Once upon a time there was data… and it didn’t change the world.
…and then there were stories…
Karen Eber has spent her career helping leaders develop the culture of their organisations. She has learn that stories are the foundation blocks of building culture.
“We must let go of the life we have planned, so as to accept the one that is waiting for us.”
Joseph Campbell
Someone has shared the documentary film “Finding Joe” on YouTube. It is a fantastic introduction to the life’s work of Joseph Campbell… who first articulated the common structure to mythological stories: The Hero’s Journey.
I don’t know how long it will be up… it is well worth a watch (I’m watching it up on my TV right now).
It is better to have a story to give meaning to what is happening in our lives than an explanation… because a story is richer… and gives meaning. What story are you telling yourself about Coronavirus? We can choose the story.
“If you bargain away your life for security, you will never find your bliss”
Joseph Campbell
The journey is a pattern of our our journey of growing up as human beings. We are called to adventure… and resist the call… until the right set of challenge, mentors, self belief comes into place… and we begin a journey of transformation > the journey from an unsatisfying life (lived in service of other’s values) to a fulfilling life (lived in service of a greater cause).
I’ve been reading the novel Jonathan Livingston Seagull with my 4 year old daughter over the last week… it is a hero journey… and it is prompting many interesting conversations with my daughter.
Take Our PollHere is a previous post of mine that describes in detail the journey…
Here’s an old video of mine where I describe the 7 steps of the Hero Journey:
What makes them so effective in moving audiences to commit to action? Why is there currently an explosion of story courses, story gurus, business storytellers?
If you are reading this via email, you can watch the video on the blog: Why do Stories work in Persuasion?
We think of stories as a creative art form but within that creativity there is a lot of structure. The building blocks of great Stories are predictable.
I have written extensively on how to tell great stories, the shapes of stories, what is a story, 7 steps to a great story.
My TED talk is coming up to 400k views: “The Discipline of Finishing: Conor Neill at TEDxUniversidaddeNavarra”
Here’s June Cohen, Executive Producer at TED Media, sharing her answers to
She passionately outlines her experience of what types of talks will “go viral”.
In this 14 minute talk, she covers:
A team can be heaven, a team can be hell: what makes the difference?
This is a story I shared a few months ago during the ACE16 conference at Harvard.
There’s a man that all his life he’s had one singular worry.
He wakes up every morning with this worry, every lunchtime has this worry. What he worries about is “how is heaven and how is hell?”.
Every morning he wakes and this is the first thing he wonders, every lunchtime, every moment that he has a bit of peace, every time he’s waiting in an elevator: “how is heaven, how is hell?”
Finally God gets a little bit tired of this incessant worry and decides I’m going to take him up and show him.
The man appears at the first set of gates. There’s some fire, little devils and rusted gates. The gates open and they enter a room.
They enter hell. In this room, the first thing that strikes him a wonderful smell of food. As he looks around the room he sees people holding their belly groaning, starving.
He sees that each person in the room is holding something in their hand.
He looks closer. He sees it is an enormous spoon.
In the centre of the room there’s a bowl. An enormous bowl. In that bowl he looks and he sees it is full of food. The people in the room are approaching the bowl, dipping their spoon into the food but the spoon is so large that they cannot eat. They’re starving.
God says “this is hell”.
The man says “Hell is not what I expected.”
They appear in front of some other doors. Little angels, harps, nice clouds… the doors slide open: they step into heaven.
Same smell, same room, same Bowl in the middle, every person in the room has the same spoon… but in this room room they’re reaching into the bowl, filling their spoon with food and they are feeding each other.
The difference between heaven and hell is who you choose to serve first.
More on the subject of creating teams that are more like heaven than hell…
On success, there is no one right answer: You cannot learn absolute rules from another person. You cannot take the life recipe of another person. You can learn from their stories, but only you will take what you take from a story.
Tribes, civilisations and families have found that life lessons are best communicated through stories. Stories have existed since words came to the homo sapiens. Joseph Campbell has identified common themes through the stories of every human society – clarifying the roles we play as human beings, the struggles we face in our lives and the search for underlying meaning to the bits and pieces that make up a life.
Stories connect to heart and to head, to reason and emotion. There is a truth to a good story that is deeper than the factual truth of the events. When a story resonates with you, it is not because of the objective truth of the story, it is because it connects with a subjective search for truth within you.
I tell many stories in my speeches. It always amazes me how different individual members of the audience take their own particular meanings from my speech. Sometimes one particular off-the-cuff comment has an oversized impact for one individual. Each person takes what they need from a good story.
Every person’s life experiences lead to answers in this moment for that person. We each live in two worlds, the outer world that we share with all others; and the inner world that exists inside us, and that will disappear from this world when we ourselves leave this world. Stories connect between my inner world and your inner world.
Seek out experiences, not certificates.
Seek out people, not facades.
Seek out stories, not answers.
There are not answers, only stories.
“What if a writer is trying to tell a story and nothing much happens, nothing is resolved…”
Use: “and then this happened”.
The essential ingredient of a boring (it is going nowhere) story is the “and then this happened”… “and then this happened”… “and then this happened” structure.
There is no conflict.
It is a laundry list of stuff happening… there is no sense of tension building and the listener getting curious and wondering about what is going to happen.
All good stories are a variation of: “Once there was a problem, but then it was resolved”
Use lots of “but…” and “therefore…” Check out the video below – it claims to have stolen the idea from Orson Wells, but I think ideas are meant to be stolen and shared.
PS I came across this gem from Nick Morgan’s blog the secrets of good storytelling.
https://vimeo.com/tonyzhou/fforfake
Resources: Check it out on vimeo: F for Fake (1973) – How to Structure a Video Essay from Tony Zhou
Today I am sharing a post from John Zimmer...
There is a small group of blogs that I always read. One is John Zimmer’s Manner of Speaking. This week he shared a video he found of Kevin Spacey (the actor) talking to an audience of online marketers.
Kevin Spacey talks about 3 ingredients of compelling stories:
Read more over at John’s blog:
via Kevin Spacey’s Three Key Elements to a Compelling Story.
Stories teach us to love, to forgive others, to be just and to strive for better than we have. Stories share and reinforce our values as human beings living together in society. In business, stories are the building blocks of culture.
Peter Drucker says “Only 3 things happen naturally in organisations: friction, confusion and underperformance. Everything else requires leadership”. A leader’s ability to share the organisation purpose in the form of meaningful stories is key to overcoming these three: friction, confusion and underperformance.
The 5 minute animated video below answers the question “What is a Story?” and gives 7 elements that need to be present to make a story compelling and motivating to the listeners.
At the very simplest, a story is:
An epic story is
The real depth of any story is not whether the character achieves the goal but who they become as they face the obstacles along the path.
How do you use these ingredients to find meaning in your life and business?
From a leader’s perspective, a story has to first develop a character that we care about, and we wonder what will happen to them.
Once we care, then something has to happen to force the character to show their hand. In real life, we don’t change unless we are changed by events. In the words of Soren Kierkegaard “the only precursor to change is crisis”.
So story step number 2: a crisis. Something that forces the character to commit to the goal. In Star Wars, Luke returns from the desert trip to find his aunt and uncle have been murdered by Imperial Stormtroopers. He commits to travel with Obi-wan to space.
We are now on the journey.
Joseph Campbell speaks of this moment as the Portal to Adventure. Often the character will have approached this portal a few times in the past, only to turn back at the last moment. Something happens to push them over the edge. It might be a mentor that says “things will be ok for you”. It might be a love interest who says “do it for me!” It might be a coincidence that the hero reads as divine message saying “it is you”.
The adventure begins. Often a few easy victories give the hero (and the readers) a sense that this is going to work out well.
In an interesting story, there are positive turns and negative turns. In Homer’s Odysseus, the hero makes amazing progress towards his home using the magic of the wind that the Gods gave to him in a bag. Joy. Progress. Then, the crew open the bag to see if they can get home even quicker. Opening the bag is a negative turn. The uncontrolled wind escapes from the bag and blows the ship way, way, way back far, far, far away from home, even further than from where they had begun.
The positive turns allow us to keep the reader engaged and hopeful of the final outcome.
If it comes easy to the hero, it’s not an inspiring story. There needs to be challenges. The dragon represents the difficult obstacles that must be overcome.
The negative turns allow us to develop the character of the hero. Kurt Vonnegut says “Be a Sadist. No matter how sweet and innocent your leading characters, make awful things happen to them—in order that the reader may see what they are made of.”
The trials and tribulations, hopes and dashed dreams continue for a while. We are watching the hero gather resources, make friends, identify enemies, trust those that are not worthy of trust, disobey those that should really have been obeyed – make a mess out of easy situations, and just pull it together to make it through the difficult challenges.
Then, the novelty wears off and the hero realises that they don’t feel like they are making progress. I am reminded of the feeling when I sail between the coast and an island. When I set out from the shore of Australia to sail to the Whitsunday islands, at first the coast behind me got rapidly smaller – I felt like I was flying out to sea. Then comes the interminable middle. The coast is no longer shrinking, but the islands don’t seem to be getting any bigger. All I know is that wave after wave is hitting my boat. I stay in this state for hours. Then, all of a sudden, the islands rapidly grow larger and larger.
In the interminable middle, the hero must find a way to overcome self doubt as well as the many obstacles that block the path to the goal.
We then reach a point of disillusion. This is the point of abandon. The hero is tired, has lost sight of the original goal, feels like they are making no progress.
The hero wants to give up. It feels pointless to go on.
Again, in good story, we need an external cause that pushes the hero to one last push. It might be a friend that reappears and supports. It might be an evil enemy doing something that is double the despicable of anything he has done before. It might be the loss of the hero’s closest ally. It might be the death of the hero’s mentor (remember Obi-Wan sacrificing himself to Darth?).
The hero, this time without hope for themselves, having lost their own ego reason for taking up the original mission takes one last push – and this push is enough to break the deadlock of the interminable middle and open up the return home.
The hero has achieved the original goal. Prometheus achieves stealing fire from the Gods and returns to the world. Luke and his allies blow up the Death Star with a last, final, spiritually enhanced missile (“just like shooting swamp rats back home!”).
The hero returns to his village, to those that knew him before his journey.
Sometimes the return is the most challenging. The hero has become a very different person though the obstacles they have overcome, but their mother and father, their brothers and sisters still see the old version of the person. It takes tremendous effort to get the old friends and family to see the new person and let go of the old person.
In a movie, we leave the cinema with a sense of closure, that a full cycle has finished. In a book we finish with a sense that the universe has been restored to a new point of equilibrium. In real life, we realise that this epic story is just a tiny sub-plot in a bigger and bigger story. In real life, the meaning is not designed into the events by an author, it is we ourselves who must create the meaning that can fit the events of our lives and give us the feeling that it is worth waking up again and experiencing more tomorrow.
This then, is a story:
Hero + Goal + Obstacles + Resources + Friends + Enemies + Learning and Growing to become the person that can succeed
I am currently reading “The Power of Story” by Jim Loehr.
In the introduction he puts a name on the widespread condition of “presenteeism“:
“Without investing high-quality, focussed energy in the activity before you, whatever it may be, setting time aside simply takes us from absenteeism to presenteeism – a condition increasingly plaguing American business, a vague malady defined as impaired job performance because one is medically or otherwise physically or psychologically compromised. Is a worker who’s too fatigued or mentally not there for eight hours really better than no worker? How about a parent? A spouse? Time has value only in its intersection with energy” Jim Loehr
In what areas are you disengaged right now? These are the areas of life where you are doing the time, but distraction really has a hold on your conscious attention.
There are always good reasons that can explain your distraction:
Another lovely paragraph from his introduction:
“Funny: We enjoy the privilege of being the final author of the story we write with our life, yet we possess a marvellous capacity to give ourselves only a supporting role in the “writing” process, while ascribing the premier, dominant, true authorial role to our parents, our spouse, our kids, our boss, fate, chance, genetics, bad weather, or lousy interest rates.”
Are you planning the final story of your life? Or just letting it drift into tragedy or comedy or thriller or farce? Maybe better a romance, a heroic adventure, a dramatic epic tale of exploration, lessons learnt and other’s lives touched for the better?
The most important story is not the one you are explicitly or implicitly telling to those around you via your actions and words, it is the one you tell to yourself.
Here’s a very timely tweet that I came upon last night:
“The stories we tell ourselves can serve as straitjackets for stagnation, or scaffolding for transformation.” @sebpaquet via @skmurphy
— Conor Neill (@conorneill) August 31, 2014
