NF

This book is inspiring, to say the least. About editing your life to make it a good story, as you would a novel or screenplay. If we are to become the heroic characters we long to be in our own stories, we need to meet conflict and overcome it with courage and even excitement. I cannot recommend this book enough! ( )

I love the power of a personal vision, story or goal. Whether in a job or my personal life, I feel lost without one. Donald Miller comes at this idea from a perspective I’ve never seen before - by learning how to write a good story and applying that to his own life.

What could have been a dry, goal oriented book is actually a hilarious, fun, brilliantly written autobiography. I loved how Miller recognized and wrote about the littlest moments and somehow jumped around time without it seeming out of place.

His take on advertising was brought back to stories too:

Advertising and marketing try to sell us a story that by buying their products, OUR story will match their perfect one.

If you can live a better story, there is no reason to buy into someone else’s. Find a story you want to live and live it. ( )

My favorite book from Donald Miller so far, although I am sad there were no sexy carrots in this one. ( )

Miller turns his comedy and wisdom to the theme of living a good story. He has a valuable thesis: in order to make the most of your life, you need direction and purpose and gumption. But I’m not so sure about the way he goes about proving it. The examples he uses from his own life to demonstrate creating a worthy story - cycling across the country, hiking to Machu Picchu, kayaking through the night in Canada, starting a huge mentoring program for boys, writing a book that gets made into a movie - seem to indicate that in order to live a good story, you have to do wild or extraordinary things. That may not be what he meant to say - in fact, I don’t think it is - but he might have been a little more balanced with his examples to avoid sending that unintentional message. (Or, I don’t know, maybe it was intentional.)

This is the kind of book that could cause people to seek what I’ve heard described as a geographical solution to a spiritual problem, to attempt to fill a void by changing their situation rather than their perspective. Sometimes putting yourself way out of your comfort zone can indeed change your perspective...but so can slow, steady, unsexy disciplines.

I did laugh, though. Miller’s a very funny man. ( )