Your life is shaped and influenced by the people that you live with, work with, and hang out with. People are definitely the single biggest source of influence in each other’s lives. If you think of your life as a story, the people in your life are the characters in the story. Just like you can learn from characters in any good novel, you can learn many things from the characters in your own story.
I met a woman once that kept a journal specifically about things she was learning from the people, or characters, in her life. She had just spent a summer backpacking in Europe and the pages of her journal were filled with biographies of the charcters that she met that summer. Some were more influential than others, of course, but she was intentional about learning from even characters that showed up in her story for just a few minutes. I was so impressed by her commitment to learning from living and I was inspired to create a similar journal just for the characters in my own life.
Since starting my own characters journal, I have learned more from people than I ever thought possible. I began the journal by listing the main characters that were frequently a part...