A Million Miles in a Thousand Years
A Million Miles in a Thousand Years: How I Learned to Live a Better Story by Donald Miller
🚀 The Book in 3 Sentences
Donald Miller wrote a successful memoir, called Blue Like Jazz, which Hollywood wanted to turn into a movie. This is the book of him turning his life into a story for the movie.
When we think about what makes life meaningful, the answer lies in making it a better story.
This book is about how to make our lives more meaningful by living a better story.
🎨 Impressions
This is such a great book. Donald really shows that when we start making our lives like a good story, our lives become filled with meaning. There are several aspects of the book which have strong religious aspects - just to be aware. This book is a very quick read and a page-turner - you will probably find you finish it the day you start it.
How I Discovered It
This was recommended by Noah Kagan and Ali Abdaal who both often talk highly of this book. Life is more about stories then we think, it is how we communicate ideas and why we buy things based on commercials. We can learn to become better at telling stories and live our lives by living a better story.
Who Should Read It?
If you are struggling to make a big decision in life, or are unsure how to find and regain more meaning this book will give you the confidence to take the option that tells a better story.
If you want to learn more about stories, and how we can tell a better story, the key components to one and how to live one this will be a thought-provoking read.
I think you should read it, just because it is a great book and story.
✍️ My Top 3 Quotes
Fear is a manipulative emotion that can trick us into living a boring life.
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.
It wasn't necessary to win for the story to be great, it was only necessary to sacrifice everything.
📒 Summary + Notes
The Opening - the meaning of life and stories
If you watched a movie about a guy who wanted a Volvo and worked for years to get it, you wouldn’t cry at the end when he drove it off the lot, testing the windshield wipers. You wouldn’t tell your views you saw a beautiful movie or go home and put a record on to think about the story you’d seen. The truth is, you wouldn’t remember that movie a week later, except you’d feel robbed and want your money back. Nobody cries at the end of a movie about a guy who wants a Volvo.
But we spend years actually living those stories and expect our lives to feel meaningful. The truth is, if what we choose to do with our lives won’t make a story meaningful, it won’t make life meaningful either.
A Story Involves Conflict, Character Transformation and Overcoming Change
Initially, we think about wanting an easy story, but no one really remembers easy stories.
When we watch the news, we grieve at all the tragedy. But when we go to the movies, we want more of it. We somehow realise that great stories are told in conflict, but we are unwilling to embrace the potential greatness we are actually in.
A story is about someone who wants something and overcomes conflict to get it.
We choose the best story available to us at the current time. We flick through channels, like a TV, stopping on a story that offers something, anything, because people can’t live without a story, without a role to play.
We got robbed of the glory of life because we aren’t capable of remembering how we got here. The experience is so slow you could easily come to believe life isn’t that big of a deal, that life isn’t staggering. Life is staggering though; we just get used to it. When people say life is meaningless, what they really mean is their life is meaningless. Have they chosen to believe that their whole existence is unremarkable and are projecting dreary lives on the rest of us.
If the point of life is the same as the point of a story, the point of life is character transformation.
We don’t know what the point of the journey was, but we appreciate we were designed to search for and find something. Maybe the point is not the search but the transformation the search creates.
The stories we tell ourselves are very different from the stories we tell the world. Therefore a character is what he does. We only know what he does not what he thinks and feels.
People love to have lived a great story, but few people like the work it takes to make it happen. Joy costs pain.
A general rule when creating stories is that characters don’t want to change. They must be forced to change. Change presents a world of variables that are largely out of their control.
Fear us not only a guide to keep us safe. It is also a manipulative emotion that can trick us into a boring life.
No character had a vague ambition. Maybe the reason our lives seem so muddled is that we keep walking into scenes in which we, along with the people around us, have no clear idea what we want.
Living a Good Story
Watching a story is not the same as actually living a story.
Resistance is a kind of feeling that comes against you when you point towards a distant horizon, is a sure sign that you are supposed to do the thing in the first place. The harder the resistance, the more important the task must be.
An advertising commercial, in some ways, is the manipulation of the elements of a story. The commercial convinces us that we will only be content if we have a car with forty-seven airbags. So we begin our story of buying a Volvo, only to repeat the story with a new weed eater and then a new home stereo. And this can go on for a lifetime. When the credits roll, we wonder what we did with our lives and what was the meaning.
A lot of people give up on their stories. They get to the middle, and discover it is harder than they thought. They can’t see the distant shoreline anymore and wonder if their paddling is moving them forward. None of the trees behind them are getting smaller and none of the trees are getting bigger. They go looking for an easier story.
Pain binds us, but so does any conflict. It’s sort of a common purpose being arrived at through a middle that brings people together. We are a tree in a story about a forest, and the story of the forest is better than the story of the tree.
In the movies, characters don’t look at themselves in the bathroom mirrors for hours wondering why they can no longer feel. Characters in movies progress. But sometimes we don’t know what direction to move in.
A kid can make the team in a football match, a girl can want to get married. But these are not stories, they are sub-stories. When the kid makes the team and finds out that playing football is hard, he finds himself in the middle of yet another story. And the girl is going to wake up three months into her marriage and realise she is, in fact, still lonely and many of her issues haven’t gone away. They need to be careful that they don’t think the climax of their substory is the climax of the human story. The human story goes on.
“ I wondered about the story we were writing and wanted, even more, to write a better story for myself, something that leaves a beautiful feeling, even as the credits roll”
“The story we tell in the movie will never be as great as the story that was told making it happen”
We don’t need to win for the story to be great; it is only necessary to sacrifice everything
A good storyteller doesn’t just tell a better story – they invite other people into the story, giving them a better story too.
