What is a Winner? The Power of Story. Part 1 of the Winner Series.

What is a winner? Why do I feel like a loser, unconfident, unsure of myself? Why do other people act confident? What is their basis? What do they know that I don’t?

Those questions fascinated me from ages 17-22. For lack of a better word, I always felt like a loser.

It was this weird sense that I was not good enough at things. From around 13 years old I trained myself to look only for the areas needing improvement. Those things lacking in me. Why focus on the positive, which doesn’t need any fixing? If I focus all my energy on where I’m deficient and fixing that, that is the fastest path towards perfection. So I thought.

I viewed any good thing I did as having little to do with me, and I viewed every mistake as mostly my fault. Shields me from complacency, keeps me humble, and glorifies God. So I thought.

I would look at other decisive, confident people and ask where they are getting that sense of faith. On whose authority? How are you coming to any conclusion with such certainty and so little thought? How do you know you are a good volleyball player? A good person? That you will succeed? That you will fail? How do you know?

A couple things undermined this mindset.

First, I read the Language of Creation by Matthieu Pageau to see how reality is laid out, to recover an ancient worldview that has been uniquely lost in the West since the Scientific Revolution. It seemed undeniably true, in a kind of mathematical way. But that’s for another post.

Second, Matthieu’s brother Jonathan Pageau, host of the Symbolic World podcast, and Jordan Peterson, showed me there is way too much information in the world to think you have a balanced, logical, wholistic perspective. You have to discriminate and choose what you see, what you remember, and really, what you worship. If someone asks me about my day, am I going to say I put my contacts in my left eye first, then my right? Or that I had to change two lanes to exit the freeway today? No, it’s not relevant. I saw it but I didn’t see it. Then I realized there are billions of details going unrecognized and unanalyzed, because we deem them not relevant.

How you deem what is relevant and what is not is the key. It is your story, and you must choose.

Secondly, seeing this, I now know I choose my own story! My entire past does not determine it, what I select does. *I choose what I remember, what I think about, what I set my mind on (mindset).

I came to understand that religion, myth, values, morality, politics, love, and really all of creation, are all story based. The best storytellers usually win people over. This materialist, scientific notion of cold hard logic and reason lacks authority.

Armed with this perspective, I came to believe I am a winner. And I have just the right story.

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*This entire worldview hinges on the notion of free will, your ability to choose. For another post.