Imagine for a moment that you’re writing a small document about a fantasy character for a complete stranger, whose purpose is to see how this character you created fits into a fantasy world.

This is largely what I imagine happens in Dungeons and Dragons. The leader of the game, the dungeon master, needs information about the characters playing in order to craft a realistic story. The players must offer up some information, hopefully interesting, about their characters. What makes them unique? Why are they here?

The leader of the game would have trouble adjusting his plot given a character with a lack of purpose. Similarly, without a brief historical background, it’d be difficult to morph the story to this character.

Creating a real-life character sheet seems like a great exercise. It’s like a resume, but for yourself.

You should be able to write down:

• Purpose
• Strengths
• Weaknesses
• Events that have signficantly shaped your history

All of these seem like reasonable things to both be aware of and frequently remind yourself of. Not only that, but they’re necessary to communicate to others in order to have a meaningful relationship with them. An investor looking for his first engineer likely would not accept “I’m not sure” as a purpose in his character sheet (resume).

Having trouble? Identify what you can do to create your purpose, or find the courage to share your weaknesses and imperfect past. Remind yourself frequently of your strengths. Most importantly, update the document or align yourself when your behavior diverges from it.