WHAT'S THE STORY?

2 hours ago

4 min read

❝We tell ourselves stories in order to live.❞ -Joan Didion

It's less interesting to know what you value, and more interesting to know how you came to value it.

It's 2015, and my wife gets a new SUV. It helps with towing our pop-up camper, and it's bigger than her previous car. I'm perfectly happy with my 2008 sedan.

Until I'm not.

Suddenly I notice the desire for a new car. Leather seats. A sunroof. It becomes my goal. Eventually I trade in the old sedan and get exactly what I wanted. It feels like accomplishing something.

But if I had asked myself when I first wanted a new car, I would have had to tell the truth: it was the moment my wife got one.

That would have told me something interesting.

WE HAVE DESIRES, BUT DON'T KNOW WHY

Most people can tell you what they want. Fewer can tell you why. Even fewer can tell you where the desire came from.

I want to retire at 60. I want to leave a legacy. I want a lake house. I want my kids to go to college debt-free. I want the portfolio to hit a certain number.

These feel like genuine desires, and they might be. But when you ask how someone came to want those things, the story gets thin fast.

"That just seems like the right thing to do," "That's obvious. That's what everybody wants." or, "This is just what you do."

When it comes to surviving, looking around at what others are doing is genuinely useful. If everyone in the tribe is running, run.

When it comes to thriving, the same instinct is far less helpful. We're influenced by family nudges, societal expectations, and the Joneses. We follow the inherited path often without knowing we're on it until we stop to look.

NARRATIVE QUESTIONS CAN HELP

David Brooks writes in How to Know a Person about narrative questions. These are questions that don't ask what someone thinks or wants, but how they came to think or want it. The story behind the desire rather than the desire itself.

He offers this: "Don't tell me what you value. Tell me how you came to value it."

Applied to financial life: don't tell me when you want to retire. Tell me when that number became important to you. Don't tell me what success looks like. Tell me the moment you first decided that was success.

A genuine desire has a rich story behind it. A specific moment, person, or experience you can trace it back to. An inherited desire has a thin story. You want it because you should, or because someone else wanted it first.

The narrative question is how you tell the difference.

This questionnaire is an instrument that taps into ten valued domains of living. It assesses the perceived importance of each of these ten life domains and the degree to which you are living in accordance with this perceived importance.

USING NARRATIVE QUESTIONS

Brooks proposed narrative questions as a way to understand others. They work just as well turned inward.

Before committing to a major goal... or at any life transition... ask yourself:

When did this become important to me?
What happened that made me want this?
Whose voice do I hear when I think about this goal?
Would I still want this if nobody else wanted it?

You can do this out loud, in a journal, or with a friend willing to ask the questions and sit with you in the answers.

Fair warning: this can get uncomfortable. Examining the origin of a desire might reveal it was never really yours. The inherited path feels like the right path... at least until you learn otherwise (hello, midlife crisis).

But a vision with a rich story, one you can trace back to something genuinely yours, is worth pursuing with everything you have. A desire with a thin story is worth letting go of, or at least holding more loosely, while you figure out what's actually underneath it.

I traded in the sedan for leather seats and a sunroof. It felt like accomplishing something.

It might have just been keeping up.

These questions are worth asking on your own. They're often easier to answer when someone else is doing the asking.

You get one life; live intentionally.

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