Live a Life of Freedom by Learning How to Tell Your Story
So a funny story, here in London, and it was nuts walking around here, we went along the river here and underneath a tunnel, and I had this crazy flashback. There was this girl standing there and I saw her from probably 50 yards away, ’cause I saw the look on her face. She’s sitting in a tunnel and she has a stack full of flyers and she’s handing them to people, kind of reluctantly, because she knows, just like the person that’s walking up knows, nobody wants the flyer.
It’s a flyer like advertising bus tours or something. I felt obligated to go take a flyer from the girl because I was that girl not that many years ago. I remember trying to pass things out to people that didn’t want them and to do any little thing to make some extra money.
Fast forward from those days not being that long ago to literally being in London and being able to live a life of freedom and tour the world because I learned how to tell a story.
Because in telling a story to somebody…maybe even telling that story, if you even consider those couple of sentences just a short story of that girl doing something that she wasn’t really proud of and she was kind of embarrassed about, but just doing whatever she could to make it by that day.
You may have never passed out a flyer in your entire life, but there’s something in you that was like, “Oh. I know how that feels, I remember that job that I hated, I remember that job I hate now that I do that I maybe even get paid for well, but it’s just sucking the life out of me.”
That’s the magic of telling a specific story.
So many people don’t tell stories ’cause they’re like, “Well, nobody’s gonna relate to my story,” or “My story isn’t like anybody else’s story,” and that’s okay.
Because if I tell you a story about me having to pass out flyers or do coffee demonstrations, or anything else, it’s not so much that you have the exact same story that I have, it’s the fact that somewhere in my story, you find yourself, and that’s why we connect. You may come from a different background than I do, you may have a different upbringing, we may have a different history, but when you’ve shared an emotional experience or we felt the same emotion, maybe coming from different areas, and that’s all in telling a story.
I’m telling you, if you learn to tell your story specifically, succinctly, with the right emotional beats, you can move people to do anything. You can create the type of life that you want.
So many people think, “Well, Jimmy, what does that have to do with my job as a real estate agent? What does that have to do with my ebook that I’m trying to sell?” What does that have to do with, whatever you’re trying to do in life, the charity you’re trying to raise money for?
Everything!
Everything. If you tell a good story, you can get people to move. If you get people to move, then you can create a life that you want. You can serve the right people, you can create the right product, you can impact whoever. It’s all about telling stories.
Tell a story. Change the world. Live the life you want.