A stranger comes to town... Most planning is about motivating yourself to do the right thing.
Let's say I want to work on an big project. Then I check facebook. If I ask myself: "If this would be a movie, would the actor check facebook?" I get a pretty clear answer: "No." The actor would do something meaninful. The times in my life where I was the most productive were the time where I was clearly in touch with a narrative.
The more strongly you develop a narrative the more likely you are to get other people to want to participate. If you want to get big things done you need other people to help you.
Yep. I've always liked the adage about trying to make one's own life an artwork (variously attributed IIRC to Oscar Wilde, Nietzsche, Pope John Paul II and possibly someone else too).
Our internal dialogues are often exactly that: dialogues that suit a narrative. Narrative building (the basis of the narrative fallacy) is often quite detrimental to attempts to think clearly. It is therefore beneficial to detect and correct for biases introduced from narrative building. But it can be hard to distinguish a 'clear' thought from one that is a consequence of a narrative.
I offer a heuristic to make the distinction between a thought which is a direct attempt to model reality and a thought which is based solely on its suitability to a narrative:
Two examples:
1. When buying something: Often times, when I'm standing in a Starbucks line for a coffee and try to imagine why I'm standing there (when I can make my own coffee both at my home and at my office), I am usually returned with a feeling of being part of The People Who Do Things. Or one of being a Hard Worker who needs his Coffee to do his Hard Work with Focus and Determination. It fits too well while introducing a character in a novel. After I started noticing this, I've been realizing that coffee is not as useful in improving my focus as I thought it was earlier.
2. In conversations: This must be very familiar to most people. Anecdotes get highly embellished based on their suitability to a story. Also the way they are usually 'narrated' rather than just 'conveyed'. Realizing this when it happens can be quite useful.
Other examples?