The story is you
As humans we tend to identify ourselves through stories. This is as you will see, one of the main reasons why we interract with each other the way we do. Most “game” strategies follows the basic structure of a story. Beginning, middle, ending. We have conditioned ourselves to believe that anything we can identify follow that structure. It is also the reason why intrigue and dominance is essential to your game. Intrigue is there to keep everything interesting and exiting. Dominance is there to make sure that you decide where the story is going. You are living in a story, and the story is you.
Main character
Firstly, becouse of this we have developed a character that lives within us. It is something that gives us a limit. It keeps telling us who we are, what we are allowed to do, and should do. It is our ego.
In the movie “Revolver”, god I love that name, this is a subject that brought up in depth. Go to their website here:
http://www.sonypictures.com/homevideo/revolver/ , then go to watch clips and watch clip 2.
The game they are refering to is the game between you and your ego. The basic principle of any game is that there is always a victim and an opponent. In the game between you and your ego you are the victim and your ego is the opponent. The rules that they went through in the clip was:
Rule one: You can only get smarter by playing a smarter opponent.
Rule two: The more sofisticated the game, the more sofisticated the opponent.
If the opponent is good, he will place his victim in an environment he can control. The bigger the environment, the easier to control.
There is also another principle in the game that they only go through in the full movie and that is: The best place an opponent can hide, is where you would never look.
The biggest trick the opponent ever pulled was making you believe that you were him.
The ego is, as I define it, the character that you believe is yourself. Becouse of it, we tend to limit ourselves through our ego telling us that it would not be like us. The ego is limiting the range of where your story can go. Becouse if the main character can not do something, the story can not go there either.
Sometimes your ego tells you that you are not the main character. This is actually the reason why we crave validation and approval, becouse if we are not the main character we have to be a character in someone elses story. So we start seeking validation to find out who we are in the story and what we are expected to be capable of.
If you could control your ego and make it serve you, it would up be you what you were capable of and what was right and wrong. You would never have a conflict between what you want, and what what you think you have the right to do. You would have authenticity.
Who you are
When we talk about identity, everyone seems to try to think of themselves as their character. I can assure you that it is not. It is about time you flipped the script and start to take charge of your life. You are the story writer. You actually have control over your ego. If you want your life to change, you simply have to make a choice. What you want is written in the stone.
For the next thirty days or so I want you to adapt a storywriter mentality. Every day you wake up you are going to name that day, it will symbolise a chapter. You will not be naming the days when the day has passed, you will do it the first thing in the morning. By naming the day you can decide what is going to happen. For example, if you are very quiet and want to be able to talk for hours straight you might want to name the day “ No more silence, the story of a talker” and that will be the chapter of the day.
In this post I have only talked about the main character, but I intend to bring up several more sides of this theory. This is only part 1.
To be continued....
Revolver