Strategic Life Narrative (Possible Book, v1, 2025)

Last updated on 29 Oct 2025

Telling the Story of Intellectual Adventures

by Oliver Ding

This article, originally written on January 29, 2025, serves as an introduction to my 2025 book draft, Strategic Life Narrative.

From November 4, 2024, to January 28, 2025, I worked on the Strategic Life Narrative project and wrote a series of articles introducing 12 types of Strategic Life Narrative practices.

The project follows a nested structure — Strategic Life Narrative (Creative Life Curation) — to establish an ontological foundation. It serves as a continuation of my 2022 book draft, Creative Life Curation.

A Brief of the Strategic Life Narrative Project

The theme of Creative Life Curation centers on turning experiences into meaningful achievements. In November 2022, I wrote a possible book on this topic and developed several frameworks to support this idea.

Throughout 2023 and 2024, I personally practiced the Creative Life Curation method, accumulating a wealth of firsthand case materials. At the same time, I developed Creative Diagramming and Thematic Space Theory, two methodological projects whose outcomes are reflected in a series of Creative Life Curation case studies. The Strategic Life Narrative project not only synthesizes insights from these cases but also expands the original five units of analysis into twelve thematic rooms.

In 2022, I used the concept of Unit of Analysis to structure sub-frameworks of Creative Life Curation. The framework has since evolved into a Meaning — Map — Model — Move — Method structure to bridge theory and practice in the Strategic Moves project in 2024.

On August 5, 2024, I designed Creative Lifescope: The House of Creative Life Curation, which featured 12 thematic rooms.

They are categorized into three groups:

The “Theme” Group

Creative Clues
Creative Themes
Creative Concepts
Creative Frameworks

The “Practice” Group:

Creative Clues
Creative Actions
Creative Projects
Creative Dialogue
Creative Journey
Creative Landscape

The “Space” Group:

Creative Projects
Creative Works
Creative Centers
Creative Platforms

Using the House of Creative Life Curation as a foundation, I developed a typology of Strategic Life Narrative practices. For simplicity, each theme was assigned to a single group, resulting in 12 distinct types of Strategic Life Narrative practices.

Over the past two months, I wrote a series of articles sharing stories and models related to these 12 types of Strategic Life Narrative practices.

A New Possible book

Now it’s time to edit a possible book and close this project.

The new possible book is divided into 13 chapters. Chapter 0 serves as an introduction. Chapters 1-12 each focus on one of the 12 types of Strategic Life Narrative Practices.

This series of articles reviews many of my real-world practices and relevant knowledge frameworks. While these reviews provide a brief overview, it is not possible to include all the original articles on my practices and knowledge frameworks in this possible book. Therefore, each article is accompanied by a reference article written after December 2022 to support the corresponding chapter.

Some numbers about the possible book:

13 chapters
29 articles
Total read time: 534 min
Total word count: 141,510 (about 283 sing-spaced pages)

The Meaning of the New Possible Book

Why didn’t I simply name this possible book Creative Life Curation 2.0?

The key reason is that this is not just a straightforward iterative update. The differences between the two works can be summarized in three key aspects:

Purpose — The outcome of the Creative Life Curation method is directed toward the creation of works. It extracts creative themes from individual experiences, refines themes into creative resources, and ultimately leads to the production of creative works. In contrast, the Strategic Life Narrative method focuses on the strategic development of the individual — anticipating the future, capturing significant insights, and forming actionable next steps.
Temporal Structure — The Creative Life Curation method primarily focuses on the past, organizing past experiences. However, the Strategic Life Narrative method requires considering multiple temporal modes: past, present, and future.
Interpersonal Interaction — The Creative Life Curation method starts as personal reflection and gradually expands to interpersonal collaboration. Meanwhile, the Strategic Life Narrative method assumes a background of interpersonal engagement and communication from the outset.

While writing this series of articles, I structured them around twelve themes, refining my understanding of these topics, sharing personal experiences and case studies, and briefly introducing relevant knowledge frameworks and possible books I have developed over the past few years. As a result, the creation of this possible book itself became a Strategic Life Narrative project, generating a self-referential effect.

Over the past few years of my creative journey, I have noticed the self-referential effect occurring repeatedly at different levels. It even inspired me to write a Footbook about it. I now recognize it as a typical Dramatic Life Pattern within my creative journey.

This possible book is not only an exploration of the twelve types of Strategic Life Narrative practices but also serves as a comprehensive review and presentation of my creative work over the past several years.

What a great milestone! The end is just the beginning!