I once worked at an insurance company where the owner smoked six cigars a day, ten feet from my desk. By afternoon the smoke was in my clothes, my hair, the paperwork. I went home smelling like his day and wondering what had happened to mine.
Unhappy would have been fine. I was stuck. I couldn’t see a version of the future where things got better, so I quit looking for one.
The strange part is that during those same years, I had no patience for a boring story. I walked out of In the Bedroom twenty-five minutes in. I wouldn’t give two hours to a story that went nowhere, but I was giving it years of my life.
Donald Miller defines a story as a character who wants something and has to overcome conflict to get it. Any story you love fits. But notice what else they share: they’re full of things we would never choose. Frodo doesn’t want the ring. William Wallace doesn’t want a war. The conflict is the whole point, because it’s the only thing that changes the character. Nobody finishes a great story as the same person who started it.
That’s why I loved conflict on the page and ran from it in real life. On the page, it cost me nothing. In my own life, change hurt, so I’d settled into a rut. Zig Ziglar used to say the only difference between a rut and a grave is that the ends are kicked out.
I know that line because Ziglar was one of the voices that got me out. I started listening to him and Brian Tracy. I read everything I could get my hands on. Somewhere in there I found Miller’s books, and his question stuck: what kind of story are you living?
If I was ever going to move up, and eventually out, I had to get good at the job I already had — prove myself through the smoke and the smell. So I learned the work cold. Then a friend who’d watched me do it asked for my resume. Not long after, I walked out of that office for the last time, and into the career I have now.
I walked out of In the Bedroom because nothing was happening to the character. For a few years, nothing was happening to me either. The difference is that I’d been blaming the smoke.
