Not happy with your life? Change your narrative, change your life

By David McElroy · October 27, 2011

There were two brothers who grew up in a dysfunctional family with an alcoholic father who terrorized the family as they were growing up. The father was physically and emotionally abusive, and it was worse when he was drinking. What do you figure happened to the brothers?

One of the boys grew up to become an abusive alcoholic who created another dysfunctional family. The other brother became very successful and had a loving, stable family. Each brother was later asked why he had become what he was. The alcoholic brother said, “What else would you expect me to be? I grew up watching what my father was and how he treated all of us. Wouldn’t you expect me to start drinking and become what I am?”

About himself, the successful brother said, “What else would you expect me to be? I grew up watching what my father was and how he treated all of us. Wouldn’t you expect me to become just the opposite of what I saw in him?”

The story is apocryphal, but it makes a very true point. You can’t control the facts of your life, but your interpretation of what happens is up to you. The facts aren’t always as important as the narrative you end up believing. In the story, both brothers had the same facts, but their narratives about what happened drove them to opposite kinds of lives. If you’re not happy with the life you have right now, you might or might not be able to immediately change the facts — but you can change the narrative immediately.

I started thinking about this today because of a conversation I had with a stranger a couple of days ago. He’s only 34 years old, but he considers himself a failure. He had big hopes for himself when he was younger. He married the girl of his dreams shortly after she finished law school. He started a business that he thought would one day make him wealthy and secure. He and his wife bought a house in a nice neighborhood with good schools for their future kids to attend. He was set for the future. Or so he thought.

The dream girl turned out to be more like his nightmare. His business failed and he had to declare bankruptcy. He lost the house to foreclosure. For now, he’s eking out a living as a salesman for another company. He and the former dream wife are now divorced. He feels as though he’s failed at everything.

I asked him what he was going to do next — and what he planned to do to get back to going after the dreams he had once had. He looked at me as though I was crazy.

“I don’t have a real future anymore,” he said. “I’ve screwed up so badly that I don’t have any money or credit. I can’t start a business from where I am. Nobody will give me the investment or a loan. And what woman worth having is going to want to marry someone with that losing track record?”

I said something reassuring about how he could turn things around, but I didn’t think of a really good response on the spot. I’ve thought about it for the past couple of days and I’ve wondered about a better answer. Even though I’ll probably never see him again, I finally thought of the story I’d tell.

There was once a young man who made his living as a salesman for a paper cup company. After doing that for more than a decade, he stumbled upon an opportunity to represent a company that made mixers — the kind that restaurants use to mix milk shakes. He spent the next two decades traveling the country selling mixers to restaurants. He was mildly successful, but it was nothing special. By the time he was 52 years old, he had very little to show for his years of work.

But in the man’s 53rd year, he found a couple of brothers in California running a hamburger shop that always stayed busy. In fact, the place bought eight of his mixers. After watching the operation, he decided he wanted to go into business with the guys who owned the place, so he talked them into letting him open other locations based on their original location.

Even though Ray Kroc had ever heard of McDonald’s (originally spelled MacDonald’s) until he was 52 years old, he built the company into the biggest restaurant chain in the world — and he died a millionaire many times over. (If you’d like to know more about Kroc’s life, read his entertaining autobiography, “Grinding it Out.” It’s an entertaining book.)

Whatever it is that has brought you to where you are in life, there’s still time to get to where you want to go. If you’re a failure at 30 — or 40 or 50 — remember that Ray Kroc wasn’t a success by then, either. Until he found the right opportunity, he was a relative failure. By continuing to plug away and keep his eyes open — and then taking a big chance — he found the success he’d always been looking for.

I can’t say whether it’s a true story or not, but it’s been said that Thomas Edison was asked why he didn’t give up in his search for a successful light bulb filament after trying 10,000 experiments. He supposedly said, “I have not failed 10,000 times. I have successfully found 10,000 ways that will not work.”

In your own life experiments, you might have found a path or two (or three or four) that don’t work. I certainly have. That doesn’t mean you’re a failure. As long as you have an objective and are willing to do anything it takes and keep getting up from each “failure,” you will have what you want in the end.

Your past doesn’t dictate your future. This is what I wish I could say to a discouraged stranger today.

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When I first heard about this, I thought it must be satire. When I discovered it was real, I was appalled, but I still thought it must be a one-time thing from some nutty activist. But it turns out it’s the latest bit of pandering to a bunch of far-left activists who believe that a man can become a woman if he decides to claim he’s a woman. As everybody knows, men have prostate glands. Women do not. Period. End of story. Men can get prostate cancer. Women cannot. But political activists are so eager to pretend that a man claiming to be a “trans woman” is really a woman that they are insisting that “women” be included in public health messages about the issue. This is nothing but political virtue-signaling. If you’re a man, you know which parts you have. You know that you ought to be screened. Nobody is made any safer by dragging far-left gender ideology into simple medical reality.

Every time someone tries to tighten requirements around the use of absentee ballots, I hear screams from Democrats and others on the political left that such efforts are nothing but “suppression of black voters.” These protests have never made sense to me, especially because it’s never been a secret that absentee ballot fraud goes on all the time in certain areas. (Everybody knew it when I worked in politics.) The people who engage in such fraud are rarely caught — often because the local political establishment approves of the crime — but a Democrat who won a primary election in Clay County, Alabama, last year has pleaded guilty to this sort of cheating. Terry Andrew Heflin was running for a place on the Clay County Commission. He was caught ordering seven absentee ballots in the names of various voters and sending them to his post office box — after which he used the ballots to vote absentee for himself seven time. Did he have other people cast additional fraudulent ballots? We’ll never know. But in a primary in which he was able to win with only 141 votes, it wouldn’t take many fraudulent votes to change the election. The next time you hear “civil rights activists” claim that it’s just “voter suppression” to hurt blacks which is at the root of efforts to stop this fraud, remember Terry Heflin. If you care about fair and honest elections, ballot security and voter identity should matter to you.

A state legislator in Maine has been stripped of the ability to speak in the state Legislature — and her votes are not being counted on legislative issues — all because she made a truthful social media post. Rep. Laurel Libby (R-Auburn, Maine) opposes allowing boys to compete against girls’ teams in school athletics and she’s become known for making an issue of it. On Feb. 17, she posted on Facebook about a recent example that she found outrageous. She posted side-by-side photos of a boy named John who competed last year in a state track event and won fifth place against other boys two years ago — and a photo of the same boy (now called Katie) who won first place in the same event this year against girls. Whether you find this outrageous or not, Libby is clearly being honest and truthful about the objective facts of an issue of public importance. But the state Legislature censured her. Democrats decreed that she could not speak in the House and that her votes would not count on legislation — until she apologized for the outrage of telling the truth. She refused and her constituents have been unrepresented in the state House since then. The people who promote this ideology are out of touch with reality and won’t rest until they force the rest of us to join them in this delusion. But even if you agree with “trans” ideology, you should be appalled at this heavy-handed attack on political speech.

The late Steve Jobs was at the center of our culture’s transition from analog to digital. He co-founded Apple Computer. He led the team that revolutionized personal computing with the first Macintosh. As CEO of Apple, he led the development of the iPhone and later the iPad. You would think the children of such a man would be surrounded by technology. But Jobs and his wife Laureen didn’t let their children use iPads. Their home had few screens of any kind. Even though Jobs spent most of his time developing and selling Macs and iPhones and iPads, he was home with his wife and children for dinner when he was in town. The family ate together at a simple wooden table in their kitchen — and there were no digital devices or focus on popular culture. Instead, he’s said to have guided his family toward deep discussions of art, philosophy and education — with no iPads to be found. If the man who guided the development of such products chose a different path for his own children, does that suggest that his digital experience taught him that children need human connection, not screens? And does it suggest the possibility that we might be better off if we made the same choice for our families?

For four years, Donald Trump’s supporters screamed that everything that went wrong was the fault of Joe Biden. They were sometimes right and they were sometimes delusional. (Anybody who knows me understands that I can’t stand Biden any more than I can stand Trump, just for different reasons.) But for two months, Trump has rampaged through U.S. political life — vandalizing pretty much everything in sight — and the vast majority of his supporters are silent at best. Many watch as he blows up the world economy and they make excuses for him. They’re in absolute denial, even about things that Trump is doing very intentionally. Anybody who understands economics and history knows that tariffs are a terrible idea from a pragmatic point of view. Anybody who values individual freedom knows that tariffs are massive taxes on individuals — and they’re a tool of political control over the ability of people to trade freely. Trump is the antithesis of everything which political conservatives stood for just a few years ago. It’s far past time for people who claim to be conservatives to reclaim the principles and values which they used to claim — and stop this mad man before he can accelerate the day when we experience economic and social collapse. Open your eyes to reality and reject this lying narcissist.

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