We all have our narrative.
We all have our story.
How often have you visualized it?
Before phones were a perpetual face of life, people used to scrap book, and way before that people would keep diaries and journals.
This exercise is about synthesizing the conceptual journey of 'you,' through the framework of a journey map, including the thoughts, emotions, and pain points along the way.
The main goal is to develop a richer self-knowing.
60 - 120 minutes
A nice and ample drawing surface
On the left and right edges of your canvas, label two points. On the right-most point, describe where you are today. On the left-most side is your birthdate--the first even in this story.
For the next 20 minutes think about all of the important milestones in your life. I don't want to bias and describe the nature or characteristic of what a "milestone" is, because what you write down will inform you about how you see the world.
The main thing is that each of these milestones desrcibes an action that happened.
You can also do this part as a list on a separate piece of paper and then add them in to your journey chronologically.
Let's add in more rows to your journey map. On the left-most side of your canvas, make a row for Media, People, Environment, Emotion.
Beneath each of your milestones, write down the media you were consuming at the time, the people in your life, the environment you lived in, and the emotions you were feeling at the time. The first 3 are relatively easy, but for the emotion row remember that we tend to look at our past with rose-colored glasses.
Come back to this artifact after a couple of hours or days and study it like a an alien anthropologist would. Call out what you see. Think about what you actively chose and didn't.
When I first thought of this exercise I was reading "The Terminal Beach," because I had seen Ken Jeong reading it Avengers: Endgame, because I had been watching the Marvel movies, because I found out Elon Musk was in an Iron Man movie, because I was fanboying over Elon Musk, because I was reading all the biographies I could about icons in tech, because I was... and on and on
So many factors influence our current circumstances.
But how did we get here anyway?
Take a walk down memory lane and see what comes up for you.
"You can't connect the dots looking forward; you can only connect them looking backwards. So you have to trust that the dots will somehow connect in your future. You have to trust in something - your gut, destiny, life, karma, whatever. This approach has never let me down, and it has made all the difference in my life." - Steve Jobs, CEO of Apple
Check back later for examples! - JJ 3/7/23
