Once upon a time
The power of a good story or a great raconteur is incalculable.
STORY is the most important tool humanity has.
Sort of a bold claim? Think about it. Stories have been around since humanity crawled out of the sludge and into caves to huddle around fires. And the very first purpose of stories? To teach.
Back then an elder telling a story about how they hunted a deer or where to find the good berries, they weren’t just entertaining tales, they were instructional.
Stories are how we passed down skills and hard learned truths about the world. Finding out a plant was poisonous didn’t have to be learned painfully by every generation because we had stories passed down to teach.
Fast forward to today and story remains one of the best ways to teach. Statistics still prove unconvincing for people. Take the Covid19 vaccine. Side-effects are rare, but I’m sure we’ve all heard stories about people with side-effects. And people will cite these stories as a reason not to get vaccinated. It doesn’t matter that the numbers say the exact opposite. One person telling us their experience trumps what the numbers say is true.
For better or worse a good story is more persuasive than facts. And good storytellers are among the most successful of us.
The obvious place to look for successful storytellers are among writers and filmmakers – humanity loves their stories so much they no longer need to teach us something, we enjoy the retelling of a good story even if its educational value is nil.
But the less obvious but equally logical place to look for storytellers is the business world.
Adam Neumann of Wework infamy comes to mind.
Neumann was the founder of that darling of all co-working spaces. He was so good at selling Wework that savvy investor Masayoshi Son of Softbank ploughed Us$4.4bil (Rm19.8bil) into the company after just a quick meeting with the charming entrepreneur in 2016.
When Wework went public and its financials were revealed to investors, it became clear Neumann had been spinning a great story about the company’s trajectory but its numbers weren’t backing the tale. Wework tanked as a stock.
Son has since reportedly called his investment in Wework “foolish” and that he “had been too enamoured of Mr Neumann’s positive qualities and turned a blind eye to negatives”.
And even with that chequered past Neumann has once again popped up in the news with a new business venture that has already raised Us$350mil(rm1.6bil) from investors. As one investor said, “Adam Neumann is in the top 1% of those who can separate people from their money”.
Does that mean Neumann’s new venture is destined for failure? Not at all. But this does show the power of story to overcome a past that had Business Insider asking why investors keep giving money to “charismatic screw ups” like Neumann. The answer to that is, simply, the power of story.
Neumann is so good at telling stories that he can make people forget about the not-so-distant spectacular failure of Wework’s IPO.
It all comes back to us being hardwired to respond to story.
Story permeates every aspect of our lives and it has for as far back as we can tell. Our oldest books and religious texts were once spoken stories passed down from generation to generation until we had the capability to write them down and record them.
We gravitate towards those who can tell a good story, towards those who have the charisma to make a story better, we gravitate to the storytellers.
The key here is understanding that story and fact can be two very distinct things. Story is emotional and therefore persuasive and facts can be cold and clinical and underwhelming at times. Hopefully, by recognising the power of story, we can learn to look more closely at statistical fact, so it’s not as easy for a good story to make a ready fool out of us.
Avid writer Jason Godfrey – a model who once was told to give the camera a ‘big smile, no teeth’ – has worked internationally for two decades in fashion and continues to work in dramas, documentaries, and lifestyle programming. Write to him at lifestyle@thestar.com.my and check out his stuff at jasongodfrey.co. The views expressed here are entirely the writer’s own.