This was one of the first books I read on my new Kindle (I absolutely love it!). I’ve wanted to read this book since it came out, I had heard a lot of good things about it.

This is not a book I’d normally read. It wasn’t a principle book or even a practical one in which I could implement all the lessons I’ve learned. The whole book is about the author’s life experiences. Movie producers wanted to write a movie about his life, he agreed, and while writing the movie, he was asked to edit large parts of his life in order to make it more interesting. Through the experience he recognized that he had been living a pretty boring story.

What did he learn? That if we’re going to live interesting lives here on earth, if we’re going to live a great story, we need to do it on purpose. We need to write our stories, make them memorable, risk it all, and have as many adventures as we can.

Big Takeaway: Stop living a mediocre life and start building an amazing one on purpose.

Final Grade: 9/10 Buy it here!

Some Highlights:

• If what we choose to do with our lives won’t make a story meaningful, it won’t make a life meaningful either.

• If you aren’t telling a good story, nobody thinks you died too soon; they just think you died.

• Good stories don’t happen by accident, I learned. They are planned.
• “I tell good stories in books. I don’t live good stories.”

• People who live good stories are too busy to write about them.

• People love to have lived a great story, but few people like the work it takes to make it happen. But joy costs pain.

• The War of Art. The book is about writing, about the process of getting words onto an empty page. Pressfield said a writer has to sit down every day and write, regardless of how he feels.

• The ambitions we have will become the stories we live. If you want to know what a person’s story is about, just ask them what they want. If we don’t want anything, we are living boring stories

• And once you live a good story, you get a taste for a kind of meaning in life, and you can’t go back to being normal; you can’t go back to meaningless scenes stitched together by the forgettable thread of wasted time.

• When you stop expecting people to be perfect, you can like them for who they are.

• We don’t know how much we are capable of loving until the people we love are being taken away, until a beautiful story is ending.

I read this story by Mark Twain recently and it blessed me:

A man died and met Saint Peter at the gates of Heaven.

Recognizing the saint’s knowledge and wisdom, he wanted to ask him a question.

“Saint Peter,” he said, “I’ve been interested in military history for many years. Tell me, who was the greatest general of all time?”

Peter quickly responded, “O, that is a simple question. It’s that man right over there.”

The man looked where Peter was pointing and answered, “You must be mistaken. I knew that man on earth and he was just a common laborer.”

“That’s right,” Peter remarked, “But he would have been the greatest general of all time-if he had been a general.”

-Mark Twain

You don’t get to do life over again. You get one shot. Make sure you’re doing what you love, what you’re passionate about, and what you’re gifted at. Once you find what that is, be the best you can possibly be and watch what God will do in your life!

Who could you become if you follow your passion?