This 12-week conversation series analyses the forces that warp your personal narrative.

The type of child you were. The innate values that drive you. How you've overcome adversity. These narratives define your self-image and determine how you relate to your friends and colleagues. But when do these stories confuse and even conjure false impressions of who you are? This series examines your personal narratives — and decodes where they reveal the truth or create powerful lies.

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Week 1. HOME

How did your childhood home shape you? This conversation analyses the formative period of your life, what you've accepted and rejected, and how this story defines who you are today.
Inspired by St Benedict.

Week 2. CHARACTER

How have your struggles altered your life story? This conversation examines these decisive episodes, the conflicts and virtues they gave rise to, and the lasting consequences to who you are.
Inspired by David Brooks.

Week 3. VALUES

What matters most to you and why? Using a Personal Values test developed at Stanford University, this conversation will decipher your passions, rationalise what disturbs you, and articulate what makes you unique.
Inspired by Viktor Frankl.

Week 4. PASSAGES

Have you ever found a character similar to you in a book? This conversation invites you to find, read and analyse a short passage that expresses one aspect of your life.
Inspired by Virginia Woolf.

Week 5. LOVE

How does the presence or absence of love cloud your personal narrative? This conversation examines how experiences of admiration, desire, rejection and loss have the power to distort how you see yourself.
Inspired by Édouard Manet.

Week 6. ACHIEVEMENT

Do you define yourself by your achievements? This conversation explores why success can create an illusory sense of greatness or inadequacy, and how it can eclipse other aspects of your identity.
Inspired by Joan of Arc.

Week 7. BEING FOREIGN

Do you chase the thrill of being a foreigner? This conversation investigates how you internalise the dilemma of freedom vs belonging into your personal narrative.
Inspired by Joseph Conrad.

Week 8. GENDER

How would you change if you had another gender? This conversation considers how the gender assigned to you at birth has influenced your attraction or aversion to the masculine and the feminine.
Inspired by Barbie.

Week 9. THE FUTURE

Are you making conservative or risky bets for the future? This conversation examines what it would take for your future to dramatically change course.
Inspired by Martin Heidegger.

Week 10. PATTERNS

What patterns reoccur in your life story? This conversation decodes inherited, instinctual and individually developed behavioural patterns, and questions the implications of breaking them.
Inspired by Ray Kurzweil.

Week 11. METAPHORS

If the weather mirrored your life, what's the forecast for your future? This conversation will analyse your future life in the form of a cloud, a creature and a glass of water.

Week 12. PARALLEL FUTURES

How many futures lie before you? This final conversation will imagine multiple lives that potentially await you, and ask if you would jump to a parallel universe where all your dreams are fulfilled.
Inspired by Kwame Anthony Appiah.

Designed at Stanford University.

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Is Norn right for
you?

Why Norn >

✓  12 conversations in person
✓  24 personal introductions
✓  36 articles to digest anytime
✓  12 recorded reflections
✓  1 manifesto of your discoveries
✓  Berlin, London and San Francisco

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