One of the greatest gifts I think we have as humans, is the ability to create new conceptions of the world. In both imagination, and reality, we can formulate ideas out of thin air. And with enough buy in from other people, it becomes a belief.
Unfortunately though, not enough of us hone this skill in our lifetimes. At least, not intentionally. A big part of that has to do with our schooling. In many disciplines, the storylines are already written. Pythagoras and his theorm. Einstein and his equations. And of course, Shakespeare and his plays.
Our job as students is often to learn about them. Very little time is given to crafting our own narrative. You graduate from whatever institution held your focus , with no real sense of how to tell the story of who you are. And worse, there's no neat and nice manual out there to learn how to do so.
So, here's what I've surmised about storytelling that might be applicable if, like me, you're trying to figure it all out.
Great storytelling is about being compelling. No one wants to read a boring story. You need action to keep people engaged. You need ideals that people aspire to have. You need to tell the kind of story that gets people excited to wake up in the morning. A quote a friend introduced me to a while ago says that
If you want to build a ship, don’t drum up people to collect wood and don’t assign them tasks and work, but rather teach them to long for the endless immensity of the sea Antoine de Saint-Exupéry
You also need to be relatable.
When you tell a story, at least one worth listening to, you need to say the kind of things that make people understand exactly where you're coming from. Especially, if they've never been in your shoes. Often, its the surprise of familiarity that brings people back to a story over and over again.
In short, you need to simultaneously capture people's attention, while giving them something familiar.
That's pretty hard to do. At first glance, excitement and familiarity feel at odds with one another. How can you evoke strong emotions with ideas people are accustomed to? How can you create a sense of surprise by doing the thing people expect? What does it take to make the obvious, interesting?
You need to find fresh ways to tell familiar stories, particularly in ways that surprise your audience. Queen's Gambit felt particularly awe inspiring for the way it presented that story from a perspective we hadn't heard. It challenged our assumptions of what greatness looked like. But it did so in a humane and rational way. The takeaway is that the perspective is the point of the story. Few people care about the learnings. More people care about the way it was learned, who it was learned by, and what circumstances surrounded that learning.
Good storytelling is also about continuity. The best stories are the ones that make the 10th detail learned even more important than the 9th. Because good details create compounding effects. I realized this most when I thought about the arc of my own career and how I would convey that story to others. On the surface, working at several different companies can feel like discrete stops on a journey of trying to make impact. But when I stepped back to look at the totality of it all, each opportunity equipped me with just enough to try out the next challenge.
Not all stories resonate with everyone. And that's a good thing. In fact, it's proof that you might have a good story in your hands. Crafting the kind of story that appeals to anyone often has the tradeoff of losing immense value for everyone. Once you realize that, it can actually be quite freeing. Ichiro Kishimi and Fumitake Koga say that Freedom is being disliked by other people.
So don't be afraid to share your story. It's the only way you'll get better at it anyway. My sense is that its one of the few remaining high leverage things you can do in today's world. With all the uncertainty brought on by AI, perhaps the one thing we'll always have is the chance to create our own narratives. And that, is a story worth telling.