Ever since I watched Graham Weaver talk about “writing stories” I’ve been hooked.

Any time I’ve written out a long-form story about a future version of myself I’ve gotten a tidal wave of clarity.

There are three key rules for these stories:

1. They take place at some point in the future (ideally more than 6 months from today)
2. They describe a wildly successful scenario
3. They don’t care about the “how”

This exercise shakes our brains from their normal rut.

Our brains are hardwired to focus on the floor falling out beneath us. Our antennae are constantly up, tuned for risks and problems we can avoid or solve. This is why problem language works so well as a marketing technique:

But, this hurts our North Star thinking. We won’t naturally think about our ceiling - what our best case scenario might be - because we're so focused on the floor. That means we never build in the daily systems and practices to reach it.