Highly sought after national speaker and New York Times bestselling author Donald Miller spoke at Vanguard’s first “Late Night” event of the year. Some of Miller’s bestselling books include Blue Like Jazz, A Million Miles in a Thousand Years and Storyline.
“Understanding Self and Story” was the topic for the evening. Miller encouraged students to discover what it would look like for them to live a meaningful life. He spoke of the obstacles that would keep them from their passion and how to overcome them.
A lot of Miller’s points dealt with the issue of identity. He told students not to identify with their failures or their successes. He described times when writing became less fun and more challenging because his identity was in his past success. This identity caused a need to meet the expectations he assumed people now had for his writing. When he finally stopped worrying about impressing people and just got back to writing the way he knew and enjoyed, he found success again.
Dealing with another area of identity, Miller described the origin of people’s fear of rejection using a simple diagram his friend created. He talked about each individual’s self becoming suppressed from a young age by shame and then the individual creating a personality to hide the shame. He described shame to include any characteristic or action of an individual that, in reality or just in the individual’s mind, will cause society to reject them in some way.
After describing the obstacles and giving personal examples of how he overcame them, Miller reminded students to find what is meaningful to them in life. What are their passions? He challenged students to just jump: to take the first step toward what is meaningful for them without fear of change or what people will say and think. Stop worrying about what other people think and be yourself even if some people reject you because of it, he said.
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