When I was 13 years old, a single story changed the course of my life.
But to understand it, I need to take you back in time to a strange experiment from decades ago.
Neuroscientist Michael Gazzaniga was studying patients who had their corpus callosum surgically severed. His experiments led him to hypothesize that the left hemisphere has a specialized system he called The Interpreter, whose responsibility is to find clear cause and effect.
Its job is simple: To take scattered, seemingly random data and facts about the world in front of you and stitch them into a coherent story that feels true.
The problem is that we’d rather have a story that’s wrong than no story at all.
For me, The Interpreter began telling a story when I was young: I wasn’t very smart. My sister was the smart one. I had to be something else.
And then, confirmation bias kicked in. The story determined what “counted” as evidence. Eventually, the story itself constrained my world.
In this piece, I talk about the stories we tell ourselves and the empowering truth that allowed me to confront my own:
You wrote the stories. Which means you can rewrite them.
The most important story in life is the one you tell yourself.
Make sure it’s true.
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