Jameson Olsen - Becoming the Main Character (Ep. 322)

**Jameson Olsen** (0:00)
This is your story. No one else is ever going to make you the main character in their story. At best, you'll be a side character. So if you really want to have a fulfilling life, it's up to you. The same rules that authors, screenwriters, any storytellers use to create a great character for a great story can transfer over to how you visualize and execute your life. The reason those became the rules for great storytelling is because they represent the greatest and most resonant truths that humans have discovered about a good fulfilling life.

**Liberty** (0:37)
Hello everyone. I'm not Jim Ushansi. I'm Liberty. Jim is writing a new book, and while he was looking at Snuck in the Studio and decided to record this conversation about what we can learn from fiction and fictional characters. So who better to have a talk about this than my friend Jameson Olsen. He's building the School of Protagonism. It's a life philosophy built from the mechanics of great stories. Jameson, welcome to the show.

**Jameson Olsen** (1:01)
Hey Liberty, it's great to be here.

**Liberty** (1:03)
Maybe we can begin like a good story at the beginning. If you could tell us a bit about yourself, but like the Jameson origin story, why did you need Protagonism? How did you arrive to this?

**Jameson Olsen** (1:14)
That's a great way to start.
I think like a lot of people, I found myself years post college graduation, and just feeling like life wasn't going where I thought it would have been going at that point in my life. You know, until you graduate college, you basically are told exactly what step to take. And as long as you're getting the grades and, you know, you're hitting the benchmarks you need to make, you just know like, oh, I'm doing fine. You enter the real world and things can go a little differently. And so I had a period of a big chunk of my 20s where I just was living a pretty small existence in terms of what I was doing. My career was moving forward, but not nearly as quickly as I thought it would. But in that meantime, I was consuming a lot of self-help content, personal development. I got into philosophy. That was the first time I started reading some of the ancients.
And so I was feeding my brain all these ideas. And that was all layered on top of my love of stories from the beginning of my life. I mean, I attribute the beginning of my love of stories to the fact that my parents, I'm the youngest of four siblings, and my older brother was like the problem child, if you didn't call him that. By most standards, he really wasn't even that problematic. But out of the four of us, he was.

**Liberty** (2:41)
It's all relative.

**Jameson Olsen** (2:42)
Yeah, exactly. And so he's such a social butterfly that my parents were conditioned like, oh, to punish him, we sent him to his room. That is like torture for him to not be able to interact with people.
And so then after him, they just were like, oh, like send him to send James to his room. Like if he's being bad, like put in there. Problem was, that's where my Legos were. And I would spend hours with my leg. They were basically condemning me to just like go into my own little world. And I had all the pirate. This is before the IP Legos came out of like Harry Potter and Star Wars. It was just, you know, the pirates or the night.

**Liberty** (3:19)
It was your own imagination, like an animal.

**Jameson Olsen** (3:23)
And so, I mean, it started young. And I've always been very interested in just understanding what makes a great story great and what makes others, you know, why do you forget some movies as you're walking out of the theater, whereas others you think about them for days after you see them. And most of that during that period in my 20s, most of that effort of understanding stories came through film analysis, watching video essayists on YouTube, reading books here and there.

**Liberty** (3:51)
That's right. If I did my research correctly, you were way more of a film buff and only started reading classic literature and all that when you started your podcast. Is that true?

**Jameson Olsen** (4:02)
I mean, I that's why I mean, I think that also works to the advantage of I bring the enthusiasm to my episodes because I've just read this book for the first time. But, you know, I never claimed to be a trained expert on classics because I have not spent that much time reading fiction until the last three to four years. I just watched movies, you know, it's more passive. Beginner's mind. You just sit down and turn it on and like consume whereas a book, it takes effort, right? So it was kind of a transition, but the opportunity came along and this idea of just a podcast to talk about the greatest stories ever written.