Donald Miller quotes: Sir StoryBrand sounds off.
“Be encouraged.”
“We shouldn’t be afraid to embrace whimsy, that nagging idea that life could be magical; it could be special if we were only willing to take a few risks.”
“Passion about nothing is like pouring gasoline in a car without wheels. It isn’t going to lead anybody anywhere.”
“If you work hard, stay focused, and never give up, you will eventually get what you want in life.”
“Most of us are waiting. We’re waiting for something interesting to happen. And I think we’re going to wait forever if we don’t do something more interesting with our lives.”
“Your life is a blank page. You write on it. People want to join a great story. If you want to lead, tell one with your life.”
“The truth is, if what we choose to do with our lives won’t make a story meaningful, it won’t make a life meaningful either.”
“People who live great stories know failure isn’t a judgment, it’s an education.”
“Here’s the truth about telling stories with your life. It’s going to sound like a great idea, and you’re going to get excited about it, and then when it comes time to do the work, you’re not going to want to do it. It’s like that with writing books, and it’s like that with life. People love to have lived a great story, but few people like the work it takes to make it happen. But joy costs pain.”
“If what you are doing is important, you will encounter resistance. If what you are doing isn’t important, it will be easy.”
“There’s a genius part of you that wants to create.”
“Every creative person, and I think probably every other person, faces resistance when they are trying to create something good. The harder the resistance, the more important the task must be.”
“The most often repeated commandment in the Bible is ‘Do not fear.’ It’s in there over 200 times. That means a couple of things, if you think about it. It means we are going to be afraid, and it means we shouldn’t let fear boss us around. Before I realized we were supposed to fight fear, I thought of fear as a subtle suggestion in our subconscious designed to keep us safe, or more important, keep us from getting humiliated. And I guess it serves that purpose. But fear isn’t only a guide to keep us safe; it’s also a manipulative emotion that can trick us into living a boring life. The great stories go to those who don’t give in to fear.”
“Great stories move through fear.”
“All the trees are losing their leaves, and not one of them is worried.”
“When something happens to you, you have two choices in how to deal with it. You can either get bitter, or get better.”
“If you don’t feel free and be yourself, you can’t connect. Find people who accept your quirks. They’ll heal your soul.”
“What I believe is not what I say I believe; what I believe is what I do. It doesn’t matter what I say. We live for what we believe.”
“In the age of information, ignorance is a choice.”
“Sometimes you have to watch somebody love something before you can love it yourself.”
“A story is based on what people think is important, so when we live a story, we are telling people around us what we think is important.”
“Meaningful stories have lots and lots of conflict. If we avoid conflict, our stories won’t be meaningful.”
“Telling the truth is the slow, mundane, difficult route to a meaningful life. Anything else is cheating.”
“Dying for something is easy because it is associated with glory. Living for something is the hard thing. Living for something extends beyond fashion, glory, or recognition. We live for what we believe.”
“I think each of us can, through our writing, discover our super power.”
“Don’t let go of your strength or your beauty.”
“We don’t think of our flaws as the glue that binds us to the people we love, but they are. Grace only sticks to your imperfections.”
“We don’t naturally want to take responsibility for our lives. We want to give the responsibility to someone else. We blame them when our lives aren’t good.”
“When you stop expecting people to be perfect, you can like them for who they are. And when you stop expecting material possessions to complete you, you’d be surprised at how much pleasure you get in material possessions.”
“In an age in which we can project an image and score that image based on immediate Facebook and Twitter feedback, thus making a video game of life and a false reality composed of lies, what gets lost is a joyful obsession with the work we create from the purest of motives—a sheer joy in the act of creation itself that causes us to lose ourselves in something else, and in a way die to ourselves over the absolute love of a thing we are breathing into life.”
“I don’t know why it is, exactly, but the people with the healthiest self-esteem, are also the greatest at intimacy. I’m not talking about arrogant people. I’m talking about people who know they are both good and bad yet believe at the deepest level they are really good for people.”
“Relationships unlock certain parts of who we are supposed to be.”
“There are two types of men in this world. One is looking for a woman to make his life complete and the other is looking for a woman to join his complete life.”
“I have sometimes wondered if the greatest desire of man is to be known and loved anyway.”
“And so I have come to understand that strength, inner strength, comes from receiving love as much as it comes from giving it.”
“We don’t think much about how our love stories will affect the world, but they do. Children learn what’s worth living for and what’s worth dying for by the stories they watch us live. I want to teach our children how to get scary close, and more, how to be brave. I want to teach them that love is worth what it costs.”
“Sometimes I wish I could go back in time, sit down with myself and explain that things were going to be okay, that everybody loses ground sometimes and it doesn’t mean anything. It’s the way life works. This is hard to understand in the moment. You get to thinking about the girl who rejected you, the job you got fired from, the test you failed, and you lose sight of the big picture—the fact that life has a beautiful way of remaking itself every few weeks.”
“Meaning is something we experience more than we attain. It’s like finding a nice, easy current in a river that carries you through life.”
“I am something of a recluse by nature. I am that cordless screwdriver that has to charge for 20 hours to earn 10 minutes use. I need that much downtime.”
“I fell in love with books. Some people find beauty in music, some in painting, some in landscape, but I find it in words. By beauty, I mean the feeling you have suddenly glimpsed another world, or looked into a portal that reveals a kind of magic or romance out of which the world has been constructed, a feeling there is something more than the mundane, and a reason for our plodding.”
“I love writing books, I really do. If I could just quit everything and work on a book every day, I would love that most.”
“I used to write when I was in the mood or felt inspired. Anymore, I write whether I feel inspired or not. It’s a discipline. So that’s definitely different. It’s part of maturing as a person and as a professional.”
“It’s something you can actually control. With writing, it feels like it’s given to you, and when the good stuff hits, it feels like it’s coming from some other planet. And you’re just channeling it.”
“Great writers know what to cut out. It’s the same in life. Clear ambitions. Clear relationships. This is the stuff of good story.”
“The times in my life when I have been most happy haven’t been the times when I have had the most money or the most freedom or the most anything, but rather when I’ve been in love or in community or right with people.”
“We don’t need as much as we have. Hardly any of us need as much money as we have. It’s true what they say about the best things in life being free.”
“God made a whole beautiful earth and decided to put you in it, to experience all of this beauty. You can’t do that watching television all the time.”
“Our lives have a countdown clock that we can’t see. Mine reminds me to only do work that matters.”
“People love to have lived a great story, but few people like the work it takes to make it happen.”
“If the point of life is the same as the point of a story, the point of life is character transformation. If I got any comfort as I set out on my first story, it was that in nearly every story, the protagonist is transformed. He’s a jerk at the beginning and nice at the end, or a coward at the beginning and brave at the end. If the character doesn’t change, the story hasn’t happened yet. And if story is derived from real life, if story is just condensed version of life, then life itself may be designed to change us so that we evolve from one kind of person to another.”
“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.”
“I think understanding your life as a story is a really terrific way of kind of knowing where you are and knowing who you are.”
“Let’s show up to life. Let’s prove how beautiful it can really be. Let’s face the conflict, redeem it, conquer it, and allow it to mold our character.”
“Every day you live is a page. Every year, a chapter. Your life, a book. What is it about?”
Related: Seth Godin quotes.
