Week #5 - Own your narrative

Last week the invitation was to anthropoligise your life, weeks #2 was about thinking in terms of the experience you want others to have.

This week is about owning your narrative.

As Nora Ephron said...

Everyone in this group has a natural instinct to build something that others will really love.

And part of what holds that up (part of the iceberg that stays solid when things get uncertain) is a solid internal sense of "of course it's me."

The feeling that your life, your detours, your obsessions and contradictions, all make sense in the context of what you're building.... And if you don't believe this in yourself right away, don't worry, this is just a neural pathway that needs to be created and built. Being the author is the first step.

Not every business needs a public-facing origin story or founder letter.

But every founder and creator needs to know why they are the perfect person to lead the world they are building if they want others to trust them and follow along!

And the act of writing it is how you convince yourself first.

So this week, the invitation is to build that case, for yourself, in writing. 😄

Eventually this might become something public — a founder letter, an about page, a post that explains why this world exists and who built it. My own World Building launch letter is an example (I cringe at it a bit now, which means it was real at the time). So is Sharmadean Reid's letter for 39BC.

But for now, you're just doing two things:

Noticing what is there (anthropologist) → Owning the narrative (author)

Step 1: Map what is there

Use last week's notes as your raw material, look at what came up — the childhood obsessions, the contradictions, the detours, the mundane stuff... is there a journey? Any connected threads?

Step 2: Write the story

Then, write the story that convinces you you're the right person to build this world.

If you need a prompt, use these five beats as your scaffolding:

Or have a look at some of these public facing examples (remember to write a crappy first version for yourself first!)

If you're still figuring out what your world will be, this exercise is especially for you — the story often contains the answer before you can see it any other way.

Send it to me when you're done. I want to read it.

Have a great week, I'm the Cotswolds at a conference called Unreasonable Business and I liked this quote from their website... “The reasonable person adapts themselves to the world; the unreasonable one persists in trying to adapt the world to themselves. Therefore all progress depends on unreasonable people.”

See you all on Friday!