Name, Place, Animal, Thing: Mine Your Life for the Stories Only You Can Tell
Lux Narayan
TED, 2M views · Author · Founder
"So, what do you do?" deserves a better answer than your job title.
Our stories are what define us. And yet, asked who we are, we reach for the most recent line on our LinkedIn profile.
AI can write your post, deck or bio. It cannot write your lived experience.
Thirty years in, you are carrying more of it than you can account for. Rooms you sat in. Decisions that went wrong in interesting ways. A place that quietly rewired how you think. The thing you do on weekends that explains more about how you work than your job title ever will.
That pile is the only asset in your professional life that can't be generated, copied or outsourced. Everyone's output is converging — same tools, same tone, same competence, same credentials in the same room. Lived experience is what's left.
And almost none of it has ever been examined, let alone told. The problem was never the telling. It's that you can't find one when you need it.
Four hours, a map of your own life, and you leave holding stories you'd forgotten you owned.
What you’ll learn
You walk in able to describe your job. You walk out with a map of your own life, and stories on it that nobody else could have told.
Places you've lived down one side, the names you've answered to across the top. Ten minutes, and your life is a shape you can look at.
Where you wore the most names at once is where the most was going wrong at once. That's the richest ground you own.
The empty squares tell you as much as the full ones.
Two probes — what you did with your body, and what you did with your hands — put a forgotten year back into colour.
Not the moments on your résumé. The ones that explain you.
Point, Line, Square, Cube: what happened to you, beside you, around you, and in the world while you stood there.
Most people only ever tell Point stories. It's why founders get exhausting.
The ones that make you worth listening to rather than worth enduring.
A way to tell which of your stories carries something, and which is just a nice anecdote.
Tag the feeling, find the shape, lose everything else. Twenty minutes, no theory.
You'll test it on the room before you leave, so you know whether it lands.
You'll sharpen a cut with the AI tools live, and see exactly how to run that pass on your own afterwards.
The same story runs differently in a pitch, on a podcast and at a dinner. What moves is where you put the turn.
The AI tools do the filing, so a story you mine is findable the day you actually need it.
Your life keeps producing material. This is how you keep finding it.
Workshop agenda
Block one · Unearthing — the first half
By the break you'll be looking at your own life as a map, and you'll have recovered something you had genuinely forgotten. Most people find this part more moving than they expect.
Block two · Shaping — the second half
The half that looks like a storytelling workshop — except you're shaping something you found this morning, not something you walked in with. One story goes all the way.
Learn directly from Lux
Lux Narayan
Founder · TED Speaker, 2M views · Author · Occasional Comedian
Who this workshop is for
Founders and executives who pitch, present and get interviewed, and keep reaching for the résumé when someone asks who they actually are.
Operators and senior specialists in rooms where everyone holds the same credentials, who need a reason to be remembered after they leave.
Anyone who's done a storytelling course and still gone blank — because those start after you've picked the story. This starts before.
What's included
Live sessions
Learn directly from Lux Narayan in a real-time, interactive format.
Lifetime access
Go back to course content and recordings whenever you need to.
The NPAT Community, free for life
Everyone who attends joins, and stays. Monthly sessions, other people's maps, and somewhere to try a story out before you use it for real.
Certificate of completion
Share your new skills with your employer or on LinkedIn.
The StoryMining workbook
Your map, your probes, your story library. A working file you keep filling long after the day ends.
Your first themed session on us
There's so much you can do with your stories: introduce yourself better, train Claude Cowork better, and everything in between. We will launch regular one-off workshops to build off what you've learned here. Your first one is on us.
Custom AI tools to help manage your storymine
AI can't find your stories, but it's very good at what comes after — sharpening them, retrieving the right one on cue, and turning your whole chronology into something you'd actually want to look at. After seeing these in action during the workshop, we'll tell you how you can make it your own.
Maven Guarantee
Your purchase is backed by the Maven Guarantee.
Where this comes from
Name, Place, Animal, Thing is a schoolyard game. Someone calls out a letter and everyone races to fill four boxes — a name, a place, an animal, a thing.
It's also the title of Lux's book, which took those four boxes and turned them on a life. The names you've answered to. The places you've lived. What you did with your body. What you did with your hands. Between them they hold almost everything you've forgotten about yourself.
The book is the fable. This workshop is the practice.
What readers said about the book this framework comes from
“…the luxury of choosing how we want to fill the rest of our glass of life. NPAT provides a delightful map in this endeavour.”
— Manish Agarwal
“…such a great framework for organizing a personal go-to-life. So thought-provoking that I plan to read again.”
— Brian Condon
What people on Lux's live Zoom sessions have said
"He got every student involved — even the ones who'd rather listen than speak — by weaving in quizzes and quick questions that kept the whole room glued to the screen."
— Prof. Sanjay Verma, IIM Ahmedabad
"I produce tons of webinars a year, and Lux's was the only one where the chat outran the speaker. Whatever he does in the first five minutes, the room never went quiet again."
— Sandra Masters, Webinar Producer, Training Magazine
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