I don’t know about you, but keeping habits can be hard. The most consistent habit I probably have is not keeping up good habits. The second most consistent habit I have, is restarting the habits that I didn’t keep up with in the first place. Somewhere in the top 5 habits I try to be consistent about is the story finding idea I want to talk about today; Homework for Life.

The book Storyworthy by Matthew Dicks has been mentioned here on the blog more than a few times (https://wordpress.com/block-editor/post/stop365.blog/267). Aside from being an easy, down to earth read about crafting stories to tell, it gave me an exercise that has made finding present day stories really easy for me. Homework for life. You can even see it here from the TED Talk (Homework for Life | Matthew Dicks | TEDxBerkshires  ). The short explanation is this: everyday wright at least one thing that may grow into a story. Everyday. You may be in the mindset that nothing happens every day. I would ask the question, are you looking every day. The things you record does not have to be an epic story. And you don’t have to record the whole story that day. You come back to it to craft the story later. Here is an example I have from a few days ago:

“Baby Girl (my youngest daughter) asked if I used my “daddy magic” to teleport her from the couch to her bed after she fell asleep. I love that she has this level of innocence. I hate that I will have to take that away one day. If I don’t, the world will.”

I’m pretty sure I will use this small moment to highlight the times parents have to tell their kids about the world as it is, not as they want it to be. It’s an story moment that I probably wouldn’t have if I wasn’t doing Homework for Life. I wouldn’t have remember it. It would have happened and then been lost in a sea of memories.  Even bigger that finding a story, Homework for Life has helped me to focus on the here and now of my life. It’s a great way to capture present day stories and memories to keep for the rest of your life. It’s a great way to find your story on purpose.

Published by Nick Baskerville

After years of being an instructor in the military and the and the fire service, I realized I needed to improve my delivery. My students needed me to improve delivery. But how do I improve my delivery? Simple. I finally took a member of Toastmasters up on the invitation to come to a meeting. It wasn't long until I joined. Along the way of improving my skills at delivering a message, I came to understand that of all the ways to get a point across, telling stories is the best way to get it done. Around this time, another friend from Toastmasters told me about The Moth monthly story telling shows. What better way to test out my theories on storytelling. It's in my travels there to the shows that I found more and more shows, and classes, and events centered around storytelling. Despite how many people know about the storytelling world, not many people know about the storytelling world. So now, I'm out to tell the world about storytelling.

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