1134: The Best Story Wins

I'm going to take a step back today, to focus on why storytelling is so powerful...

In The Usual Suspects (1995), Special Agent Dave Kujan struggles to uncover the identity of mythic underworld monster, Keyser Söze.

If you've seen the film, you'll remember its final reveal...

It's a movie about the persuasive power of story. As the agent picks his way through the complex, conflicting accounts of a shooting, he struggles to sort fact from fiction.

But in a critical sense, everything in life is fiction...

Yesterday, I hinted at the storytelling insight hidden within Jordan Peterson's book, Maps of Meaning.

We'll get to that, but first let's get some context from neuroscientist, David Eagleman...

"... our reality is ultimately built in the dark, in a foreign language of electrochemical signals. The activity churning across the vast neural networks gets turned into your story of this, your private experience of the world..." ...

Reality – Eagleman says – is literally the story our brains piece together from the data it receives...

But not all the data. We only process around 40 pieces of data at any one moment. 40 pieces from an estimated 11,000,000 data points that our senses are collecting every single second...

Which is why, reality can only ever be a simplified story.

Or, as Peterson said yesterday, our most fundamental maps of meaning "have a narrative structure..."

For better or worse, we humans experience, understand and navigate the world through stories...

Which is why the right story in the right place at the right time can change our experience of the world. Not metaphorically. Literally...

Powerful communicators know this. Here's Steve Jobs, a leader with his own mythology...

“The most powerful person in the world is the storyteller.” ...

In the final moments of The Usual Suspects, the 'story' falls away to reveal the truth, and we gasp as reality crashes in.

But of course, that's just another story.

Nick

This is Business Storytelling Technique 8/30. Follow me to see the series.

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