Homework for Life

Hey friends,

I’m reading a book called Storyworthy and there’s a daily reflection exercise the author recommends called Homework for Life.

The idea is that at the end of every day, we should spend a few minutes thinking “What’s the most story-worthy thing that happened today?” Then we should make a spreadsheet of each of our Storyworthy moments, and over time, we’ll build up a bank of stories that we can develop and share with others.

This is legit game-changing stuff. My mind was officially blown when I read about it a few days ago, and I’ve made a public commitment (on Twitter, follow me pls btw) to do this Homework for Life for the next 365 days at least, and hopefully for the rest of my life.

The point isn’t just to expand our bank of stories – it also encourages us to reflect on our days in a super easy-to-do way, thus allowing us to remember snippets of our life that would otherwise pass us by.

So if you’d like to join me on this journey, I’d love for you to make your own spreadsheet (or in my case, Notion page) with the question “what’s the most story-worth thing that happened today?”.

I’ll report back in a few weeks/months with insights that I gain from this process, and it would be nice to exchange notes if anyone fancies joining along.

Have a great week!

Ali

This Week on Not Overthinking

Not Overthinking is the weekly podcast hosted by me and my brother. If you enjoy these emails, you’ll hopefully like that too. You can listen on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Google Podcasts, Stitcher, Castro (my favourite podcast app) or any other podcast app – just search for ‘Not Overthinking’.

Life Positions & Games – Transactional Analysis Part 2 | Not Overthinking

In this episode, we continue our discussion about Transactional Analysis. We recap the Parent, Adult and Child zones of thinking that we mentioned last week, and move on to talking about the 4 different Life Positions and the Games People Play.

My Favourite Things This Week

1 – Podcast – I listened to an interesting episode of The Caleb Wojcik Show this week on Personal Branding & Superhero Syndrome with Chris Ducker. They distil the relevance of having a personal brand and how to build one in a nice, succinct way – worth a listen for everyone.

2 – Podcast – Derek Sivers’ Podcast continues to provide valuable insights and pieces of advice. This episode from March is an enjoyable listen on making it in the music industry but it had lots of relevant insights, such as how the only wrong choice is to do nothing, that can be carried into the ‘non’-musical world too.

3 – Book – I started reading ‘Storyworthy‘ by Matthew Dicks this week (where the Homework for Life stuff came from). It’s one of the most engaging books I’ve ever read and has already changed my outlook on the stories that happen every single day in our lives that usually just pass us by.

Quote of the Week

I sit down every evening and ask myself: What is my story from today? What is the thing about today that has made it different from any previous day? Then I write my answer down. That’s it. That’s all I do. If you do it, before long you will have more stories than you could ever imagine.

From Storyworthy by Matthew Dicks. Resurfaced with Readwise.

This Week’s Videos