Saturday, May 3, 2008

STORY

Rather than paraphrase, I am just going to include a long exact quote from the fascinating book: A Whole New Mind, by Dan Pink. Read this book!

We are our stories. We compress years of experience, thought and emotion into a few compact narratives that we convey to others and tell to ourselves. This has always been true. But personal narrative has become more prevalent, and perhaps more urgent, in a time of abundance, when many of us are freer to seek a deeper understanding of ourselves and our purpose.
More than a means to sell a house or deepen a doctor's compassion, Story represents a pathway to understanding that doesn't run through the left side of the brain. We can see this yearning for self-knowledge through stories in many places...
What these efforts reveal is a hunger for what stories can provide--context enriched by emotion, a deeper understanding of how we fit in and why that matters. The Conceptual Age can remind us what has always been true but rarely been acted upon--that we must listen to each other's stories and that we are each the authors of our own lives.

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