There comes a point in every story when you are ready to quit. It could be a relationship, a project, or your job. Regardless, you’ve had enough, and you are ready to “throw in the towel.”
My friend, Donald Miller, discusses the temptation to quit in his book, A Million Miles in a Thousand Years. In a chapter called “The Thing About a Crossing,” he describes something called a “story arc” or trajectory. This is the dramatic outline that nearly every great story—including yours—follows.
Here’s how it works. You start off fast, visualizing the destination. Everything seems easy. You are a little surprised but soon become over-confident. You think, This isn’t so hard. I’ve got this nailed!
But, inevitably, you come to the middle of the story. Suddenly, things get difficult. You’re working hard, but you don’t feel you are making progress. You feel trapped: You’ve come too far to go back, but you aren’t sure you have enough resources to finish.
Eventually, you push through and reach the destination. But then you realize that the destination isn’t that important. Instead, it is what happened to you on the journey—how you have changed and what you’ve become.
From this quick outline, you can see that the really important stuff happens in the middle. Don describes it this way,
[People] come out of college wanting to change the world, wanting to get married, wanting to have kids and change the way people buy office supplies. But they get into the middle and discover it is harder than they thought. They can’t see the distant shore anymore, and they wonder if their paddling is moving them forward. None of the trees behind are getting smaller and none of the trees ahead are getting bigger. They take it out on their spouses, and they go looking for an easier story” (p. 179)Continue reading on Michael Hyatt's blog...
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