An Introduction to Stories by Shiv

Narratives to better understand our world.

This newsletter is where I collect narratives each week, synthesizing ideas sourced from wide-ranging mediums. In a single post, we could discuss a podcast about training professional athletes and how that might relate to a fiction novel depicting racial identity in the 1970s. Finding similarities in the dissimilar, each one redefining our understanding of the world and reality.

After all, if there is no objective truth to reality, what’s the truth you want to tell?

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The “why” behind your goals is important to keep tabs of, because oftentimes goals seem so important for all the wrong reasons. We have goals to be able to say “I’ve done this”, in an effort to make sure we haven’t simply filled our days with no purpose. This is important, of course. BUT…

What I have found is that you will undeniably learn new things in your pursuit of a goal. For me, these things redefine my thoughts, perceptions, and feelings of the world around me. So it’s only healthy that, at the very least, they also challenge the goal itself. 

Here’s the dilemma: I find myself caring about these goals in a way that completely ignores the journey to achieving them. Sound familiar? Here’s why we should reflect on the journey:

1. We all have limited time in any given day and in our lives, therefore...

2. We should only focus on that which truly matters to the goals (or micro goals)

The latter allows us to ensure that we are not creating things for the sake of creation. We are not wasting time, energy, and mental space on those activities that don’t matter.

We build a life of meaning over matter.

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Hi, I’m Shivani. Most generically, my goal is to hone the craft of storytelling. It’s the way I process everything around me. This pushes me to consume many stories — in the broadest definition of the word; stories from podcasts, books, advertisements, etc. With each narrative, I gain a new insight on the craft that I can then apply to the stories I create — these also have a broad definition; stories for my job as I build brands, stories for young cousins as they start to build their own, and even stories for myself to make sense of the world and how to best live this life.