thank you thank you I'm having dinner with my family a couple years ago I'm sitting with my wife Alicia my daughter Clara who was five at the time and my son Charlie who's two and we're eating dinner except Charlie is not eating dinner he we're having chicken nuggets and he is taking the chicken nuggets as we hand them to him and he's throwing them on to the floor every chicken nugget I hand to him ends up on the floor and I have the only dog in the world that does not eat table scraps so she's sitting at my feet and these like poultry bombs are exploding around her and she's just staring at them like they're nothing and I'm losing my mind because my daughter has never thrown food she's perfect she's just like me but charlie is not and for whatever reason he throws food at every meal and so I turned to Alicia and I say what are we gonna do about Charlie throwing food and she tells me that she's going to the pediatrician tomorrow anyway so she'll get some strategies and I say great let's bring in an expert and solve this problem so the next night we're back at the table and we're having dinner and tonight it's peas and charlie is throwing peas and he is honestly like an olympic food throwing champion he can make Peas go from there like antigravity peas he gets them from the dining room into the kitchen and he thinks it's the greatest thing in the world and again I'm losing my mind so I turned to Alicia and I say what did the doctor say about Charlie and the food and she puts her fork down she looks at me and she says the doctor said that when Charlie throws food we have to take all the food away from him so he'll learn and I know that's going to be really hard for you and that was true it was going to be really hard for me but I wasn't sure why she was saying that so I asked her why do you say that it's gonna be hard for me and she says to me I know that when you were a boy you always didn't have enough food to eat and for you to take food away from Charlie is going to be a hard thing and that was true too but I had never told Alicia that that was the secret that I kept closest to my heart because when you're poor and you're hungry the last thing you do is tell anyone in the world that you're poor and hungry but my wife had spent eight years with me and she had heard my stories and she'd listen to me talk about my childhood and she had figured it out and then she told me that every morning when I pack Clara's lunchbox for preschool I put more food in that lunchbox than a kid could possibly eat in a day and then when I leave for work she comes down the stairs and she unpacked the lunchbox and she's never wanted to tell me because she knows how important it is to me to be able to send to my kids to school with enough food every day I'm sitting at my dining room table and I have a moment with my wife where I realize she knows me better than any person in the world she probably knows my heart better than I do here's the thing about that story we have these moments in our lives all the time it sounds special and unique and beautiful but they're everywhere these moments exist for all of us they are like dander in the wind they're all around us and we miss them and when we happen to see one we can't catch them and we don't know how to collect them a few years ago I found a way to collect them accidentally and it changed my life and I think it can change yours in 2011 July I told my first story on a stage I went to New York City I stood on a moth stage and competed in a moth story slam the moth is a nonprofit organization that produces storytelling shows all over the world it's people like me who stand on a stage and we tell a true story about our lives without notes on a theme they have assigned I went to the moth because my friends told me I would be great at story time because I have lived a life of horrible misfortune and that is sadly true I was arrested and tried for a crime I did not commit there was a time in my life when I was in jail there was a time in my life when I was homeless there was a time when I was sharing a bedroom in the home of a family of Jehovah Witnesses with their indoor pet goat I was the victim of a horrific crime that left me with two decades of PTSD and I've actually died twice and had to be brought back to life both times by paramedics so my friend said like you have the worst life go to the moth it's going to be amazed and so I did I stood on a stage I told the story about pole-vaulting in high school I won the slam but more importantly the moment I started speaking to microphone I fell in love with storytelling and I began storytelling with great vigor I was driving to New York all the time I started going to Boston I was telling stories for the moth constantly other shows began to ask me if I would tell for them as well my wife and I began a storytelling organization in Hartford so I could tell more stories and today I tell stories all over the country and all over the world and one of the things I realized right away or two things one was I need more stories because I love doing this but I'm gonna run out if I don't start hunting down stories but the other thing I realized was the stories that I thought were going to be great the ones my friends thought were gonna be great they're okay but the story I tell you about Charlie that little story that little fleeting moment that dander in the wind those are the stories that people love because if I tell you the story about the time I died on the side of the road and the paramedics brought you you know brought me back you don't sit there and go I remember the time I died on the side of the road I but if I tell you Charlie's story and the food all of you have a secret close to your heart and maybe it's a secret you never want someone to know or maybe it's a secret you're dying for someone to find out and we all know what hunger is so you can relate to that and we all have had a time in our lives when we want our children's future to be better than our past and so those tiny moments connect and I decided I have to find those little moments I have to find the small stories that I think exist in my life so I can stay on stages so I gave myself a homework assignment this is what I did I decided that every night before I went to bed about 11:30 I'm gonna sit down and I'm gonna reflect upon my day and I'm gonna ask myself if I had to tell a five-minute story from something that happened today as benign as it might be what was the most story like moment from my day now I don't write the story down because that would be too much all I do is write a snippet of it I actually use Excel because I'm sort of an insane person so this is my Excel spreadsheet from the most recent days and you can see that what I write down is about a sentence or two sometimes it's just a collection of words but there are things that mean something to me and you can see that some days I have more than one item and so I sat down and I just started doing that not knowing what the results were going to be this project turned into magic because I discovered that if you apply this to your life if you sit down and honestly look for stories in your life you begin to develop a lens a storytelling lens that is sharp and clear and you start to see that there are stories in your life all the time there are moments when you connect with someone and your heart moves or your position on something changes or you discover something for the first time and you also discovered that there's beauty and import in your life that you never imagined was there and so like if you look at my most recent one which is the last one from just a few days ago it says walked Kaylie at 2:00 a.m. underwear birds rain and beauty and so my dog woke me up at 2:00 o'clock in the morning Kaylie she doesn't do it very often but she wakes me up it's clear she has to pee I'm wearing a pair of boxers and I say alright I'll bring onto the lawn and Electra pee and so I bring her out onto the lawn and apparently she did not plan on just peeing because she started walking down the block and again I'm only in boxers but I'm thinking it's 2 o'clock in the morning this can't go that bad and so I walk with my dog in a pair of boxers around the block and it's a busy block and if you've ever been out at 2 o'clock in the morning you'll know that the birds are louder at two o'clock in the morning than any other time they sing their hearts out at two o'clock in the morning and so I'm walking with my dog and when I reached the furthest point on the block from my house it begins to suddenly rain on me and so I have a dog and I have boxers and I have the rain and I'm far away from my house and five years ago I would have been angry about this moment I would have seen nothing in this moment but annoyance but I have that lens I've developed it and I stopped on the block and I realize my dog's 14 years old she is my best friend and I know that she's not going to be around for much longer and this might be the last time in my life that I walk in the rain with this dog and so what would have been annoying and forgotten is now something that I have written down and I will own for the rest of my life I don't know what else happened on that day but I look at that and I am right back on that sidewalk with the birds and the rain and my dog and one I am lying on my death bed at 100 I'll be able to get right back there I don't lose a day because of it it's magic it's something that I never expected to happen and then other amazing things happen because when you start to look for stories in your life and you will find that lens you suddenly have all these stories well up from your childhood and your youth that you had forgotten because now I'm thinking about to my dog in the rain and suddenly you remember another moment with another dog when you were 12 year old boy and suddenly that gets on my list too and I start to have the memories come rushing back so quickly you have to brush them away all of this happens because I sit down every night and ask myself what's the five minute story from today what makes today different than the last night and then I write it down whether you use an Excel spreadsheet whether use a notebook whatever you use you write it down and then suddenly you have more stories than you can imagine I know hundreds of professional storytellers and they think it's crazy how many stories I have and I think it's crazy that they don't do what I tell them to do but even if you don't want to collect stories other amazing things happen the best phone call I probably have ever had in my life happened about a year ago a woman called me and when I picked up at the phone she was already crying and I thought oh no something's terrible happened she doesn't tell me who she is she just starts crying and talking to me she tells me that she took a workshop with me six months ago I had no memory of her and she heard my talk I told her to do this homework for life and she did it she calls me and she tells me she's 50 years old and she has never felt like she was an important person in this world she had always felt like she was just like everybody else and she was going to go out quietly she started doing my homework for life and she said she feels like an important person for the first time in her life she feels like that her story is part of a bigger story and that if she wasn't there things would fall apart she tells me that she can't wait to get out of bed to find out what the thing is going to be that makes that day different than the last it's the best phone call I've had and I didn't get her name because she hung up while she was still crying but you suddenly discover that you are not an unimportant person and that your days aren't meaningless and just like the same and you suddenly end up with a bounty of stories but even if you're not interested in collecting stories like I am and even if you already think you're a very important person in this world and you don't need any further evidence there's a secret there's a there's a magical elixir that I never expected in doing this by doing this everyday by doing my homework suddenly things have slowed down for me we live in a day and age when I hear people say all the time time flies that last school year went by like a blink I can't even remember what I did last Thursday and I used to feel just like that and then I started doing my homework and the world slowed down for me days creep by and agonizingly slow speeds and I cannot tell you how lucky I am for this I don't ever lose another day in my entire life because of what I do I can touch any one of those moments in the three years I've been doing that and I am right back in that moment I will always have it I will be on my death bed at 100 looking at my Excel spreadsheet it will probably be a hologram by then hovering over my head but I can scroll through it and I will be back in every moment of my life every one of those critical moments it's the greatest blessing I have ever given myself and I did it by accident I am one step above an idiot I just found something by mistake while desperately looking for stories and it has changed my life and so I've told thousands of people over the last two years to do this and only hundreds have done it a very small amount because it requires two things that are sadly lacking in the world today it requires commitment and faith commitment that you will sit down every night and reflect upon your day and it sounds crazy that you won't give five minutes to it but you won't you will give two hours to law and order and Law and Order SVU shows that I will tell you they always end the same way guilty or not and almost always guilty you will give your life over to these things but you won't give five minutes at the end of the day to what I promise will change your life the other thing that you lack is faith because it doesn't happen instantly it didn't happen instantly for me the items that I wrote down early they're not very good I wasn't seeing the moments like I can today because that lens that storyteller lens was not sharpened and was not refined but I was so desperate to find stories I kept going it might take you a month it might take you six months it might take you a year of giving up five minutes a day it requires the faith to know that you will eventually begin seeing these moments in your life and they'll begin to make you feel like an important person I was here at Cal Poly two weeks ago teaching and I was getting ready to go into the class I took the elevator up to the second floor and in that elevator ride a woman said something to me and I said wow this one minute elevator ride has just changed my life I think of things newly and I now have a new story to tell five years ago I would not remember that elevator ride but now I will always be on that elevator I will never forget that woman and I will never forget the things she said to me no matter how old I am so I give this homework to you it's homework for life I am an elementary school teacher I feel like I have the right to give it so I am assigning you homework for life five minutes a day is all I'm asking at the end of every day whenever your day comes to an end you sit down you reflect upon your day you ask yourself what is the most important moment of this day if I had to stand on a TED stage until a five minute story what would the moment be as benign and boring as it may be it's the best one from that day and then you write it down you don't write it all down you write a few sentences at best something that will keep you moving something that'll allow you to do it the next day and if you have commitment and you have faith it will change your life you will become a person who discovers that you are important you'll discover that there are meaningful life-changing moments happening to you all the time that dander and the wind that is blowing by you it will blow by you for the rest of your life unless you find a way to collect it to reach out and get it in your hands and find a way to keep it in your heart forever so I encourage you to do my homework for life in my heart I know that most of you aren't and it's gonna break my heart that you won't but here's the one great thing if you do it and you change your life there's a little added bonus because you will know that you are better than everyone else that you are a better person than all the people who spent their evening watching television instead of giving five minutes of their time and I'll tell you there's nothing better than walking through the life knowing that you are better than everyone around you and so for that alone do my homework for a life and if it changes your life to which it will just consider that a bonus thank you you