Austin, Texas, some years ago: I'm working as a pedicab driver for the city's weeklong music-tech-film festival. My friend's fanny pack at my waist is close to bursting with bills, the card reader dongle on my phone is getting a heavy workout, I'm scarfing down ham and cheese sandwiches whenever I can find a spare moment. It's a great time thanks to all of the frivolous corporate spending in every direction.

I receive a thunderstorm of applause and tips upon chauffeuring three women up a long hill at the light of dawn. I help some singer whose stock was on the rise film a promotional video by driving her around in the brisk midday rain. I park outside of a music venue at sunset to take a little phone break, and I see an email from a professor:

"I was wondering if you might be willing to share a copy of your first paper with me. You did a great job, and I would like to use it as an example paper to share with students."

I lean back as best as I can on my bicycle seat, hands tucked into my red hoodie, and I beam a big smile up to the empty night sky. Work hard, play hard, get paid hard.

A few months later, I lost a significant portion of the money I earned that week to a phone scam. Womp womp! I didn't let that stop me from spending my post-graduation summer in South America, zagging south when so many of my friends zigged east to Europe.

To live a great story is to fully engage with all of the vicissitudes of life, the ups and the downs and the all arounds. It's available to everyone who wants to live for something greater than themselves. That's the why: you live in connection with others. As you elevate yourself, the people around you benefit as well. Your personal integrity, your steadfast persistence, your abundant kindness is infectious. You recognize the energetic flow in all things and you allow life to shape you as much as you shape it. You are a vessel, a conduit.

Living a great story might require you to recontextualize your story so far. Everyone has low moments. Sometimes the proverbial wasp stings you, sometimes you kick the proverbial hornet's nest. You might be tempted to make your story one of self-loathing, guilt, shame, or self-pity; you might not want to own your past. But that's the coward's way. More low moments are coming, both in and out of your control. If you cannot accept your past lows, and you cannot view your past self with love and gratitude, you've set up a pattern to fall back into the next time you face the wasps and the hornets. Living a great story requires your full acceptance of everything that has happened to you and everything you did, so that you may accept everything that's coming, the good and the bad.

I'm glad that I got scammed. I learned to not get taken for a ride so easily. I learned how counterproductive it is to act from a panicked state. I learned that losing a sizable amount of money isn't the end of the world. When you live a great story, you get to decide the meaning of what's come so far.

So, once you've gotten right with your past, how do you live a great story? There's a book's worth of frameworks and theories here, and I don't want to give a definite answer. I don't know what works for you, I only know what works for me. You might live a great story by doing something different, or embracing this moment, or accessing the good in the suck, or breaking early, failing quickly, and thinking abundantly, or agencymaxxing, or something even better.

Regardless of your approach, remember that your story is exactly one lifetime long, it's not over at twenty or thirty or forty or fifty. Do whatever is necessary so that you can just keep livin your great story.

You are the main character. Act like it.