How To Find Viral-Worthy Stories In Everyday Moments

Doing Homework for Life is simple.

Every day, you take five minutes to reflect:

If you had to tell a story from today - a five-minute story about something that took place over the course of the day, what would it be?

And all you have to do is write one sentence about it.

Finding stories is a skill - and you need to practice it every day.

And that's the beauty of Homework for Life.

It's simple enough to do even on your busiest days.

Two columns: date and story.

Five minutes, one story, one sentence.

And once you start doing it, time slows down.

You start to recognize storyworthy moments in the simplest things.

You become appreciative of moments that for years you've overlooked.

And you start to assemble a list of hours of future stories - all in five minutes per day.

Framework #2: Crash and Burn

The goal of Crash and Burn is to clear the ideas clogged up in your head and get them onto the page.

Matthew Dicks calls it "dreaming from the end of your pen."

It's a simple five-minute stream of consciousness writing exercise with three rules:

Rule #1: You must not get attached to any one idea

During your Crash and Burn session, new ideas are going to fly from every direction.

Ideas you forgot about, never thought about, and everything in between.

Lean into this - every time a new idea pops up, let it take over.

Rule #2: You must not judge any thought or idea that appears in your

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Every idea that pops into your head must make it onto the page.

Give yourself permission to spill your guts on the page.

Also - handwriting, grammar, punctuation, capitalization - forget about all of it.

Rule #3: You cannot allow the pen to ston movina

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This is the most important rule.

Whether you're freewriting or on a keyboard, you cannot stop.

If you feel yourself slowing down, start listing items until they trigger a memory.

• Fruits

• Colors

• People

• Numbers

Dicks recommends doing Crash and Burn every day for 15 minutes.

The freewritina session lasts five minutes. And Document player for: How To Find Viral-Worthy

afterw; Stories In Everyday Moments

ling it over,

finding the storyworthy threads.

The first time I did this, it blew my mind how many stories and ideas I found.

Framework #3: First, Last, Best, Worst

The third and final framework is my favorite.

As you go about your life, you forget many of your storyworthy moments.

They're like gaps in your memory, waiting to be filled.

And First, Last, Best, Worst is built to fill in those gaps.

To do this exercise, make a grid with five columns along the top:

• Prompt

• First

• Last

• Best

• Worst

And under the prompt column, list any of the following prompts:

• Pet

• Job

• Skill

• Gift

• Book

• Travel

• Trouble

• Advice

• Investment

For each prompt, find your first, last, best, and worst moment or memory for each of them.

This create an ABSURD amount of raw material for storytelling

To reflect on what you wrote, look at each box in the grid to find anything worth keeping.

Hint: look for repeat

Aaaaand that's it!

I've been practicing these three exercises for a while.

And now I have TOO MANY stories to tell.

Block some time today and get started.

Here's each of them so you can remember:

• Homework for Life

• Crash and Burn

• First, Last, Best, Worst