The Stories We Live
And how they determine everything
All we live are stories. The invitation in Christ is to learn to wake up to the stories we are living before we die. This has been a new — albeit — earth-shattering revelation for me.
I recently experienced a significant business and financial setback in my real estate business. One of the worst real estate markets in 30 years caught me off guard and ill-positioned and nearly ruined me financially.
What has been worse than the stress of keeping a business afloat has been the emotional and mental turmoil that has come along with it. (I share more about this unraveling in this article.)
My older brother is a highly successful entrepreneur. When I say highly successful, I mean highly successful. He is living the tech startup dream in southern California and doing it well. While he has been a source of inspiration and even a mentor at times, he has also — unfortunately — been a mental measuring stick for me.
My tendency to compare everything about me to him began in our childhood. For as long as I can remember, we have competed. From grades to sports to who could mow the lawn best and fastest, you name it, and we likely competed in it.
This normal sibling behavior isn’t a big deal when you are young. But when you are a 35-year-old middle-aged man trying to support his family, and everything falls apart, it becomes a major problem.
For months after I failed to scale my real estate business, I struggled to make sense of the season I barely made it out of. Often, the only thing I could think of as I was wallowing in my despair was his success, his business, and how he had made it, but I had not. It wasn’t until a mentor helped me reframe what I perceived as a colossal failure that I began to pull my head above water.
In Philippians 4, the apostle Paul shares the secret of being content. He says he has had much, and he has little. In other words, he has experienced the ups and downs of life. He goes on to say that whatever circumstance he is in, he has learned to be content. Notice that he doesn’t call little bad and much good.
He calls it a circumstance. What if my failure wasn’t a failure at all? What if what I experienced in my real estate business was simply a…circumstance?
That creates an entirely different—and more empowering—mental narrative (or story) than comparing my business failure to my brother’s success.
As humans, we can choose what meaning we apply to the circumstances we experience. In so doing, we get to choose the stories in which we live. The reality is we are doing this all day, every day anyway. It’s just typically subconscious.
All we live are stories. Here is exactly what this looked like for me:
Mental Story #1: I’m a failure, I suck as an entrepreneur, I will never measure up to my brother, blah blah blah…
Mental Story #2: Whew, that was a challenging circumstance I just experienced. I have never tried to scale a real estate business in a down market; what lessons can I learn from that experience and carry with me into the next season?
I am learning to lean into and embrace the second story. I haven’t done it perfectly over the last few months, but as I have let go of the first story, I have regained my confidence in myself and God's goodness.
There is always an open invitation to reconsider and rewrite the stories we have been living.
