What if you took the elements that make a great story in screenwriting or novels, and you began to apply them to your life? In other words, if at the end of a movie you feel this sense of fulfillment when the credits are rolling, what if you could feel that at the end of a year, or a lifetime? How would you structure your life differently?
The principles of a good story are just this: a character who wants something and is willing to overcome conflict to get it.
And what we want matters. Imagine if I wrote a screenplay: This character works in a grocery store, and he decides that he wants a Volvo. And he works for three years and overcomes this hard boss that he has, and at the end of the movie, he gets the Volvo. He’s driving off the lot, testing the windshield wipers. Are you crying at the end of this movie? Are you saying to yourself, “If he can have the Volvo, I can have the Volvo?” No, you’re not.
There’s nothing wrong with driving a Volvo or living in a nice house. But if that’s what our story is about, we shouldn’t expect to feel any different at the end than we would if we were to see it on the screen.
I wrote a book about growing up without a dad, and I met my dad recently for the first time in 30 years, so I’m acutely aware that in America we have 27 million kids growing up without a dad; 85 percent of the people in prison grew up in a fatherless home. We have 360,000 churches—if each church would just mentor 20 kids, we would shut down an enormous number of prisons in our country. So I wrote down this new ambition: I want to start mentoring programs in churches all across our country.
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