Dave Evans

Your internal narrative really matters.

And so story crafting is about picking carefully the story that you are telling yourself and living into because it has a profound effect, both on the life you live and the quality of your experience of it.

Of course, that story has to be true.

It can't be a fantasy story.

We're not fans of magical thinking, but we are big fans of picking the story that's truest and most generative to give you the best possible chance of becoming fully alive.

Well, you know, Stanford is, of course, an elite university.

But what people lose track of is, you know, 80 percent of our students are on financial aid.

So they're not prep school kids.

And by no means are they all highly resourced.

We have lots of first-generation students or under-resourced students who really suffer the imposter syndrome.

Like, man, do I really belong here?

And there are a group of people in the education school and psychology department who work on intervening in ways that might be helpful to these students.

And one of the results was it turned out as short as a 15-minute intervention with a first-generation student

on the narrative they're telling themselves can have a transformative effect that lasts not only all four years of college, but five or 10 years after.

And the narrative simply is not, yeah, you're under-resourced and all those guys who went to the prep school are going to kick your butt.

That story is then replaced by the reason you're here is you're highly capable.

You can do this work and there are lots of resources to help you that you can avail yourself of.

And if that store, that alternate narrative is offered to that first-gen student by another first-gen student two or three years older than them for whom it has worked, they believe it.

And literally that 15 minutes, their performance changes permanently.

Well, if you ever take a look at your neighborhood fire hydrant, there's a little, you know, cover over the nozzle where the water comes out on one side.