On Stories
Don Miguel Ruiz is a good writer because his books are short.
That’s how you know he’s good. It’s the same as Hemingway: short sentences, short words, terse prose. Don’t be fooled, the greats all have the ability to write thousand-page epics, yet none have said it better than Pascal in his Lettres Provinciales: “I would have written a shorter letter, but I did not have the time.”
Ruiz’ Four Agreements is a tiny book, maybe a hundred pages long. It packs an incredible amount of wisdom into a tight space. It can be reread every two or three years and it will have a new impact on you as your accumulated life experience catches up to the written message.
He has another book called The Voice of Knowledge which I read a while back, and while I’m not sure I’d wholeheartedly foist it upon you in the same manner as Four Agreements, it had a framework in there that has stayed with me.
This framework is what we are exploring today.
Essentially, all humans are stories. You are a human being, and in your own mind, you have a story of who you are. For each person that you know, you have a story about who that person is. Similarly, they have a story about themselves, and they have a story about who you are.
Which story is correct?
We’ll get to that.
Excerpts from Ruiz below:
“You are the author of an ongoing story you tell yourself. In your story, everything is about you, and it has to be that way because you are the center of your perception. The story is told from your point of view. You create an image for the secondary characters in your story, and you assign them a role to play. The only thing you know about the secondary characters is the story you create about them. The truth is that you don’t know anyone, and nobody knows you either.”
***
“All of the drama humans suffer is the result of believing in lies, mainly about ourselves. The first lie we believe is I am not: I am not the way I should be, I am not perfect. The truth is that every human is born perfect because only perfection exists.
We humans have no idea what we really are, but we know what we are not. We create an image of perfection, a story about what we should be, and we begin to search for a false image. The image is a lie, but we invest our faith in that lie. Then we build a whole structure of lies to support it.”
***
“All humans create their story with their own unique point of view. Why try to impose your story on other people when for them your story is not true? When you understand that, you no longer have the need to defend what you believe. It’s not important to be right or to make others wrong. Instead, you see everybody as an artist, a storyteller. You know that whatever they believe is just their point of view. It has nothing to do with you.”
***
“Respect is one of the greatest expressions of love. If other people try to write your story, it means they don’t respect you. They consider that you are not a good artist who can write your own story, even though you were born to write your own story.
The only way to change your story is to change what you believe about yourself. If you clean up the lies you believe about yourself, the lies you believe about everybody else will change. Every time you change the main character of your story, the whole story changes to adapt to the new main character.
Don’t waste your time taking anything personally. When other people talk to you, they are really talking to the secondary character in their story. Whatever people say about you is just a projection of their image of you. It has nothing to do with you.
Humans are the storytellers of God. It is our nature to make up stories, to interpret everything we perceive. Without awareness, we give our personal power to the story, and the story writes itself. With awareness, we recover the control of our story. We see that we are the authors, and if we don’t like our story, we change it.”
***
“In my story, you are a secondary character who is my creation, and I interact with you. You project what you want me to believe about you, and I modify it depending on what I believe. Now I am sure that you are what I believe you are. I might even say, “I know you,” when the truth is that I don’t know you at all. I only know the story I create about you. And it took some time for me to understand that I only know the story I create about myself.
Once I discovered that people are creating and living in their own story, how could I judge them any longer? How could I take anything personally when I know that I am only a secondary character in their story? I know that when they talk to me they are really talking to the secondary character in their story. And whatever people say about me is just a projection of their image of me. It has nothing to do with me. I don’t waste my time taking anything personally. I focus my attention on creating my own story.
When we meet somebody new, we want to know that person’s story almost right away. We ask all of the key questions: “What do you do? Where do you live? How many children do you have?” This interrogation goes both ways. We can hardly wait to tell that person our point of view, to express what we feel, to share our own story. When we experience something we like, we want to tell everybody about it. That’s why we talk so much to one another. Even when we are by ourselves, we have the need to share our story, and we share it with ourselves. We see a beautiful sunset and we say, “Oh, what a beautiful sunset!” Nobody is listening except us, but we talk to ourselves anyway.
We also have the need to know other people’s stories because we like to compare notes, or we can say that as artists we like to compare our art. We see a movie, we like it, and we ask the friend who went with us, “What did you think about the movie?” Well, maybe our friend has another point of view and tells us things about the movie that we didn’t see. Very soon we change our mind and say, “Well, that movie was not as good as I thought it was.” We are constantly exchanging information and modifying our story in this way. This is how the dream of humanity evolves. Our personal dream mixes with the dream of other dreamers, and this modifies the bigger dream of society.”
I think you get the point. My message is slightly different than his, less airy-fairy and a little more uncomfortable. The problem with a lot of these books is that they leave the door open to a complete abdication of personal accountability and responsibility, which is why they continue to sell millions of copies yet the reader doesn’t close the book a different person than when they opened it. The comfortable interpretation from the excerpts above would be, “oh, their story of me is wrong and that’s on them,” which may be true, but the truth may also be that you are a horrible shitty person who says and does horrible shitty things. This is where “don’t take anything personally” goes wrong. Some things you should take personally! The truth of the matter is always somewhere in the middle and that’s where we’re headed.
If I had read Ruiz’ book ten years ago, I don’t think any of it would’ve registered; not from lack of perspicacity but from lack of life experience.
For me, I had to wind up in the papers. That was when the genesis of this whole framework began beating me upside the head, leading to me writing the following paragraph in 2021:
“It felt like I was in the center of a maelstrom, a rapidly unfolding psychology experiment taking place around me where there was no universal reaction. That’s what blew my mind at the time: the diversity of reactions based on the exact same information, which was a government press release of alleged charges, mostly true, some false.”
On one side, I had people who were being too generous and making excuses for my behavior. On the other side, I had people who were condemning me far too harshly. In the midst of it all, I knew exactly what I had done, and the truth lay somewhere in the middle—just as it always does.
I cannot overemphasize how completely bonkers this maelstrom was making me. I had built out an Excel spreadsheet called friends.xlsx which is the type of shit you only do when you are violently strung out on Adderall, and I was laying out, like, everyone I knew, how long I’d known them, where I knew them from, whether they were an investor and how much they were in for, how often we talked, everything. And none of it made sense. In hindsight I’d say no shit, but my mind works a little differently now than it did four years ago.
At the time, I was going through life in a sort of carnival-hall-of-mirrors way, not really sure about who I was but having faith that I’d see it in the reflections of those around me. That mental model was collapsing in real-time as it became apparent this is not a valid approach to self-discovery or a principled existence. Only insecure people operate like that. As a result, I had too many mirrors all showing different reflections, I didn’t know where to look, I didn’t know which mirrors I could trust, I was losing sight of who I was and I had no process for sorting it all out.
I was ranting and raving on the phone to one of my wiser friends that nothing was making sense. The power of reason was failing me and my [retarded-ass] data-driven analysis wasn’t yielding any results. He set me straight with six words:
“Greg, you can’t generalize about humans.”
That was that. I scrapped friends.xlsx and kept moving. Rather than write more about the conclusions I drew at the time, I will put it in the same terms as one of Bacon’s essays: “Heraclitus saith well in one of his enigmas, Dry light is ever the best. And certain it is, that the light that a man receiveth by counsel from another, is drier and purer, than that which cometh from his own understanding and judgment; which is ever infused, and drenched, in his affections and customs.”
To try and assume that the people around you are going to view everything from a rational lens is wrong. We aren’t robots. We draw conclusions on feelings and not facts. And those feelings are drenched in affections and customs, what I guess Heraclitus would call wet light, where our genetics and upbringing and cumulative life experience shape all new information we receive before it’s processed in our conscious mind.
The output of this process is Ruiz’ story.
This is why you really cannot care too much what other people think. I’m not saying to be a selfish and thoughtless person, but the point is that you cannot ever manage someone else’s perception of you. I will say it again, louder, for the people in the back: you cannot ever manage someone else’s perception of you. If you have realized this same principle then you are nodding your head furiously because you are remembering all the times you drove yourself crazy trying to do this exact thing.
There are people who have a favorable view of you. You are a positive story in their life. Everything you do, all your words and actions will be construed and filtered through that lens. When you fuck up or do something awful, they will come to your defense, even to the point of fault. Their perception is their perception and you are powerless to shape it.
On the other side there are people who have an unfavorable view of you. Their story of you is negative. There is nothing you can do right in their eyes. You can go around being an incredibly wonderful human and they will invent ulterior motives for all your actions. If you cure cancer, they will say you’re putting doctors out of work. Their perception is their perception and you are powerless to shape it.
In the middle of it all is you. You have a story about yourself.
Where does the truth lie?
Who the fuck knows!
It would be wonderful to say that your story about yourself is the most accurate one, but there’s no guarantee of that either. Have you ever been talking to someone and you’re listening to them tell you about themselves, or something they did and their reasoning for doing it, and all you are thinking is “bruh—you are WHACKED. Good Lord. This man is so off-base about himself that it’s hard to listen to.” It’s usually people rationalizing something they did that wasn’t right, or defending why they were correct in an argument and the other person is wrong, or something where lust or love is steering them awry. Symptoms of an unhealthy mind. If you were to talk to me in the summer of 2020 I was that guy, doing a lot of wrong things but justifying and rationalizing and making excuses as to why it was okay, and so I guess you could say I’ve become an expert in spotting when someone else is living a lie. These Blind Spot things, my brother, they can really screw your life up if you aren’t careful.
What are you to do with all this information?
First, you have to be careful around both the good-story-people and bad-story-people listed above.
The friend with the good story of you, he’s never going to hold you accountable. The one with the bad story, he’s never going to give you any credit.
Right is right. Wrong is wrong. The former will tell you you’re right when you’re wrong. The latter will tell you you’re wrong when you’re right. Both are pushing you further away from the truth, and as a result, both are equally dangerous.
Also, you will realize that some people’s story of you isn’t unique—it’s the tint of the lenses they wear when they’re assessing human nature—and that they’re either overly naive or overly broken, damaged and hateful with how they view everyone’s actions. But that’s neither here nor there.
The best answer to this whole conundrum that I have come up with, can be summed up once again by a different one of Bacon’s essays:
“A little philosophy inclineth man’s mind to atheism, but depth in philosophy bringeth men’s minds about to religion.”
All roads lead to God.
The power of reason can only take you so far. Dogmatic belief in free will works until it doesn’t and you slowly shift towards determinism. If it isn’t obvious from the discussion above, there is no objective truth. People have their own story of you, you have your own story of yourself, and guess what? Every single one of these stories is dead-ass wrong.
Stop worrying about what other people think. Do right by the driest light known to man, or at least to most men: God. It takes some longer than others, but every wise and well-read man eventually arrives at the exact same endpoint.
Once you internalize this framework, navigating relationships becomes easier. You have to hold yourself accountable first and foremost. When you are being a piece of shit, destroy yourself, suffer, do whatever it takes to wring the evil out of yourself. Never let yourself off the hook, even for your thoughts, when you are completely alone…because you are never truly alone.
Once you are consistently correcting your behavior on this level, right speech, right view, right resolve, all the Noble Eightfold Path stuff, you are permitted to completely stop giving a fuck about what the next man’s story of you is. Right is right, wrong is wrong, and when you are right, you are right.
As Ruiz wrote, this is when you will stop painting stories of other people, because all your energy is directed away from judging others and focused instead on judging the man in the mirror. It is a full-time job.
This is the path to peace of mind. Life becomes infinitely more freeing when you give up on trying to paint others a story of yourself. I will leave you with a quote from Montaigne that drives the point home.
“Some of my friends have at times taken it upon themselves to school and lecture me most outspokenly, either of their own accord or at my invitation: a service which, to a healthy mind, surpasses, not only in utility but in kindness, every other office of friendship. I have always welcomed it with the most open arms both of courtesy and gratitude. But to speak of it now in all honesty, I have often found both in their blame and their praise so much false measure that I should not have been much amiss if I had done what according to their notions was wrong, instead of what they considered right. Those of us, especially, who live retired lives, exposed only to our own gaze, should have a fixed pattern within us by which to test our actions and, according to this, sometimes hug and sometimes correct ourselves. I have my own laws and my own court to judge me, and I refer to these rather than elsewhere. I certainly restrain my actions out of deference to others, but I understand them only by my own light. None but you know whether you are cruel and cowardly, or loyal and dutiful. Others have no vision of you, but judge of you by uncertain conjectures; they see not so much your nature as your artifices. Do not rely on their opinions, therefore; rely on your own.”
Serve God,
GB
