Ep 340 | Homework for Life

Thank you for joining me today. It's Brian Gubernick, and welcome to the No Days Off podcast, where we believe that every single day brings a new opportunity to get better. Today we are going to continue to talk about the Matthew Dix interview from just a couple days ago. We ran through an hour-long conversation with Matthew Dix an amazing author and storyteller. We learned so much. Yesterday's episode, we talked a little bit about strategic listening. Today, I wanna talk about Matthew's exercise he calls Homework for Life. Really how to tell better stories through this exercise that he created called Homework for Life that I think we all absolutely should be implementing in our worlds right now. If you haven't listened to the episode, go back a couple days, Listen to that whole episode because I think there are just so many nuggets, so many things that we can apply. But let's focus on one of those things today, this Homework for Life exercise. I asked Matthew a couple different ways, how do you tell better stories? And I'm gonna give you a direct quote. I'm gonna read this to you. He says, "I always tell people that the person who has the most stories tends to be the best storyteller." So finding more stories is the first key to being an excellent storyteller. Otherwise, you're gonna be like that uncle at Thanksgiving who tells the same stories every single year. We're also most effective as storytellers and communicators when we could speak in metaphor, when we can compare two things. The easiest way to get someone to understand something is to take a complex thing we're trying to describe, or that foreign thing, or that thing they're not familiar with, and compare it to something that is familiar. And we do that through storytelling. We do that by having a story that relates to every other thing in the world. So the more stories we have, the more we have an ability to take a concept and then explain it through story. Bottom line, the more stories we have, the better storytellers we become. The more topics that we can cover, the more knowledge that we have, the more conversations we can have, the more interesting we become. Matthew says to create more stories, you ought to consider this Homework for Life activity. And that's a process that he came up with that is basically the idea that we have more stories in our lives than we ever see. And when we do see them, we often just allow them to sort of just pass by us unnoticed and unrecorded. Homework for Life, though, was his attempt to become a storyteller who had more stories to tell. So here's what he did. He gave himself this homework assignment. He did it, he started doing it, I think, 15 or so years ago. And the idea that was that he wanted to become someone who had something to say at all times. And so every single day, he sits down and he asks himself, what's the most story-worthy moment that took place over the course of the day? Even if nothing actually happened that'd be worth telling a story about, he would force himself to find something and then just write it down. Not the whole story, 'cause he said that that was overwhelming, that's too much. He wouldn't wanna write novels about each one of these days 'cause it's unrealistic. But he would write down a story from his life every day and it would create a habit. He wanted to create this habit. So it wasn't 500 words he was trying to jot down. He just was trying not to miss days. And he doesn't think— he thinks if you do this, never miss a day, because every single day is worth living. And because it's worth living, something happens over the course of the day that, that's worth remembering. And so he uses an Excel spreadsheet, and you could do the same. Uh, it's just one cell per day, and he just writes across the screen. Nothing overly complicated. He doesn't use some crazy app. I'm sure there's lots of apps we can use, journal apps or whatever it may be, but he's just using a spreadsheet and he's just filling the story in, maybe a few sentences across one cell. And he'd write that down as his homework for life moment that day, 4 or 5 sentences that essentially captured a moment from the day. And he does it every day. And over time, what he discovered was that his goal of finding one moment per day was actually a ridiculous goal because now he sees his numbers were actually 7.8 moments per day, meaning that every day he's found roughly 8 moments per day. Now, he said it didn't start that way. He thought his life was a lot less interesting than that. But as he started doing this more and more and more, and he refined his lens for storytelling, finding stories were not all that hard. Over the course of time. What I found most fascinating though, as he was sharing this, kind of blew me away, was something I, I, I made a, a note about. He said that most people can probably recall maybe 100 days from last year. I actually think that's pretty generous. If you try to think back to your past 12 months, maybe if you thumb through social media posts or pictures or something with within your phone, you could probably recall some days. He said most people can come up with 100 days. Again, I think it's less than that, but let's just go with his 100. So that means, according to Matthew, that we've taken a 365-day year and we've reduced it to 100 days. So when people say, and this is what I really made note around, when people say time flies, it doesn't really fly. They just choose to forget most of the time that they experienced. They don't account for their days in a meaningful way. And I'm all about maximizing time. I wish I had this aha sooner, but I'm so glad that he shared it, because where he went with this was he said that as he built this, this muscle of recognizing there's a story or multiple stories in every single day, no matter the size or significance of the story, and he would find, call it, 8 moments per day It means he was turning a year— he was turning a year into 28,000 days. What he was saying is he's taking 8 stories a day and multiplying it by 20— you know, I'm sorry, 365, and he ends up with 28,000 or so days. He turned his year into 28,000 days. Time does not fly by for him. He says it creeps. His daughter's 15. She feels 15 to him. And he hasn't met many parents that don't say times fly by, flies by, and that kids don't grow up fast. And I bet you if I pushed him, he would still think his kid grows up fast. But he, but he doesn't necessarily believe you have to let that happen. It just doesn't happen. He just thinks people don't pay close enough attention. He even told a story about a a woman. I think he said she was 82 years old, and she asked, well, I'm 82 years old, why would I write down a story every day? I don't have that much time left. And I think his counter to that was something like, well, might as well— in his words, not mine— might as well put a pillow over your head then, because if you don't believe the next several days, or I think he said 10 days, are important to you, then why are you even living? It was such a good, such a good point. And it's such a valuable lesson. Most of us— I tell you, I can tell you where I went with this, and I think I said it to him. I think about my, my older daughter Avery, who's 13. Um, if I was to recall, say, her past, you know, when she was 4, the only thing I could probably do is think back to some stories that maybe she was 4, she could have been 3, or she could have been 5. I would look at pictures, I'd chat with my wife, I'd maybe look at a Facebook post. It makes me somewhat sad to think, man, I— there was a strategy that I could have deployed back then to remember all 365 days, but I didn't do it. Now it doesn't mean that I'm not going to start doing it right now. Right now I'm aware, so I'm going to go do something about it. But this idea of writing down a story for every day is an amazing one. Now he wasn't going the direction in terms of like— he wasn't trying to prompt you to remember you know, the past years of your kids, like the way I took it. I took it rather literally. But he was using this Homework for Life exercise as a way to become a better storyteller. Again, the best storytellers have a lot of stories to tell. And the way to, you know, the first thing you can be doing to be a better storyteller is to build your library of content. Writing down something every single day does that. And over the course of building that habit, you get better and better and better in terms of identifying what could make for a good story. And then you incorporate these things into the conversations you're having, and that makes you much more— so much more attractive in terms of the conversations that you're having. He said to me, you know, when my son or daughter say something to me that I think is interesting, hilarious, profound, unbelievable, it's an entry in my homework for life. So I have thousands of entries of my kids think— saying things to me. And he says, as a parent, your kids say crazy things all the time, things you never want to forget. And then most parents just choose to forget. They choose to not actually take a moment and write down that crazy thing their kids said. Now, the last part of this, again, Homework for Life is about developing your content library. But the last part of this that resonated with me was when he had shared, okay, maybe you messed this up. You can start doing something about it right now. but you could also be teaching the younger people in your life to start doing this. He said his kids are writing down their own stories each and every day, 3, 4, 5 sentences. And now they have these diaries of sort, right? They have these stories written down that they can go back to from when they were 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, they're, I think they're 15 and 13 maybe. They could go back to these stories. I just think that's so cool. And it's probably our, not probably, it is our responsibility to be teaching those around us about this as well. So the thought for you today, the action item for you today is to think around this homework for life exercise. Don't overcomplicate it. Just start jotting down a few sentences every day about something that happened. It may not be that significant, may not be all that amazing, but jot it down. Something you observed, something you experienced, something that made you laugh, something you learned a lesson from. Jot it down. And I think you go back to it, and I could tell you, shouldn't say I think you go back to it, I've been doing it now for about the past 70 to 80 days. And it's been a very, very enlightening experience. It's actually, you know, I have 2, 3, 4 stories that I now am incorporating into different presentations I'm doing. And I'm just getting started because my lens is not all that great just yet, but it's significantly better than it was. I love this. I love this idea. And I think you, I think you will, will learn a ton from it as well. That's all I have for you today. The No Days Off podcast. Thank you so much for listening. And remember, every single day brings a new opportunity to get better. So let's get better.