A Boot Sequence is 📝John Zdanowski's name for the story a person tells themselves on waking, borrowed from the routine an electronic system runs at startup to tell it who it is, and rewritten on purpose to reclaim the authority to narrate one's own life.
The term comes from computing, where the boot sequence is the process a machine runs when it is switched on. John applies it to people: most human boot sequences, in his telling, have been handed to them by others, by families today and by ancestors in the past, rather than chosen. A friend named Trevor introduced him to the practice, as he recounts in 📝Why the Boot Sequence. Its preamble is meant to take back personal autonomy and agency, the authority to tell one's own story, on the premise shared with 📝Storyteller Consciousness that a life reflects the story a person has been telling themselves. The preamble opens with the line that gives 📝Best Day Ever its name:
Today…is the best day ever.I am - free to do whatever I want, I am- the master of my universe and, I am - the narrator of my own epic story. The preamble creates the space to start telling a new story. John pairs it with a prompt:
What goal would justify the suffering of your life? ……….Keep trying to piece that together, you’re going to get better at it.
After the preamble comes an aim. John and his collaborators first wrote the biggest mission they could imagine:
Our mission is to accelerate humanity’s evolution to the next level of consciousness. Finding that too grand, they stepped down a level to something more pragmatic:
We are reinventing venture financing for the 21st century. That line gained force once it was coupled with a why:
As consumers become more aware of what’s in their products where they come from and where they go, every single product in every single category will need to be reinvented.
Over time the sequence grows with affirmations of a better self, some already realized and some aspirational. One such line led, among other things, to John's 📝Gardening Tips; another names who he intends to become:
I am the steward of a family farmI am a writerOur lives are a reflection of the story we’ve been telling ourselves. Everything we’ve ever accomplished, graduating high school, college, buying a car, started with a story in our heads. We ruminated on that question of suffering. We didn’t think we were suffering. Yes, we had minor inconveniences from time to time. We had to work, every day all week, in our jobs and at home. But we didn’t suffer. We learned the word Dukkha, and we imagined the biggest mission we could imagine. And we laughed. ”That’s ridiculous, you can’t do that - no one can!“ The most recent addition I’ve made to my own boot sequence is that I am a writer. And by now you must realize that today is my Best Day Ever.