds Rosamond Vincy, envisioning domestic harmony fueling his hospital reforms. Rosamond embodies social false purpose: beauty as currency, refinement as destiny. Her dreams—silk gowns, continental tours—consume his funds. Lydgate’s idealism crumbles under debt, compromise, political intrigue. He signs the corrupt paving contract, trading principle for survival. Eliot indicts ambition’s lie: progress demands not genius alone, but navigation of human pettiness. Lydgate ends diminished, practicing among the comfortable, his fire banked to embers.

Eliot weaves subplot mirrors. Fred Vincy, indolent heir, mistakes inheritance for entitlement until love for Mary Garth demands self-reform. Bulstrode, pious banker, cloaks financial predation in evangelical zeal—false purpose as sanctimony. Even Will Ladislaw, Dorothea’s vibrant cousin, flirts with artistic pose before grounding in honest work. Middlemarch’s chorus—gossiping matrons, scheming politicians—reveals collective delusion: community as mutual flattery, progress as slogan.

Outing false purpose unfolds gradually, Eliot’s realism eschewing melodrama. Dorothea’s widowhood brings freedom shadowed by scandal. Her rapport with Will—intellectual equals, unpretentious—tempts scandal. Society’s verdict: fallen woman. Yet in quiet cottages, aiding fever victims, Dorothea discovers purpose unadorned: empathy without fanfare. “The growing good of the world is partly dependent on unhistoric acts,” Eliot affirms. True vocation hides in obscurity, not headlines.

Lydgate’s fall stings sharper. Rosamond’s pregnancy binds him; Farebrother’s generosity saves him. He dies young, embittered, his wife untouched by remorse. False purpose’s cost: not ruin, but erosion of self. Dorothea renounces fortune for love, thriving in humble influence. Ladislaw’s parliamentary stirrings hint at redirection, but Eliot tempers optimism—reform endures through persistence, not revolution.

Middlemarch’s genius lies in interconnection. No character exists isolated; illusions collide. Casaubon’s death liberates Dorothea yet ensnares Lydgate via Raffles’ blackmail. Bulstrode’s exposure ripples outward. Eliot’s web mirrors life: false purposes entangle, outing one unmasks others. Provincial narrowness amplifies delusion—town as microcosm, where “incalculably diffusive” acts matter most.

Through “Outing False Purpose,” Middlemarch redefines heroism. Dorothea’s ardor matures into wisdom; Lydgate’s brilliance yields endurance. False purposes—scholarship, science, beauty, piety—crumble under scrutiny. Eliot indicts Romantic individualism: genius alone falters without community’s grit. Purpose emerges not in transcendence, but immanence—the daily choice of integrity amid compromise.

Eliot’s prose, luminous yet probing, mimics revelation’s pace. Omniscient asides—“If we had a keen vision and feeling of all ordinary human life, it would be like hearing the grass grow”—expose vanity’s smallness. Landscapes—dusty roads, fevered lanes—ground abstraction. Nature witnesses without judgment, underscoring human folly.

The novel endures as Eliot’s manifesto. Victorian optimism—progress, reform—meets realism’s scalpel. Modern parallels abound: startup illusions, social media sainthood, careerist altruism. Middlemarch warns that borrowed ideals destroy; authenticity demands solitude before action.

Redemption whispers in survival. Dorothea mothers children, influences quietly; Lydgate’s memory inspires successors. Fred redeems indolence through labor. False purpose outed leaves scars, but scars toughen. Eliot closes not triumphantly, but tenderly: “The surprises of chance” yield “the growing good.”

Middlemarch storms complacency, demanding self-examination. False purposes—vocation as glory, love as elevation—lie exposed like Casaubon’s manuscripts. What remains: Eliot’s humanism. Live earnestly, she urges, eyes open to limitation. Outing illusion frees, forging purpose from fragments.

In provincial dust, truth resides—not in epic quests, but faithful steps. Middlemarch illuminates: the world improves through “unhistoric” souls, illusions shed. False purposes fade; quiet resolve endures.

Eliot leaves readers transformed—mirrors held to ambition’s face, hearts schooled in compassion. Purpose is not conquest, but the courage to begin again, humbly, amid life’s web.

That’s what happens when we craft your new stories. These stories, finally, move their authors – and others, too – the way great movies do. We feel the potential for heroism in what the author/main character aspires to. If you’re seriously going to write a story powerful enough to get you to do great things, then you’ve got to create a quest and a story so compelling that you are moved to make those corrections in your life, and make them for good. Remember that tremendous feeling you got, when younger, after seeing a movie that spoke to you so profoundly you were all hyped to make major changes to your life – travel the globe, join the air force, tell someone you were in love with him or her? That’s the kind of action your own story must move you to take. 

The only way a story can achieve that level of transformative power is when it supports an unassailable purpose.

This purpose above is large enough, sustaining enough, that they can get up every morning, knowing that it may be their last, knowing they may meet a violent death, knowing that they may be crippled for life. The knowledge that they do it for their loved ones moves them to assume this extraordinary risk and responsibility. 

If I asked you what your purpose was, how would you know you had got it right? First and last, does it move you? Really, really move you? Some purposes are so obviously faulty that the individual can smoke it out by himself or herself. But other purposes sound very, very good, so neat, so on message – and yet they’re not quite THE quest. That is why finding one’s true purpose  is an exercise that requires real commitment and the courage to be honest with oneself. 

An ultimate quest is never small. It is never minor. It can’t be, by definition. It is grand, heroic, epic. You never put your life on the line for something not fully aligned with your Ultimate Quest.

Thomas Hardy’s final novel, Jude the Obscure, stands as a thunderclap against Victorian complacency. Published in 1895 amid public outrage that silenced Hardy’s fiction forever, it dissects the soul’s collision with institution—marriage, education, religion, society—all revealed as engines of false purpose. Jude Fawley, the stonemason-scholar, and Sue Bridehead, his free-spirited cousin, chase authentic lives only to discover that every noble ideal exacts a mortal toll. Hardy’s Wessex becomes coliseum for human aspiration, where dreams bleed into tragedy under the indifferent gaze of spires and stars.

Jude begins in rural Marygreen, a boy enthralled by distant Christminster—the Oxford of his imagination, towers gleaming like beacons of truth. Self-taught through borrowed books, he yearns for learning not as ornament but salvation. Yet false purpose lurks in this hunger: education as escape from class, intellect as redemption from labor. Apprenticed to masonry, Jude restores ancient stones by day, studies Greek by night. Christminster symbolizes borrowed meaning—the conviction that degrees confer destiny, ignoring the flesh that builds cathedrals.

Enter Arabella Donn, sensual barmaid whose earthy appetites trap him in hasty marriage. Her false purpose is domesticity as conquest: marriage securing status, passion mimicking love. Jude, naive idealist, mistakes lust for union. The union sours swiftly—Arabella abandons him for Australia, leaving Jude to dissolve the bond in shame. Hardy unmasks matrimony’s lie: sacrament as cage, indissoluble vows punishing error rather than fostering growth. Jude flees to Christminster, stones his companions, towers his tormentors.

There he meets Sue Bridehead—ethereal, intellectual, pagan in sensibility. She sells theological curiosities, mocking faith she intellectually craves. Their kinship ignites: souls recognizing untrammeled spirits. Sue embodies false purpose’s subtlest form—freedom as theory, uncommitted to flesh. She marries Phillotson, her schoolmaster, not from passion but experiment: testing convention’s chains while preserving autonomy. Jude, meanwhile, courts rejection at university—no place for working-class intellect. Christminster exposes academia’s hypocrisy: knowledge hoarded by privilege, aspiration crushed by gatekeeping.

The lovers unite in defiance, cohabiting without vows. Sue births children; Jude labors as stonecutter. False purpose proliferates: their “new” morality—love beyond law—proves fragile under poverty’s lash. Society condemns as fornication; self-doubt festers. Sue’s remorse peaks in fanaticism: to atone, she returns to Phillotson, dragging Jude into torment. Hardy indicts progressive illusion: rebellion without roots invites backlash. Sue’s paganism yields to guilt; Jude’s scholarship to despair.

Tragedy erupts in Little Father Time—the eldest child, symbol of inherited despair. In chilling rationality, he murders the younger two and himself, sparing parents from “more mouths.” The note—“Done because we are too many”—crystallizes false purpose’s apocalypse: ideals of freedom breeding hopelessness, progress ignoring human cost. Public horror brands Jude and Sue as moral poison. Sue blames their “sin”; Jude sees systemic cruelty. Marriage’s false sanctity, education’s false meritocracy, religion’s false mercy—all converge to crush.

Hardy structures revelation through phases—Marygreen innocence, Christminster aspiration, Aldbrickham cohabitation, Shaston remorse, Kennetbridge collapse. Each locale unmasks delusion: rural simplicity veils ignorance; urban towers promise, withhold; suburbs enforce conformity. Jude’s inscriptions on stones—classical fragments amid gothic arches—mirror his fate: beauty laboring in obscurity.

Outing false purpose demands total exposure. Sue, flogging herself in penance, rejoins Phillotson; Jude weds Arabella’s return. Their final meeting amid Christminster celebrations—graduates in finery—stings with irony. Jude, dying of pneumonia, recites from the Book of Job: “Let the day perish wherein I was born.” Hardy’s biblical echoes indict faith’s false comfort: scripture consoles, yet institutions wield it as whip.

Through “Outing False Purpose,” Jude indicts Victorian pillars. Marriage: indissoluble trap punishing growth. Education: aristocratic monopoly, genius irrelevant without wealth. Religion: dogma stifling intellect, guilt weaponized. Society: progress preached, prejudice practiced. Jude and Sue seek authenticity—unfettered love, self-directed learning—yet institutions demand performance: vows as virtue, degrees as worth, piety as purity.

Hardy’s compassion tempers fatalism. Jude endures with tragic dignity—forgiving Sue, laboring nobly. Sue’s frailty humanizes fanaticism. Little Father Time warns of modernity’s chill logic: enlightenment birthing despair. False purposes crumble not by rebellion, but realization: borrowed ideals destroy when unadapted to flesh.

Prose mirrors ruin—lyrical in aspiration, stark in descent. Wessex landscapes judge: Christminster spires pierce hope; windswept downs echo isolation. Pagan undertones—Sue’s Hellenism, Jude’s classics—mock Christian rigidity. Hardy subtitles parts biblically, subverting scripture.

The novel’s outrage silenced Hardy, proving its prophecy: truth offends power. Modern echoes resound—student debt, loveless marriages, ideological puritanism. Jude warns that false purposes evolve: credentials as identity, relationships as contracts, virtue as performance.

Redemption eludes. Jude dies obscure; Sue trapped; Phillotson diminished. Yet in defeat lies indictment—systems exposed, costing lives. Outing false purpose yields no triumph, only clarity amid wreckage.

Jude the Obscure endures as elegy for aspiration. False purposes—scholarship, love, faith—lie shattered like Jude’s restored arches. What remains: Hardy’s defiant humanism. Live truthfully, he urges, though society crucifies visionaries.

In Christminster’s shadow, truth resides—not in towers, but the stonemason’s patient hand. Jude storms hypocrisy, leaving readers gutted, awake. Purpose is not institution-granted, but self-forged amid ruins—fragile, human, unvanquished.

Hardy closes with silence: Jude’s grave unmarked, towers enduring. False purposes persist; the obscure remember. The novel’s fury whispers eternal challenge: dismantle illusions, or become their victim..

Same goes for a company’s purpose. To thrive in all the ways a company ideally should – profitability, sustainability,  employee morale, superior standing in the eyes of the various communities it serves (end users, vendors, investors) – requires a purpose that goes deep and wide, not simply a mandate to move as much product as possible and to keep costs down.  In the same way that personal stories must move us if they are to work, so, too a company’s story must move people – management, employees, customers,investors. Its purpose might be, say, We strive for everyone who walks through our doors to have the best most favorite place besides home experience they have ever had.  

These companies exemplify purposes that deeply inform their culture, products, and impact, going far beyond marketing slogans. Their missions are embedded in their operations and strategies, shaping positive change across society, customers, and the planet.

For the story ultimately to succeed, though, it has to be true (the second pillar of good storytelling) and lead to real action (the third and final pillar) anchored in real accountability and verifiable commitments.What it does help to show is this: To have a magnificent story – be it a company’s or an individual’s – you first must have a magnificent purpose. 

Questioning the Premise

Maybe you’re thinking: Hey, I may be tired and stressed out but I know what I live for. I may feel depleted and my life is chaotic but it’s not as if I don’t understand what keeps me going. 

Pardon my nerve, but I am not sure that is as true as you may believe it is. In the next two stages of our journey, as I discuss in detail the second rule of storytelling – truth – I hope to illuminate the amazing, scary extent to which we often think we know who we are and what story we’re telling when in fact we’re telling something very different. 

Thomas Hardy’s Far from the Madding Crowd unfolds not as pastoral romance but as moral reckoning amid Wessex fields, where ambition collides with nature’s indifference. Published in 1874, it introduces Bathsheba Everdene, independent farm mistress, pursued by three suitors embodying false purpose’s spectrum: steadfast duty, obsessive possession, reckless charm. Hardy’s landscape—golden barley, raging storms, ancient downs—serves as impartial judge, stripping illusions to reveal how every pursuit of love or security curdles when divorced from self-knowledge.

Gabriel Oak enters first, shepherd of quiet competence. Frugal, self-reliant, he leases a farm only to lose his flock to a heedless dog, plunging into penury. Meeting Bathsheba—vivacious, eight years younger—he offers plain marriage. She refuses, prizing independence over stability. Gabriel’s false purpose is subtle: loyalty as salvation, believing endurance redeems rejection. Hardy tests him through ruin—he wanders jobless until extinguishing fire at Weatherbury farm, earning Bathsheba’s employ as shepherd. His constancy endures humiliation, yet risks erasure of self.

Bathsheba inherits her uncle’s estate, mistress amid rustics. Vain, impulsive, she sends valentine to Farmer Boldwood—staid bachelor, awakened to mad passion. Boldwood’s false purpose erupts: love as ownership, transforming restraint into frenzy. Gifts pile undelivered; he counts days to Troy’s presumed death. Bathsheba toys with his suit from guilt, not affection—her own delusion: power through flirtation, independence masking loneliness. Hardy unmasks both: her playfulness wounds; his obsession devours.

Sergeant Frank Troy dazzles, sword flashing in secret hollow. Dashing soldier, he seduces Bathsheba with spectacle, wedding impulsively. His false purpose is clearest: pleasure as conquest, charm veiling emptiness. Fanny Robin, his forsaken lover, haunts—Troy’s watch holds her hair. Bathsheba discovers Fanny’s pauper grave, infant corpse beside, shattering marital bliss. Troy mourns extravagantly, then flees, presumed drowned. Hardy exposes romance’s lie: passion without responsibility breeds tragedy.

Nature amplifies revelation. Sheep bloat on clover—Gabriel alone saves them, rebuked yet retained. Thunderstorm rages post-harvest; Gabriel thatches alone through deluge, Troy drunk. Fire engulfs ricks; Gabriel commands salvation. Each crisis outs false purpose: Bathsheba’s pride delays wisdom; Boldwood’s rage blinds; Troy’s flair fails utility. Hardy’s Wessex demands not charisma but competence—storms judge character unsparingly.

Fanny’s arc pierces deepest. Trove’s victim, she mistakes military glamour for security, dying in childbirth. Her grave unmasks Troy’s deceit; Bathsheba confronts shared folly—both ensnared by illusion. Boldwood, learning truth, spirals: bribe fails, obsession peaks at Christmas party. Troy reclaims Bathsheba; Boldwood shoots him dead, sentenced to asylum. False purposes converge in violence—flirtation ignites murder.

Bathsheba, widowed twice over, inherits ruinous debts. Gabriel prospers as bailiff, refusing pity. Their union evolves organically—no grand gestures, but mutual reliance forged in trial. She proposes indirectly: “He will never know, because he never asks.” Hardy subverts courtship: heroine humbled, suitor proven. Marriage blooms quietly, false purposes shed.

Through “Outing False Purpose,” Far from the Madding Crowd dissects suitors’ delusions. Gabriel’s steadfastness risks passivity; Boldwood’s ardor tyranny; Troy’s allure destruction. Bathsheba’s vanity—independence as isolation—yields to interdependence. Hardy indicts Victorian ideals: marriage as economic bargain, masculinity as dominance, femininity as allure. True purpose emerges in humility: Gabriel’s labor, Bathsheba’s stewardship.

Structure mirrors revelation—four books tracing courtship, marriage, crisis, resolution. Rustic chorus—Jan Coggan, Joseph Poorgrass, Laban Tall—provides comic witness, gossip veiling insight. Weatherbury malthouse hums judgment: “Shepherds is the backbone of the country.”

Hardy’s prose marries lyricism to fatalism. Downs “breathe”; storms “madden”; stars witness silently. Pagan echoes—Valentine’s Day, swordplay—mock Christian propriety. Nature outlives illusion: ricks burn, sheep perish, yet earth renews.

The novel endures as Hardy’s gentlest tragedy. Victorian readers praised rural charm; deeper readers discern indictment—society’s scripts crush authenticity. Modern shadows: performative independence, obsessive romance, charismatic failure. Bathsheba prefigures career women trapped by choice; Gabriel, quiet competence undervalued.

Redemption resides in survival. Bathsheba mothers farm to prosperity; Gabriel shares burdens. False purposes—vanity, obsession, seduction—dissolve in routine. Hardy tempers pessimism: love purified endures, not as ecstasy but equilibrium.

Far from the Madding Crowd storms pretense gently. False purposes lie exposed like storm-flattened barley. What remains: Hardy’s pastoral humanism. Live practically, he urges, rooted in earth’s rhythm. Outing illusion frees through labor, not lament.

In Weatherbury’s folds, truth resides—not in crowds, but madding isolation. Gabriel and Bathsheba wed quietly, crowd receding. Purpose is not spectacle, but shared yoke amid tempests—humble, resilient, alive.

Hardy closes serenely: survivors thrive, illusions interred with Troy. The crowd maddens afar; authentic lives persist near, unvanquished.

Premises questioned unlock infinities. What lie will you erase today? In that blank page lies your truest tale—tattooed not on flesh, but in awakened soul.

To prepare for that discussion here are two exercises. The first is to get you in the habit of extrapolating a real situation into an imagined one, which is exactly what you’re doing when testing to see if your stated purpose holds up (what will my epitaph be?). The second exercise is to make you more conscious generally of how purpose – sometimes good, sometimes bad, sometimes honest, sometimes manipulative – may lurk in the shadows, yet its influence is atomic. 

Exercise 1:  Change a story in your mind and your emotional response changes immediately. Here are two examples. 

You’re driving behind an elderly lady. She’s slow and indecisive. You’re getting angrier by the second. 

Now imagine – really imagine – that the elderly driver  is your struggling mother. Or your grandmother.

How do you feel now?

Epic poetry rarely sues for truth; it thunders premises into eternity. John Milton’s Paradise Lost, dictated blind in 1667, does neither—it interrogates the axioms of divine order with infernal subtlety. What if obedience is not virtue but paralysis? What if rebellion forges nobility from defeat? What if free will crowns not salvation but catastrophe? Satan, cast from Heaven’s hierarchy, and Adam and Eve, stewards of Eden’s innocence, test these heresies across celestial wars and terrestrial falls. Milton, Puritan revolutionary turned royalist exile, questions not God’s justice but humanity’s axioms of authority, ambition, and autonomy.

The poem erupts in medias res: Satan wakes amid lake of fire, legions strewn post-defeat. “What though the field be lost? / All is not lost,” he rallies, transforming rout into manifesto. Premise questioned: hierarchy as divine mandate. Heaven’s monarchy—Son enthroned, angels ranked—mirrors monarchy Milton once decried. Satan’s revolt exposes obedience’s lie: fealty without question breeds stagnation. “Better to reign in Hell than serve in Heaven” unmasks ambition’s paradox—tyranny self-imposed, yet preferable to subjugation. Milton endows rebel with tragic grandeur, his soliloquies—Luciferian pride laced with pathos—challenging predestination’s premise: fall ordained or chosen?

Hell’s council convenes: Moloch bellows war, Belial sues peace, Mammon builds empires of gold. Satan volunteers scout Earth, traversing Chaos—vast unformed anarchy between realms. His journey questions creation’s premise: order from void demands architect, yet voids persist. Arriving new-formed world, he scales Eden’s wall, spies Adam and Eve amid bowers. Raphael warns proto-humans of Satan’s guile, recounting war in Heaven—Son’s chariot crushing rebel hosts into serpent forms. Premise probed: knowledge as safeguard. Raphael’s lore enlightens yet burdens; innocence veils peril.

Eve dreams first—Satan as misted angel, fruit-tempting vision. Premise questioned: subconscious as pure. Her narration to Adam reveals psyche’s vulnerability—desire precedes reason. Serpent assaults next, coiling Tree of Knowledge: “Ye shall be as Gods.” Eve partakes, godlike insight flooding: good-evil duality. Premise shattered: prohibition fosters curiosity. Fruit’s nectar intoxicates; she woos Adam, who chooses solidarity over solitude. “O fairest of Creation, last and best” yields to shared doom—love trumping law.

Expulsion follows: cherubim flaming sword bar Eden. Adam laments loss, Eve repents; Michael visions future—Cain’s murder, Flood, Abraham’s covenant, Moses’ law, Christ’s redemption. Premise questioned: fall as origin. History’s pageant reveals progress cyclic—sin recurs, grace intervenes. Milton’s God, stern yet just, foreordains yet endows choice: “They themselves decreed / Their own revolt, not I.” Free will absolves deity, indicts humanity.

Through “Premises Questioned,” Paradise Lost dissects cosmic architecture. Obedience: Heaven’s harmony or stagnation? Rebellion: heroic dissent or suicidal pride? Knowledge: enlightenment or hubris? Gender: Eve’s agency vilified or vital? Milton subverts Genesis—Satan sympathetic antihero, Eve rational actor, God lawyerly. Blank verse rolls thunderous, Latinate diction elevates; similes—leviathans, behemoths—evoke sublime terror.

Satan dominates early: “Which way I fly is Hell; myself am Hell.” Self as prison questions external punishment. Eve’s temptation monologue—“Fountain of nectar’d sweets”—seduces reader, mirroring fruit’s allure. Adam’s abdication—“How can I live without thee?”—indicts chivalry’s premise: love excuses transgression. God’s soliloquy justifies foreknowledge without predetermination, threading Calvinist needle.

Milton’s blindness infuses intimacy: invocation to “Celestial Light” pleads inward muse. Interregnum politics shadow—Satan as Cromwell, God as Charles? Restoration tempers radicalism; poem affirms hierarchy post-fall. Yet questions linger: Satan’s charisma endures; Eve gains wisdom; human history redeems via Christ.

Epic scope—twelve books mirroring Aeneid—interweaves cosmogony, theogony, tragedy. Hell’s pandemonium parodies Parliament; Eden’s bower mocks aristocracy. Nature witnesses: Earth groans in sympathy, Chaos roils.

Modern echoes resound: existential revolt, feminist rereadings—Eve as first rebel. Satan prefigures Miltonic hero—Faust, Ahab. Premises persist: authority contested, knowledge double-edged.

Redemption crowns ambiguously. Adam and Eve depart hand-clasped, dawn lighting “World… all before them.” Fall births agency—history’s stage set. Milton tempers despair: loss yields potential.

Paradise Lost endures as inquisitorial epic. Premises—obedience perfects, rebellion damns, ignorance bliss—lie dialectically probed. What remains: Milton’s dialectical humanism. Question boldly, he urges, verse forging truth from paradox. Interrogation illuminates, birthing wisdom from schism.

In Eden’s gate, reality dawns—not paradisal stasis, but arduous pilgrimage. Satan’s tragedy warns: unexamined premises forge chains. Paradise Lost thunders eternally, readers tempted, enlightened. Purpose emerges not in hierarchy, but heroic questioning—defiant, dialectical, divine.

Milton closes hopeful: “The world was all before them, where to choose.” Premises toppled; choice endures. Genius lies in tension: affirmation amid interrogation, fall as genesis. Readers emerge transfigured—Satan’s fire tempered, Eve’s fruit savored.

Chances are your emotion has changed dramatically. Your brain chemistry has shifted; interestingly, your brain can’t tell the difference between something that is actually happening and something that is vividly imagined. 

The second example: You light up a cigarette as you have done thousands of times. But as you strike the match this time, imagine the faces of your children and what they will go through if you die young. Train yourself to do this every time you light up, or are tempted to. 

These are seemingly minor mental tricks. I am asking you to try. But they are important first steps to take in finding the larger purpose, the one you must have if you are to get your story straight. To discipline yourself to do that, as will be outlined in the next stages, it helps to start small. 

Exercise 2. To evaluate an action or event fairly, determining its factuality is not enough; you must try to divine its purpose, too. To keep ourselves from being seduced, we need to work at understanding the why behind the what. 

In 2006, a large American metropolitan newspaper decides it’s not going to report any good news out of Iraq. Its stories will highlight the deaths of American servicemen and women and Iraqis; The factionalization and anger and chaos over there; the staggering cost and costs of war. There will be no mention of schools being built, of tides turning, of general progress, if any, being made. 

Okay, so maybe it’s not quite hypothetical. Certainly media outlets make such ‘decisions’ all the time, even as they believe they’re providing a ‘true’ picture of the world. 

Now, as you read any one of several daily stories about Iraq in this newspaper, you should ask yourself two fundamental questions (at least). First: is the story true? Are the details provided in the story true? 

And, second: What is the newspaper’s purpose in telling this particular story (and not, for instance, telling another Iraq relevant story in its place)? Why did their editorial staff feel compelled to lead with this report? 

To the first question, your answer appears to be: Yes, it is true. The facts are pretty much true as far as you can tell. 

How about the second question? What was the newspaper’s purpose in covering this aspect of the war? They might claim that their reporting is objective, and that, unfortunately, the events unfolding in Iraq are almost wholly negative (How could any thinking, feeling person find otherwise?) They also may believe that their coverage is in the best interest of the public: Citizens need to know how badly the war is going. And anyway, if people object that the paper is not painting a full picture, they should realize that comprehensive coverage does not exist. There is no such beast. And any media outlet that claims its coverage is comprehensive is making a preposterous claim.  

Now, if the paper’s true purpose for covering the war as they do is to educate (and ultimately protect) the public, then their story is authentic, perhaps even noble, if arguably patronizing.  On the other hand, if the real purpose for their overly negative coverage is to advance the newspaper’s political agenda, or to create as much chaos and doubt as possible for the Administration or its political party, then the story becomes quite ignoble and inauthentic. 

My place here is not to suggest that this hypothetical newspaper is right or wrong. I chose this example to show how we need to train ourselves to build the muscle that enables us to examine the influences on us ad our stories.  Only by doing this can we be sure, eventually, that the story we are living is ours and no one else’s.  Only by doing this can we be sure that the force driving our story – our purpose – is profound, sustainable, noble…and true. If you do nothing else that I suggest throughout this book but ask these two questions about events in your own life, then you will already have brought a level of consciousness and engagement to your life story that can have meaningful and positive effect:

1. Is the story true?
2. Why is the story being told?

Now let’s turn these questions on ourselves and our own motives. Say you choose to reveal a true story to your wife knowing full well that it will be painful and disturbing. You tell her that last week you missed movie night with her because after another mind-numbingly busy workday you ended up having dinner with your secretary – a totally benign dinner – and neglected to mention it then. Or you tell her that your combined retirement account took a bad hit in the last six months, worse than you let on. When she asks why you chose to tell this story now, your reflec response is that it’s something she needs to hear.

Few novels illuminate purpose’s transformation amid commerce’s clamor like Émile Zola’s The Ladies’ Paradise. Published in 1883 as the tenth Rougon-Macquart chronicle, it chronicles Paris’s department store revolution through Denise Baudu, orphaned provincial arriving amid glittering displays. Real purpose emerges not as ruthless conquest but creative stewardship—the purpose aligning human desire with communal flourishing, where ambition tempers into empathy, spectacle serves sustenance, and modernity honors the vulnerable. Zola, naturalist chronicler of Second Empire excess, unveils purpose as evolutionary force: not destruction of old ways, but their transfiguration into vibrant new forms.

Denise enters Paris trailing brothers Jean and Pépé, seeking refuge with uncle Baudu’s drapery. The Ladies’ Paradise—Mouret’s megastore—looms triumphant, its windows seducing with silks, laces, bargains. Baudu’s shop crumbles, customers lured by spectacle. Denise applies timidly; Mouret intuits her genius, hiring despite mockery. Real purpose dawns vocational: sales not predation, but intuitive harmony—reading customers’ unspoken yearnings, fostering loyalty through gentle guidance. Zola renders Paradise a living organism: departments pulse like organs, crowds swarm like blood, Mouret the visionary heart.

Mouret embodies ambition’s double edge. Widower building empire on widow Hédouin’s foundation, he exploits feminine desire—displays as erotic theater, prices as psychological bait. “Woman is the marketplace,” he declares, yet loneliness haunts. False purpose tempts: conquest as mistresses, expansion as domination. Denise rejects advances, modeling integrity. Real purpose calls him higher—store not plunder, but cathedral of consumption elevating all. Her innovations—children’s department, employee welfare—humanize machine.

Small traders’ tragedy tempers triumph. Baudu rails against “monsters”; Robineau, glove-maker, bankrupts nobly; Bourras, umbrella artisan, resists demolition. Geneviève dies heartbroken, fiancé stolen by Clara’s allure. Zola honors their purpose—craft pride, familial loyalty—yet charts inevitability: old trades yield to collective efficiency. Denise mediates, purpose bridging eras: compassion for kin, vision for progress. Real purpose integrates loss into legacy—ruins fertilize new growth.

Grand sales orchestrate revelation. White sale inaugurates Rue du Dix-Decembre: Paradise expands block-wide, wedding-draped in tulle. Madame de Boves shoplifts lace in fevered trance; Marty spirals debt for finery. Denise triumphs in children’s realm, Pépé modeling smocks. Jouve exposes thefts; Mouret confronts avenger Denise—jealousy yields to awe. “You are the revenge of woman,” Bourdoncle warns. Real purpose consummates: Mouret proposes marriage before Hédouin’s portrait, empire sanctified by love.

Through “Real Purpose,” The Ladies’ Paradise elevates commerce. Mouret’s evolves from predation to partnership—store as social engine. Denise’s from survival to salvation—guiding women to joy without ruin. Counterfeits abound: Hutin’s scheming ambition, Clara’s predatory allure, aristocrats’ kleptomania. Zola affirms purpose creative: displays not deception, but delight; expansion not erasure, but embrace.

Structure mirrors store’s architecture—twelve departments as chapters, climax in vast inauguration. Naturalist detail catalogs: fabrics’ textures, crowds’ frenzy, ledgers’ triumph. Paris evolves: Haussmann boulevards frame Paradise as modernity’s temple. Zola’s omniscient lens probes psyches: Denise’s quiet resolve, Mouret’s epiphanic gaze.

Author’s prescience infuses inevitability—Zola witnessed Bon Marché’s rise, prophesying retail cathedrals. Real purpose rejects nostalgia: small shops’ intimacy yields to democratic abundance. Denise embodies synthesis—provincial heart, commercial acumen.

Modern resonances dazzle: Amazon’s algorithms echo Mouret’s psychology; fast fashion’s waste indicts unchecked greed. Denise prefigures ethical CEOs—sustainability amid scale. Zola prescribes: purpose humanizes commerce—profit with principle.

Redemption communalizes. Baudu survives humbled; Pauline weds happily; orphans thrive. Paradise prospers, yet Denise’s reforms endure—maternity wards, schools. The Ladies’ Paradise affirms: purpose resurrects through adaptation—old virtues in new vessels.

The novel endures as purpose’s manifesto. Counterfeits—greed, nostalgia, hedonism—fade like yesterday’s bargains. Real purpose gleams luminous: fabrics adorning families, labor dignifying workers, love crowning empire. Zola commands: build purposefully, humanity central.

In Paradise’s aisles, truth resides—not ruins, but radiant renewal. Denise’s triumph spotlights survivors’ grace: purpose not conquest, but confluence—humble, harmonious, alive.

Zola closes exultantly: Mouret and Denise embrace amid millions, Hédouin smiling approval. Purpose marital, monumental. Genius: evolution organic, purpose immanent. Readers emerge invigorated—consumption reenchanted, commerce consecrated.

Is the story true? Well yes. It actually happened.  That’s a fact. 

Why is the story being told? Well, it turns out that you haven’t been entirely honest with yourself: Upon more courageous reflection, you realize that your real purpose for telling the story now was to inflict pain; earlier in the day your wife did something that hurt you deeply and you were looking to retaliate. 

When your real purpose is exposed and examined (I need to hurt her back) your choice to tell her the story at that moment is rather ignoble. 

Exposing the real purpose in our storytelling may be embarrassing or indicting. It may bring shame or tears.  But pushing yourself to uncover true purpose can and will pay extraordinary dividends. 

Lining up 

Although Ultimate Quest is synonymous with ‘purpose’, it is also close to synonymous with ‘theme’, a word with which every accomplished storyteller is familiar. Every story has a theme, usually a very simple one  You should be able to identify it, though often you may have to think about it a bit, to make sure that you have sorted out the overall theme of the story from other, less profound themes. In every great story, the overall theme is reiterated in almost every scene, in ways we usually process not intellectually but very much instinctually. Thus each scene is,  thematically, a microcosm of the whole story.

For example, if the overall theme of the Wizard of Oz is ‘there is no place like home” then each scene – Dorothy running away from Miss Gulch, the witch of a neighbor who wants to put Toto to sleep; Dorothy with her friends in the dark, ominous forest; even Dorothy being dazzled by the eye candy of the new world she’s fallen into, the place that suggests to her ‘we are not in Kansas anymore’ – is also about the very same idea. There is no place like home. 

The Wizard of Oz: There Is No Place Like Home

Dorothy Gale lives on a quiet Kansas farm with her Aunt Em and Uncle Henry. Life is simple, sometimes harsh, and Dorothy dreams of a place “over the rainbow” where problems fade away, and happiness is easy to find. One day, a sudden twister whirls through the prairie, lifting Dorothy’s house into the sky—with her and her loyal dog, Toto, inside.

When the house lands, Dorothy finds herself in the magical land of Oz. The world is bursting with color and wonder, unlike anything she’s ever seen. 

Here, Dorothy is celebrated for accidentally defeating the Wicked Witch of the East. But she’s lost and desperate to return home. The kindly but mysterious Glinda, the Good Witch, tells Dorothy that only the powerful Wizard of Oz in Emerald City can send her back.

Following a road paved with yellow bricks, Dorothy begins a journey filled with new friends: the Scarecrow, who yearns for a brain; the Tin Man, who longs for a heart; and the Cowardly Lion, seeking courage. Each companion believes that only the Wizard can grant their deepest wishes, and together they brave dangers and temptations, learning about themselves and each other.

At last, they reach Emerald City, and the Wizard promises to grant their requests—but only if they defeat the Wicked Witch of the West. After perilous struggles and acts of bravery, Dorothy and her friends succeed. Yet when they return, they learn that the Wizard is just a man—ordinary and fallible. Still, he helps them realize that what they sought was within them all along: the Scarecrow is clever, the Tin Man is compassionate, and the Lion is brave.

Dorothy, heartbroken, realizes the magic to return home was with her, too: Glinda reveals that the slippers she’s worn since her arrival can take her anywhere she wants. With a tearful farewell to her friends, Dorothy whispers, “There’s no place like home.” She closes her eyes—and wakes to the grey Kansas sky, her house, her family, and Toto. The adventure, real or dreamed, has changed her. She sees her home as both ordinary and precious, filled with love and possibility.

The Wizard of Oz’s journey revolves around the longing for a place—a home not defined by excitement or magic, but by comfort, belonging, and love. Dorothy’s adventures show her how extraordinary and valuable her ordinary world and relationships are. The friends she makes long for qualities they already possess, just as Dorothy’s heart was always drawn towards home. In the end, “There is no place like home” resonates not just as physical space but as a recognition of self, roots, and the love that sustains us.

No matter where we roam in search of happiness, The Wizard of Oz reminds us that true contentment often lies in appreciating where—and with whom—we already belong.

In many ways, it is this echoing or ‘alignment’ between the overarching theme of a great story and all the scenes, characters and moments that make up that story – be it Madame Bovary or High Noon or Moby Dick or the Harry Potter books or the New Testament or countless others – that make these stories stay with us forever.  

Great stories are never made up of far-flung elements. They are never about petty concerns. They are always tight, streamlined, deceptively simple. Indeed, they are unified. 

Unity – alignment – are hallmarks of persuasive stories. A good story is consistent. It has an internal logic. Every thought you share, every word you utter, every expression you make can’t help revealing some aspect of your unique story. 

As with great stories the theme (Ultimate Quest) of your life story is simple – touching on ideas like family, honor, benevolence, continuity – and each subplot reiterates the theme.  Without this echoing or alignment, your mission is going to fall apart somewhere. For example, if you wish to be an extraordinary father and husband, then that entails a certain level of moral integrity; you can’t at the same time be a businessperson of dubious integrity, because that runs counter to who you profess to want to be as father and husband. There is a serious misalignment in your Ultimate Quest. 

Herman Melville’s Moby-Dick is a masterwork of thematic alignment—every scene, character, and moment converging on profound meditations about obsession, the limits of knowledge, and mankind’s confrontation with the unknowable. The story, narrated by Ishmael, is propelled by the monomaniacal quest of Captain Ahab, who pursues the vast white whale, Moby Dick, across the oceans, determined to exact revenge for the loss of his leg.

The overarching theme—the struggle between human will and inscrutable fate or nature—encompasses all aspects of the novel. Melville crafts this alignment with meticulous care. From the novel’s opening, where Ishmael seeks meaning and adventure, the tone is one of philosophical inquiry: who are we in a vast, indifferent universe? As the Pequod sails, it transforms into a microcosm of humanity: diverse races, beliefs, hopes, and fears all thrown together on a doomed voyage.

Characters as thematic vessels:

• Ahab: The embodiment of obsession, Ahab’s pursuit of Moby Dick is single-minded to the point of self-destruction. Melville paints him not as a cartoon villain, but as a tragic figure aware of his own doom. His moments of human warmth—such as his concern for the crew’s sleep or his fleeting nostalgia for family—are crushed beneath his compulsion, showing how obsession isolates and consumes.
• Starbuck: The first mate, serves as the moral and pragmatic foil to Ahab, questioning the madness of vengeance against a “dumb brute.” His doubts underline the theme of reason struggling against monomania and fate.
• Queequeg and Ishmael: Their friendship embodies tolerance, openness, and interdependence—qualities that contrast sharply with Ahab’s narrow vision. Queequeg’s coffin, turned into Ishmael’s lifeboat, becomes a literal symbol of survival through acceptance and adaptation.
• Other crew members (e.g., Fedallah, Pip): Each adds layers to the central questions; their fates are bound to Ahab’s decisions, reinforcing the interconnectedness of human destiny and the consequences of following unchecked leadership.

Scenes and moments in alignment:

• The “Quarter-Deck” scene, where Ahab’s true mission is revealed and the crew is drawn into an oath to hunt the whale, crystallizes the fatal momentum around a single will.
• Ishmael’s philosophical asides about the “whiteness of the whale” and the nature of reality deepen the central motif: the limitations of human understanding as we confront life’s mysteries.
• The recurring motif of prophecy and omens (e.g., Elijah’s warning, Fedallah’s prophecies, the corpse lashed to the whale) binds events into a sense of inexorable fate.

The alignment reaches its peak in the novel’s catastrophic ending: after days of pursuing Moby Dick, the whale destroys the Pequod; Ahab and nearly all the crew perish, leaving only Ishmael alive, floating on Queequeg’s coffin in the vast sea—a survivor not of heroism, but of philosophical reckoning.

Every aspect of Moby-Dick—the plot, the diverse crew, the philosophical digressions, the stormy seas—serves its overarching theme: man’s yearning to impose order and meaning on a chaotic universe, and the tragic consequences when obsession overrides humility. The novel’s genius lies in its unity. Each scene, character, and decision resonates with Melville’s haunting question: Can humanity ever truly master—or even understand—the forces that govern its fate?

If one of the goals in your Ultimate Quest is to ‘empower as many people as you can over the longest time possible – yet you are yourself closed to new learning, incapable of improving and further empowering yourself – then there is something askew in your Ultimate Quest. Or if one of your ultimate goals is to be a person who treats people with compassion and dignity – true enough of the way you treat your superiors and colleagues, say, but not intermittently true of the way you treat those beneath you on the corporate ladder – then there’s misalignment. Without alignment, you can’t achieve what you set down in your ultimate Quest. Thi is true in other aspects of life, too. 

J.K. Rowling’s Harry Potter series achieves rare narrative alignment, as every scene, character, and magical detail serves the grand themes of love, mortality, courage, and the complexity of good and evil.

From the very first novel to the last, every moment—Harry’s childhood under the stairs, his friendships, rivalries, magical lessons, and climactic battles—reinforces the core themes of sacrificial love, the acceptance of death, the power of choice, and moral courage. Characters like Harry, Voldemort, Dumbledore, and Snape embody and test these motifs in their personal journeys: Harry’s survival springs from his mother’s love; Voldemort’s downfall is his denial of mortality and human connection; Dumbledore personifies embracing wisdom through humility; Snape’s arc wrestles with the battle between selfishness and selflessness. Every subplot—Neville finding his bravery, Hermione’s application of logic, the interplay of school rules and rebellion, the lure of the Mirror of Erised—serves the overarching structure, as young wizards confront fears, temptations, losses, and the necessity of choosing between what is right and what is easy. Even the rich worldbuilding, balancing magical wonder with mundane detail, reflects the series’ central conflict: the extraordinary arising out of the ordinary, and the value of human choices in shaping destiny. In all, Rowling’s narrative crafts a seamless alignment between the overarching themes and every scene, character, and magical moment, making the Harry Potter series a touchstone of modern narrative unity and emotional resonance.

Your story can’t work without all the important elements being aligned. It is no accident, I think, that a colloquial way to describe being aligned with someone is ‘to be on the same page’.  If Francis Ford Coppola and Mario Puzo, co-authors of The Godfather movies, had added a scene or two showing Michael Corleone genuinely feeling as if h e had been absolved of all his sins by God, his family, and the ‘legitimate’ outside community, even as he continued to preside over his crime operation, the story would fall apart; such a scene, in being at complete odds with the overall theme of the story, would make a mockery of it. We would not be drawn nearly as much to watch these movies and revel in their human truths, because now they would strike us as false. Simply put, the story would not work. 

If your Ultimate Quest is to inspire you – truly inspire you, the way a great, consistent, seamless story moves and inspires you – then everything in it needs to be aligned. The values it professes need to dovetail with each part of your mission. If something in your life is not aligned with your Ultimate Quest – some behavior, some habit, some relationship – then you need to examine it and change it or eliminate it until things are aligned.