Christian essayist Donald Miller has a practice that helps him be more focused and productive: He starts each morning by reading his own eulogy.
“I’m very, very aware of what my personal story is about and what I’m supposed to be working on,” the New York Times best-selling author said of his daily ritual. “And it takes me from kind of cluttered and muddled in my thinking to very, very clear in my thinking and my decisions are reverse-engineered from that process.”
His second book, 2003’s “Blue Like Jazz: Nonreligious Thoughts on Christian Spirituality,” was a collection of essays and observations and sold more than 1 million copies. His latest, “Hero on a Mission: A Path to a Meaningful Life,” publishes early next month.
If Mr. Miller’s own results are any indication, the process works: He not only has sold more books than most authors only dream of but also has built a business teaching people and company teams how to use storytelling to engage with customers and prospective clients. “Building a Story Brand: Clarify Your Message So Your Customers Will Listen,” a 2017 guide to such marketing, is now a must-read for aspiring copywriters.
“Hero on a Mission” takes that notion of storytelling and applies it to individual lives. He said a decade-long experiment of applying principles such as the daily eulogy proves the book’s concepts work.
Mr. Miller, 50, asserts that finding and living one’s own story is key.
“When we see a movie, or we read a book about a hero who [has] overcome something, it gives us a deep sense of meaning and purpose while we’re [viewing or] reading it,” he said. “What if we actually took the tools that screenwriters and storytellers use to model our own lives into a good story?”
Mr. Miller said he drew from the work of Holocaust survivor Viktor Frankl, who he said “gives a very practical application” of a way to create meaning in life, conceding “it’s sort of hidden in the clinical language” the late Viennese psychologist used in works such as 1946’s “Man’s Search for Meaning.”
He summarized Frankl’s approach as suggesting that people “find a project that demands your time and attention, and share that project with others, or, get interested in things outside yourself, such as art, nature, or community.”
Another point Mr. Miller said he borrowed is to “expect that life is very difficult and has challenges and that those challenges have a redemptive side to them, they make us stronger, or more tender.”
He said adopting that perspective changed his life: “It’s not that every day is a happy day. Some days are terribly sad, but at the same time, there’s not been a day since I’ve applied that framework to my life where I haven’t at least experienced a deep sense of purpose and meaning.”
“I think where most people go wrong is they let culture write the script for them,” whether it’s parents in childhood, or one’s education, or finding a career and a partner,” Mr. Miller said. “The biggest landmine, if you will, is in thinking that somebody’s supposed to give me a story rather than me actually sit down and creatively think of one for myself.”
The author contends it’s never too late to find purpose in life and act on it.
“We each get to live as many stories as we want,” Mr. Miller said. “If you’ve got a week left on the planet, you can live a really great story. You can live a story about a heroic person who chooses to pick up the phone and connect and confess to people that they’ve neglected or hurt and attempt the climactic scene of reconciliation before you leave this earth.”
