Compelling and Effective | A Million Miles in a Thousand Years: What I Learned While Editing My Life |...

Don Miller telling his history of ourselves | A Million Miles in a Thousand Years: What I Learned While Editing My Life | Donald Miller

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	• A Million Miles in a Thousand Years: What I Learned While Editing My Life Donald Miller Thomas Nelson, 2009 - 288 pages average customer review:based on 249 reviews view larger image
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highly recommended

Inspires me to create a better story

I had never heard of Donald Miller before a friend sent me a link to his blog about creating a story for the new year instead of making new year's resolutions. I loved the blog post and decided to check out this book. As soon as I started reading I couldn't put it down. The honest style of writing and the touching narrative of the stories all woven together really captured my heart. I've been caught in my own writer's block of sorts and seeing how Don created a better story for his own life was really an inspiration to me. I highly recommend this book to anyone who is trying to get unstuck and create a reason for getting out of bed every day!

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Compelling and Effective

I feel that this is one of Donald Miller's most compelling and effective books.

As always, the author makes it easy to relate to him, talking as a sort of everyman who lived the first portion of his life seeking insulation from discomfort and living in daydreams. He maintains a relatable prose, conveying a couch potato-like, unassuming personality and staying very down-to-earth (with an occasional jarring exception such as "it was time for me to fly to a conference and make a speech": harder to relate to that one, as it implies a degree of personal success and being-in-demand that one wouldn't expect from an authorial voice so introverted).

The author asks us to accept his dual image of being unaccomplished and unambitious while also being approached by filmmakers who want to make a movie based on his already-published memoirs. He may not have much "slacker cred" left - in time, his gains in career velocity might somewhat compromise his on-the-page relatability as he attempts to connect with "normal" people who feel like they're living humdrum lives.

However, this down-to-earth style is what makes the author's books work well, and his honesty about his motivations gains him an enormous amount of credibility with me, so I'll drop the subject. This book is a wonderfully woven set of impressions and vignettes that alternate between funny, touching, and both. The author's main premise is the idea that we are either living exciting stores or unexciting ones, and we often don't think to structure our lives in ways that make for a better story. He shows how this point of view lends purpose to everyday living and meaning to challenges and obstacles (since good stories are about characters going after what they want and overcoming challenges in the process). Would you watch a two-hour movie about a character saving up for a Volvo, and finally driving off the lot with it? Probably not, but those can often be the kind of priorities that drive our everyday behaviors, and that's Miller's point. He makes it well, well enough for me to want to read this book again at least once.

In short, this book made me want to rethink my whole life, and only the very best books can do that.

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Don Miller telling his history of ourselves

Donal Miller is a great writer when choose to speak about spirituality. He's fun and show us his experiences that turn out in our own experiences in some paragraphs later.
A Million Miles in a Thousand Years is an invitation to pain, to suffering, to conflict, and to climax: all that stuff are part in a beautiful history.

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refreshing anecdote to 'pop' self help

It may sound strange, but the most refreshing, inspiring part of this book was its rejection of the feel good new agey idea that we should always feel good.

There are a few other insights in this tight, well written book that are almost like a pair of prescription glasses for the mind, that make one see life a bit more soberly and clearly.

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Fundamentally Transformed How I View Life

This refreshing, uplifting, poignant, and ultimately empowering book provides a unique perspective that made me think, "Why haven't I ever thought of that?"

The theme is simple, yet profound: View yourself as a character in a story. Write your best story and live it with courage and discipline. Realize that living the story will require dealing with hardship and monotony; that the ultimate victory comes only after persistence.

One chapter I appreciate particularly states that all good stories have memorable scenes, and urges readers to consciously create memories in their own lives. Moreover, helping others create memories can be one of the best acts of service. As a father, this gave me pause and has propelled me to be more conscious of creating memories for my children.

I can't say enough good about this book. I view it as nothing short of a handbook for navigating life successfully, to which I will refer often. Miller's introspective style, reminiscent of Robert Fulghum, is simultaneously comforting and unsettling -- comforting in that it gives hope, unsettling in that it motivates you to create a better life story.

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Full of beautiful, heart-wrenching, and hilarious stories, A Million Miles in a Thousand Years details one man's opportunity to edit his life as if he were a character in a movie.

Years after writing a best-selling memoir, Donald Miller went into a funk and spent months sleeping in and avoiding his publisher. One story had ended, and Don was unsure how to start another.

But he gets rescued by two movie producers who want to make a movie based on his memoir. When they start fictionalizing Don's life for film--changing a meandering memoir into a structured narrative--the real-life Don starts a journey to edit his actual life into a better story. A Million Miles in a Thousand Years details that journey and challenges readers to reconsider what they strive for in life. It shows how to get a second chance at life the first time around.

I love Donald Miller. He is a man after my own heart. -Anne Lamott, New York Times best-selling author of Traveling Mercies, Grace (Eventually), and Bird by Bird.

If someone tells you they've read this book and they "enjoyed it" or they "liked it" or they think it's a "good hook" then maybe they didn't read it - it's well written and funny and interesting and all that, but it's also disturbing. Really, really disturbing. Don is into provocative territory here, wrestling with The Story and the role each our stories play in it . . . this is very convicting, powerful, unsettling writing. I felt like this book read me more than I read it. -Rob Bell, author of Velvet Elvis

I've never been in Donald Miller's living room, but this book makes me feel that I have. The stories compel, the humor works, and Don's wisdom stealths its way on to the pages. I already want to re-read it. -Max Lucado, New York Times best-selling author of 3:16 and Fearless.

Sly, soulful, and deeply affecting, Donald Miller's A Million Miles in a Thousand Years is an indispensable road map and travel companion for readers seeking not only to experience better stories but to live them as well. -Allan Heinberg, Executive Producer, Grey's Anatomy

Only Donald Miller can mill the glorious wreckage of the human experience for the hue of jazz and the hope that we can live out a story worth sharing. His premise will haunt you until you set out to discover if memorable lives, like unforgettable books, often require several drafts and a loving editor. -Steve Duin, The Oregonian

In the first few chapters of Don's new book, Don got me thinking about Don and his interesting life. Then for several chapters, he got me thinking about my own life. And then for the rest of the book, I couldn't help but think about God and other people and the kind of future we're creating together. That sounds like solid evidence that this uniquely talented and sagely writer/thinker/storyteller has given us another wonderful and life-enriching reading experience. -Brian McLaren, Author, Speaker, Activist, brianmclaren.net

There are some writers who simply don't have it in them to craft an inelegant sentence. Donald Miller is one of them. A Million Miles in a Thousand Years proves in story form how stories define us even more than our genes do. Read this book for an experience of sheer beauty, or for help in living a well-storied life. -Leonard Sweet, Drew Theological School, George Fox University,
www.sermons.com

With great honesty and insight, Don Miller issues a simple and profound challenge: live a better story. In A Million Miles in a Thousand Years Don opens up his life, struggles, triumphs, and insecurities and shows the reader how to do exactly that. The world is full of great challenges, terrible tragedies, and overwhelming joys-there is simply too much going on to be a part of a boring story. For anyone who knows that life should more than what we see on TV commercials and billboards, this is a book for you. -Jim Wallis, President of Sojourners and Author of the New York Times bestseller The Great Awakening

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