Storytelling
Let me tell you a story.
One of the most important but undervalued skills outside its traditional realm is storytelling.
Recently in a Forbes magazine publication, Warren Buffett, known as the oracle of Omaha for his ability to understand markets and have a skill almost Supernatural in his way of investing wisely, he spoke about how he writes the annual letters to investors for his firm Berkshire Hathaway.
Buffett understands that to convey complex ideas to people who don’t necessarily know business and technical language in the same way that he does, the best way is to convey it in a way that everyone can understand the message.
Warren Buffett has two people in mind when writing his annual letters: his sisters. They are smart, he says, but they are not involved in business. How does Buffett communicate an idea to you? Through the power of history. It is a skill that also works in both written and verbal communication.
Our brain cannot process all the information that passes through our senses, what it does is act and automatically interpret the information based on experiences.
We process our world in the form of a narrative. We translate ideas and knowledge using stories.
There are world competitions of people who can memorize numerous numbers. It never ceases to amaze how people accomplish this feat; It appears that it is a supernatural ability that they have. But just like magic, there is a trick behind it. The secret is that they make stories with the numbers.
In a video for Wired magazine, Joshua Foer, former United States Champion, explains how he achieves this by using the first 100 digits for Pi. First it establishes letters for each of the numbers, later it separates the string of digits from 3 to 3. These three digits turn them into letters, and use your creativity to transform these letters into something memorable. So, the first 3 digits, 141, become DRD, which he interprets as DRuiD. He does the same with all the other digits and transforms it into a story in what he calls his mental palace.
Since we have a way of expressing ourselves, we have transmitted stories. From cave paintings through all human evolution.
In our lives there are always morals, fables, sayings, stories, and legends that convey knowledge and wisdom to us.
As children, they told us stories and tales that taught us basic things like being careful around strangers. In language classes we learned through fables, morals, which are teachings that serve as life lessons and facilitate their understanding, since the listener, reader, or spectator himself determines what this lesson is.
In the bible or any religious book or text, life lessons and religious teachings are passed along through these stories. Basically, the sermons that they give us on Sundays in the case of Catholics, is to tell us the passages of the Bible and interpret their meaning and the dogmas of faith that they want to transmit.
Painting acquires its value not only for its technique, but for its interpretation. Proof of this are Jackson Pollock’s paintings, which have become one of the most expensive ever sold. These paintings may at first appear to be just splashes, but the story behind how he made them, which he called “action painting” and the meaning they evoke was how he became a key figure in Abstract Expressionism.
The skills to project ideas and emotions has made the world evolve. When radio, television, and cinema were created, a space was opened where stories were taken to us and one taking the role of spectator we were creating a channel where he could reach us from the famous speeches of Churchill in the war or of John F. Kennedy When we set out to send man to the moon.
Technology has changed and improved in such a way that now we no longer only receive stories as a spectator, we are now the creators of stories in the media. News and ideas no longer spread only unilaterally. With the new media that were possible with the creation of the internet, now we are the creators of the content that moves us as a society.
Now there is the phenomenon of virality, which we call information that generates so much interest that it spreads like a virus, since we want to share it with everyone else. And this not only happens with videos like “the fall of Edgar”. The leak of documents classified by Julian Assange on Wikileaks has been one of the biggest blows to the government system since Watergate. At that time, President Richard Nixon was removed from office for recordings and testimony that were only possible through a complex investigation.
Now there is virtually nothing that we do not find out instantly and public opinion no longer depends only on what we are fed in traditional media, we are actively part of the conversation and there is nothing important that happens that does not become a meme.
Control of the narrative is essential to direct what one seeks to achieve.
Donald Trump is a clear example of someone who knows how to use the power of stories with unmatched mastery.
Trump is in our minds the archetype of a successful millionaire man, although his fortune is in constant debate of how much it amounts to because it has never been opened to the public, and is said to be one of the most skilled businessmen in the world.
However, what is public, is that he has declared bankruptcy 6 times, which should make us distrust his talent.
Despite everything, Donald got elected President of the United States. How did you achieve this? Controlling the narrative.
In the world of marketing and business, the power of stories has been used very effectively.
Since the days of traditional media, advertising made us buy products with the power of ads, which is still true but not as before.
In those days, they could sell us cigars so successfully that it reached a point that almost half of the adult population smoked. It is now known that smoking is one of the largest causes of death that exists, but this habit is so ingrained and the tobacco industry is already so large that despite all efforts, 1 in 5 adults continues with its habit.
One of the names that is synonymous with successful marketing is Steve Jobs and Apple. Jobs was not the genius behind the technology of his first Apple products, this was Steve Wozniak, with whom he made one of the most fruitful dumbbells in history. The genius of Jobs was his vision of how the world was going to change with the use of his computers. That vision managed to transform the world, from the way we use a computer interface, to the present day that changed how people acquire music and use mobile devices.
We will never know what the world would have been like without Jobs and Apple products. What we do know is that until now, we live in a society that eagerly awaits the launch of new products because Steve Jobs transformed an industry from beige products to something sexy and aspirational.
When Jobs stood on stage, he made us live an unforgettable experience with his way of presenting new products. For the first time, people began to attend these events with the same emotion as going to a concert by your favorite artist. Fortunate people enough to attend, felt part of the story, as they were going to witness an unusual event.
Even so, beyond what we saw, behind the camera is where it shone the most. A very famous anecdote is how he brought the then CEO of Pepsi to Apple.
John Sculley was more than reluctant to leave one of the world’s largest companies for another that was not even a fraction of what it is then. Steve Jobs convinced him with a single question: “Do you want to sell sugar water for the rest of your life, or do you want to come with me and change the world?”
All of us at work or school know how boring PowerPoint presentations are. We understand it, and we always continue to do the same. We get to the point that we have to follow a size and font format and that everything is the same. If we assimilate it rationally, we are creating rules to make a presentation as tedious as possible. All this is due to the fear of change, of leaving the pre-established mold.
If we want to understand how to make successful presentations, just look at the TED (Technology, Entertainment, and Design) talks; a forum where anything worth talking about is discussed.
The format here is that a person stands on stage to present their idea to people. You may or may not use visual aids or teaching materials, the only limitation is that it should not exceed 18 minutes.
In this exhibition, we will never see that the presenter carries a PowerPoint that has all his talk written, as it is done at work or at school.
For a story to be effective, in terms of its length, there is no limitation for it to have resonance. An example of this is Ernest Hemingway’s challenge to write a story with only 6 words. At least this is the story behind this story; It is assumed that Hemingway was one day with his friends in a restaurant. He bets ten dollars on the one who can make a complete story in six words. After each putting the money on the table, Hemingway writes “For sale: baby shoes, never worn” on a napkin, passes it across the table and collects his winnings.
So, how can we strengthen our storytelling skills?
First, we must be more clear about what we want to communicate and how we are going to ensure that this information captures the interest of your audience.
In their book “Made to Stick”, the brothers Chip and Dan Heath give us a formula to make an idea more “sticky”, that is, to stay in people’s minds.
The basic principle is that the stories that are spread have two qualities: they are memorable and people want to pass them on to other people.
Many times we want to explain in as much detail as possible the ideas we want to convey, which is sometimes counterproductive because the expertise that one has is not necessarily at the same level as that of the listener.
They created a framework called SUCCES (yes, with only one S): Simple Unexpected Concrete Credible Emotional Stories or simple, unexpected, concrete and credible stories.
The most effective way to get someone’s attention is to show them that there is something important that they do not know yet, making the audience go from autopilot to waiting for interesting or simply entertaining valuable information.
The effectiveness of emotions for an idea to adhere to people’s minds is much greater than using the analytical sense. For example, to understand what is suffered from malnutrition in the world, it is much more effective to show a photo of a child living in this situation than to just present figures. Emotions are the driving force of human behavior, not reason or statistics.
Credibility and authenticity is essential so that people can process the information as something unquestionable, whether one has that authority because people already know your trajectory and you are the expert on the subject in their minds, or using information from the one who does.
It is, likewise, anti-authority can be used as an example. In the example of smoking, there are also validity and credibility for people who testify to how harmful this is because smoking had some repercussion on their health.
This helps us even to speak in public. To give an effective presentation, preparation is critical, from writing a good script, to how you are going to use both verbal and non-verbal language.
In his book “TED Talks: The Official TED Guide to Public Speaking”, Chris Anderson, who acquired TED in 2001, gives us basic tips on how to give a presentation in this forum.
In addition to the basic questions to give a presentation such as tone of voice, stage presence, diction and so on, you must keep your audience in mind and keep them captivated with the story you present.
First you must understand what interests most of those present and start from the basic point so that everyone understands the idea you want to present.
From the beginning of the talk you should keep them on the lookout and curious about what you are going to say to them, for this it is very useful to use metaphors that everyone can understand and assimilate their content.
To present data or to engage in effective negotiations, you can use these same principles.
You must understand what your audience or counterpart is looking for and have empathy to be able to get your message across successfully. If you are going to give data, present it in a way that its context can be understandable and the action or lesson you want people to get is understood.
Everybody knows that that Jeff Bezos is the richest man in the world -although it tends to fluctuate with the market- with a fortune of 120 billion dollars. It sounds impressive, but if we want this to resonate, it is much better to use vivid examples that resonate more in the daily lives of individuals.
For example, how would you feel with this statement?
Bezos earns $3,715 every second!
Bezos earns 3 times the monthly full-time minimum wage job in the United States EACH SECOND!
Bezos has earned $2.2 million USD while you have been reading this article (estimating 10 minutes).
Put yourself in the other person’s shoes, imagine what they want to hear, and give them a thought-provoking story.
In short, as Mark Turner, cognitive scientist, linguist, and author said, Narrative imagination — history — is the fundamental instrument of thought. Rational capacities depend on them. It is our main means of looking to the future, or predicting, planning and explaining.
