Copyright © 2021 by Lisa Cron

All rights reserved.

Published in the United States by Ten Speed Press, an imprint of Random House, a division of Penguin Random House LLC, New York

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Ten Speed Press and the Ten Speed Press colophon are registered trademarks of Penguin Random House LLC.

Author photo copyright © Kevin McIntyre

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is on file with the publisher.

Trade Paperback ISBN 9781984857682

Ebook ISBN 9781984857699

Acquiring editor: Lisa Westmoreland | Project editor: Matt Inman | Production editor: Want Chyi

Print designer: Lauren Rosenberg | Art director: Lisa Bieser | Print production designer: Mari Gill

Print production manager: Dan Myers

Copyeditor: Andrea Chesman | Proofreader: Amy Bauman

Publicist: Felix Cruz | Marketer: Monica Stanton

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CONTENTS

Introduction

PART ONE: Story Is Our Survival Guide

1. Story or Die Is Not a Metaphor

2. Forget the Facts

3. Embrace Emotion

4. Story: What the Brain Craves

PART TWO: Your Audience, Their Story, Your Point

5. Your Audience, According to You

6. Your Audience, According to Them

7. Identifying Your Audience’s Hidden Resistance

8. What’s Your Point?

PART THREE: Crafting Your Story

9. The Core Conflict

10. Keep It Specific

11. If, Then, Therefore

12. There’s No Place Like “Aha”

13. An “Aha” Moment of Your Own

Notes

Acknowledgments

About the Author

INTRODUCTION

“Those who tell the stories rule the world.”

—HOPI PROVERB

As the plane touched down at LaGuardia Airport, I breathed a sigh of relief. Weather had delayed my flight, but we’d made up time in the air and so, thankfully, I’d get into midtown Manhattan in time to make the meeting it had taken months to set up.

But instead of taxiing to the gate, we came to a dead stop in what looked like the middle of the airfield. My anxiety rose as we deplaned down a rickety metal staircase, and, with airport vehicles whisking by scarily close, headed toward a terminal in the distance. Once inside, I sprinted out of the airport and stopped short. LaGuardia, I realized, was in the midst of a massive reconstruction. It was a madhouse. I was searching frantically for a taxi stand, a bus stop, anything, when another weary traveler tapped me on the shoulder and pointed to a very long line. All ground transportation was miles away; the line was for a shuttle bus that would take us there—wherever there was.

It took more than forty minutes. I was going to miss my meeting for sure.

But that wasn’t what made the experience unbearable. After all, airports need to grow, construction is necessary, and often delays can’t be avoided. I get that.

What made it excruciating was the recording that played over and over as the shuttle bus slowly navigated the rubble. A perky male voice apologized for the delay, and then went on to tell us the inconvenience was well worth it, because of how amazing, elegant, and streamlined the new terminal would be. He extolled the enhanced floor-to-ceiling views of Flushing Bay, the sleek modern construction, how many upscale eateries travelers would soon have to choose from, how spacious it would be, how very relaxing.

The implication was clear: surely we’d feel that our discomfort was a small price to pay because they were building something dazzling.

They were wrong.

Because that announcement communicated something altogether different.

What it made abundantly clear to us was that they didn’t care a whit about how we felt at that moment. It was obvious they hadn’t given a thought as to how the delay might actually be affecting us—the connections we might be missing, the exhaustion, the frustration. We were irrelevant. It was all about them and their project.

They were sure that if they gave us the facts as they saw them—about how fabulous the airport was going to be—we’d feel what they felt: that the elegance of the new terminal was more important than our inconvenience. Clearly, those who wrote the script had never been subjected to our experience.

If they had, they would have told a different story: one that focused on what we needed, instead of what they needed. They needed to inconvenience us. We needed to feel heard about the toll their inconvenience took on us. For us, it was all cost and no benefit. And it felt like they were rubbing our noses in it.

Or, as Pulitzer Prize–winning media critic Emily Nussbaum recently tweeted: “Wtf is this new ‘walk forever to the taxi stand—and then take a BUS to the taxi’ thing going on at LaGuardia?? Signed, Bus Full of Growling People…An ultra-cheery voiceover is now explaining this terrible system & bragging about how great the redesign will be. Everyone’s eyes are filled with murder.”

Exactly.

The takeaway is no one hears you unless they feel heard. Unless what you’re saying is part of how they see the world, what they care about, and how they see themselves. Otherwise the only thing you’re convincing them of is that you don’t know the first thing about them.

As we’ll see, facts alone do not persuade us—not because we’re stubborn, irrational, or dumb, but because facts are generic, general, and up for interpretation. Story—the self-narrative that we use to make sense of the world around us—is that interpretation. Story puts facts in context so we can understand their significance and what they mean to us.

Ever since we added language to our tried-and-true communication system of grunting, hand gestures, and evocative facial expressions (insert image of eyebrow-waggling Neanderthal here), every story that ever got through to anyone, convincing them of something they didn’t already believe, did it by connecting to their experience. Story was the key to our survival, and every savvy storyteller knew that—how else could they have convinced their tribe that it’s better to harness fire than to run from it?

That’s why when it comes to convincing your audience of anything, the story you create has to tap into their story, so they feel why the fact, the product, the cause, matters to them. Do that and you can change more than minds; you can change lives. Even save them.

That’s exactly what happened in Brazil in 2013. The problem was dire, the kind that makes an airport delay seem like—okay, I’ll admit it—the minor inconvenience it was. In Brazil, people were dying needlessly: the country was facing a growing shortage of organ donors, and the waiting list was impossibly long.

It’s a worldwide problem. In the United States, only 40 percent of people have checked the “organ donor” box on their driver’s license—even though it helps people in need, even though it saves lives, and geez, even though you’ll be dead anyway, so what difference does it make?

You would think checking the box would be a no-brainer. It’s not.

First of all, it’s surprisingly hard to accept the notion that, yes, someday you will die. I remember once in college when a philosophy professor said in passing, “Everyone dies,” and I found myself thinking, Yeah, everyone but me. Easy thought when you’re nineteen, and everything seems so gloriously hypothetical. Even death.

But accepting that in the long run we’re all goners doesn’t lead directly to checking that box, either. For one thing, it’s unsettling to contemplate your heart being surgically cut out of your chest, put on ice, and whisked away to…oh look, a squirrel!

That thought might lead to even darker speculation, like, what if the doctor knows you’re an organ donor and so doesn’t try all that hard to save you? Hey, what if the doctor’s own mother needs a heart, and you aren’t sick at all, and this was just a ruse because your heart will fit perfectly into her chest?

Who wants to take that risk?

In other words, there are myriad deep-rooted barriers to talking about the problem, let alone solving it.

In Brazil, increasing the pool of donors was even more difficult because there is no box to check on your driver’s license and then quickly forget about. Organ donation has to be authorized by the grieving family who, overwhelmed, hurting, and with no idea what their loved one would have wanted anyway, often refuse.

The nationwide shortage of organ donors meant that thousands of people died when they could have been saved, and thousands more were severely impacted. It wasn’t for lack of trying. Earnest awareness campaigns had laid out the facts and figures in perfectly scripted logic-based appeals to civic duty. Didn’t work. For one thing, campaigns like that can feel an awful lot like shaming. After all, even the most rational, objective pitch to change your behavior still tacitly implies you’re doing something wrong in the first place. Why else would you need to change? Plus, who wants to be told what they should be doing? People don’t change because you tell them to. You gotta wanna.

So how do you get people to voluntarily change their behavior?

Story or die. In this case, literally.

But what story? That was where Ogilvy Brazil, the agency commissioned to come up with a new campaign, began their quest. Thanks to the deep discomfort people feel even thinking about their own death, Ogilvy knew that focusing on the external “ask” would be about as effective as turning to your significant other and saying, “We need to talk.” Nothing makes a person more wary and less open to change. And when it comes to talking about death? Whether we admit it or not, most of us secretly harbor the hope that we’ll live forever and spend eternity racing headlong after the things we love, the things we believe in, the things we’re utterly, madly passionate about.

That is where Ogilvy started. They focused on the people they wanted to change, rather than on the change they wanted them to make.

The question was: What—specifically—were Brazilians utterly, madly passionate about? Ogilvy knew that to make people want to change, their campaign had to tap into something they already cared about, something that was part of their identity. Since passion isn’t easy to hide, it didn’t take long for them to find the way in. If there’s one thing Brazilians are wildly passionate about, it’s soccer, and most passionate of all are the fans of Sport Club Recife. They’re known throughout Latin America for their irrepressible zeal, a fervor that borders on obsession. It’s a lifelong devotion that spans generations, bringing people together, binding them in an expansive community that pledges undying love to the club and beats with a single heart.

Bingo! They found the story.

What if every fan’s heart could beat for their beloved club after they’re gone? What if their eyes could still watch the games? What if they could pledge eternal loyalty?

And so the “Immortal Fans” campaign was born.

Tagline: “Sport Club Recife has some of the most passionate fans in Brazil. They want to be fans forever. Now they can.”

The award-winning video they created opens with an exuberant young fan, her voice hoarse from cheering, yelling, “We are the best, the best fans. There’s no comparison. Nothing comes close. Nothing else matters; Sport Club Recife is everything.”

Who would want that to end, ever? It was something patients in dire need of transplants were very ready to help with.

“I promise your eyes will keep on watching Sport Club Recife,” pledges a blind man.

“Your lungs will keep on breathing for Sport Club Recife,” swears a man who doesn’t look older than twenty.

A woman much too young to die promises, “Your heart will always beat for Sport Club Recife,” smiling hopefully as she swipes tears from her eyes.

The fans heard. Says one, “I’m Sport Club Recife even after I die. My soul is Sport Club Recife.”

Another fan was even thinking about besting the team’s rivals from the great beyond. “When I donate my organs, and my lungs go to a guy from a rival team, he will breathe Sport Club Recife.”

Everything for Sport Club Recife. Even after death. It was brilliant. The campaign took the fear of death and transformed it into the promise of eternal life.

The call to action was clear, simple, and concrete. At games or online, fans could get a card to carry in their wallet saying that they wanted to be an organ donor, so when the time came, their families would know. It was a badge of loyalty, a badge of honor. More importantly, they were eager to tell their families, perhaps encouraging them to become donors as well. And just like that, across the country, people were talking about a subject that otherwise never, ever would have been broached in polite society. Being an organ donor became part of how they saw themselves, because it gave them something that we’re all hardwired to crave: a feeling of belonging, of being seen for who we are, of being a part of something bigger, something that will live on because of us. Plus, in the wishful thinking department, it provided the comforting notion that after we die, we’ll still be here eternally rooting for our team to make that last-minute game-winning goal.

The campaign exceeded all expectations. By the end of the year, 51,000 fans were carrying organ donor cards, and organ donations leapt by a breathtaking 54 percent. The long waiting list for both heart and corneal transplants plummeted to zero for the first time ever.

The wave didn’t stop. By the next year, more than 66,000 cards had been given out, and other countries were working on similar campaigns.

What does that mean for you? Like the creatives behind the Sport Club Recife campaign, you are a change agent, whether your goal is to persuade clients, customers, voters, the public, or your teenage son. As such, you’re continually faced with the challenge of convincing people of something that they don’t want to believe, without alienating them, boring them, or inadvertently confirming the very reasons they’re resisting your call to action in the first place.

There is only one way to do that: create a story that taps into their self-narrative, rather than threatening it.

I don’t have to tell you that it’s never been harder to convince people to change their minds—about anything. Whether the subject is which political party to vote for, whether or not vaccines are safe, or what toothpaste to use, we’re less inclined than ever to budge from our current position. You may feel like you’re hitting your head against a wall, wondering why laying out the advantages of your position, using clear-cut facts, doesn’t seem to work. At all. As we’ll see, that’s not because the people you’re trying to convince are stubborn; it’s due to how our brains have been hardwired ever since we lived in small tribes and survival was a day-to-day proposition. Given the new kind of tribalism we often find ourselves smacking up against, it’s increasingly clear that facts alone don’t persuade.

In order to have a shot at changing anyone’s mind, you must first understand why it’s such a challenge, based on how the human brain works. That knowledge is what will allow you to then harness the power of story to change the way people see the world.

Because story isn’t a way to engage, persuade, and inspire others, it’s the way. That is perhaps the most surprising thing I’ve learned over the course of my career.

I’ve spent decades analyzing what makes a story rivet us, and how to get it onto the page, starting in publishing, moving on to television, then as a story consultant for Warner Brothers and other studios, later as an instructor in The School of Visual Arts in their MFA program and now as a private story coach. Year in and year out, I’ve worked with novelists, memoirists, and screenwriters, many of them accomplished professionals themselves. What I learned astounded me: what grabbed me, what made me care and kept me reading, had little to do with the plot, the writing, the external drama, or the beautiful prose. What riveted me was how what happened affected the protagonist’s belief system, causing it to change over the course of the story.

But why?

I found the answer by digging into the neuroscience associated with story, and the way it intersects with the fields of cognitive psychology and evolutionary biology. What I discovered was the science behind why story is built into the architecture of the brain. It is why, when a story mesmerizes us, it can change how we see things (whether we’re aware of it or not)—and why story is the most powerful, and transformative, communication tool we have.

What does my story have to do with you? Your goal is to change how your audience sees things. My goal with this book is to help you achieve it.

In order to do that, in Part One, we’ll first explore how our brain is wired for story, from how it processes incoming info, to how—and why—it spins fact into narrative which it then guards as if our life depends on it. Armed with that insight, in Part Two, you will learn how to pinpoint your audience’s hidden resistance by answering two important, but often misunderstood, questions: First, who is your audience? (It’s often not who you think it is.) And second, what are you asking of them? (It’s often not what you first expect.) Finally, in Part Three, you’ll go through the step-by-step process of creating your own story, one that transforms how your audience sees the world, thus overcoming their resistance and taking up your call to action.

And here’s the amazing thing: just as the fans of Sports Club Recife sparked a lifesaving national conversation that all the logic, facts, and figures only served to shut down, your audience won’t act because you told them to; they’ll act because they want to, because it feels right.

That is the power of story.

1

STORY OR DIE IS NOT A METAPHOR

“Consciousness begins when brains gain the power—the simple power, I may add—of telling a story.”

—ANTONIO DAMASIO, NEUROSCIENTIST

Several years ago I was hired by a small school district in New Jersey to help its teachers incorporate story into how they taught writing. I’d like to say the superintendent brought me in because he knew that until you understand story, writing is an empty exercise. But that wasn’t why. I’d like to say he brought me in because he knew that understanding story is the foundation of critical thinking. Nope. Although he knew both to be true, the reason he brought me in was because their standardized test scores were low, and he thought if the students learned how to wield the power of story it might help boost their scores.

I soon learned what I was up against. Testing was something every teacher detested, and forcing kids to memorize data for those tests was, across the board, their bane. In my first meeting with the staff, one frustrated 5th-grade teacher said that he spent months teaching kids things they’ll never, ever need to know because, hey, it’s on the test. Another said he flat out admits to the kids, “Listen, you’ll never use 90 percent of this in real life, and after the test you can forget it, but we gotta do it anyway.” At least he was honest, he said, so they could roll their eyes in unison at the thought of memorizing endless lists of quantifiable facts solely because they were going to be tested on them.

Quantifiable is the key word—and therein lies a heartbreaking irony. We can test only for what is quantifiable, and so we learn to prize data above all else precisely because it is quantifiable. Retaining it gets us high marks on tests, trumpeting to the world that we’re smart. Which in turn sends a clear message: the ability to memorize data is the hallmark of intelligence.

In reality, the ability to memorize data is far less a hallmark of intelligence than something much more foundational to our success as a species, and that’s the ability to make ourselves understood. What’s worse, our false belief in the power of facts is precisely what keeps so many of us from being heard.

It was a lesson brought home to me when I went into one of the school’s 7th-grade English classes to help a group of twelve-year-olds experience for themselves the power of story versus facts. I had the perfect example, because my visit happened to coincide with the fiftieth anniversary of Lyndon B. Johnson’s 1964 War on Poverty and the Wall Street Journal had published competing editorials on the subject penned by two members of Congress: a congressman and a senator, one a Republican, the other a Democrat.

The editorials ran side by side, and they were very different. I’m not talking about their ideological differences (because duh), but the difference in how they were presented.

The kids gathered around, sitting on the floor, ready to listen as I read the opening few paragraphs of each editorial. The first one began:

“In my three months as a senator, I have already seen firsthand that partisan debates in Washington can distract us from uniting around common-sense actions to address our most urgent needs.”

It went on, with abstractions and statistics like: “I’m happy to hear more people talking about poverty. But we can’t fall prey to the debilitating simplicities of our seemingly binary political world.”

And continued with (feel free to skim):

“Data, not stultifying political or ideological rhetoric, must drive our agenda. So let’s be clear on the facts. The federal government’s half-century of effort has slashed poverty among seniors from 35% in 1960 to 9% in 2011; it has brought so-called ‘deep poverty’ (those living 50% below the poverty line) down to 5.3%; and it has cut overall poverty by a third, when you factor in tax credits and other payments, according to a recent report by the Council of Economic Advisers.”

As I watched the kids’ body language, it was clear they were trying to listen. After all, I was a guest in their class, and they wanted to be polite. But the glazed look in their eyes said, “Huh?”

Then I read from the second editorial, which began:

“One day at Pulaski High School in Milwaukee, a fight broke out between two students. The staff separated them, but one of the students, a young woman named Marianna, refused to relent.”

Suddenly, the kids were leaning in. That glazed look was gone. The story went on:

“Then a call went out over the school radio for ‘Lulu’ to respond…Once she arrived, Lulu quickly defused the situation…Of all the people at Pulaski High—all the teachers and administrators—only one person got through to Marianna that day, and it was Lulu. ‘Lulu’ is Mrs. Louisa, one of five youth advisers in Pulaski High’s Violence-Free Zone program. Most of them are recent alumni who grew up in the inner city, and they have the scars to prove it. They’ve been part of gangs. They’ve seen violence firsthand. But they don’t have education degrees or state certification. They have something more important: credibility. The youth advisers understand what the students are going through because they’ve had the same struggles.”

When I finished reading, I asked the students: “Which editorial got your attention?”

The verdict was unanimous—it was the second one, the story.

But when I asked, “Which one did you think was better?”, the answer surprised me.

It was the first one.

“Why?” I asked.

“Because,” one student said, “that writer was much smarter.”

“Okay,” I said, “but do any of you know what the writer was trying to say?”

They blinked. The whole class shook their heads.

“Do you remember anything that writer said?”

Again, almost sheepishly, all heads shook. One kid piped up, “But he sure was smart!”

And therein lies the problem: facts, charts, and data make us look smart, and they make us feel smart, but alone they don’t get our point across, nor do they make what we’re saying memorable. Which means they’re pretty much useless when it comes to helping us accomplish the thing that really does make us smart: the ability to communicate clearly, in a way that engages, persuades, and inspires.

It’s something we all want. We long to be understood, to be heard, to have an effect on the world. As we’ll see, it’s built into our DNA.

Unfortunately, the one thing missing from our genetic operating manual is a set of instructions on how to actually get our point across, and so we do what we’ve done since the dawn of language: we explain it. In detail. Often using analytical arguments, charts, graphs, statistics, and lots of intricate supporting data that tend to be more sleep-inducing than a handful of Ambien and a cup of warm cocoa. Your audience tunes out, turns away, and starts checking their phones or thinking about what they’re going to have for lunch. Suddenly what you wanted them to know, think about, or do has become background noise.

Maddening, isn’t it?

Like those seventh-graders, they’re not ignoring you on purpose. Chances are they have been trying to pay attention, but no matter how hard they do, their minds keep wandering off, like curious dogs on one of those extendable leashes.

Before you begin beating yourself up, there’s something you should know: It’s not your fault, either. No doubt, just like that really smart senator, you did a bang-up job of passionately presenting the facts, data, and statistics; your reasoning, your PowerPoint slides, and your cost-benefit analysis were all spot-on. Your audience tuned out because that’s not how we’re wired to take in information, especially information aimed at motivating us to do something we’re not already doing.

In other words, just like him, you were doomed from the start.

Throw facts at us, we duck. Personify those same facts in a story, we lean in. Not by choice but because we’re biologically helpless against an effective story. That may sound like hyperbole, but it’s not. As behavioral scientist Dr. Jennifer Aaker points out, we are twenty-two times more likely to remember something we learned in a story over something someone explained to us. Understanding why that’s true is the key to harnessing the power of story and, ultimately, is what will allow you to zero in on how your audience processes everything you say.

STORY TOOL

Throw facts at us, we duck. Personify those facts in a story, we lean in.

That’s why in this chapter we’ll explore how we’re hardwired to absorb information, how we make sense of it, and how we decide what to do as a result. Given that—unbeknownst to us—almost all the info we encounter is evaluated behind the scenes by our cognitive unconscious. From there we’ll dive into why we’re so blind to the power of story, neatly debunking the myth of objectivity, along with the notion that the purpose of story is to entertain. Finally, we’ll delve into the evolutionary purpose of story, which is just as crucial now as it was when our survival depended on belonging to a small, tight-knit tribe. Which, in many ways, it still does.

The Unsung Glories of the Unconscious Brain

I remember hearing once, years ago, that there was more information in a single Sunday New York Times than you learned over the course of your entire life during the Middle Ages. Right now even that feels quaint, so old timey, so analog. These days, information doesn’t wait for us to retrieve it from our doorstep and leaf through it at our leisure. Thanks to the internet, info is flung at us nonstop, from all sides. It can feel like a barrage, especially since the bulk of it is no longer curated, so not only is there exponentially more of it, but you often have no way of knowing the real agenda of the fact-thrower.

Even more chilling: What comes at you over the internet is only a light sprinkle compared to the amount of real-world data that bombards your five senses every second. That number, as I pointed out in my first book, Wired for Story, is 11,000,000 bits of data. Try soaking that in: 11,000,000 bits of data coming at you every second. I know, it doesn’t sound possible. Imagine if you had to make sense of all those facts. Or if you had to consciously oversee every decision you make every day, given that it’s estimated we each make approximately 35,000 choices daily, 226 on food alone. No wonder it’s so hard to figure out what to have for dinner.

The good news is that of those 35,000 daily decisions, only about 70 of them require our conscious deliberation. And I’m convinced the bulk of those 70 decisions are things like “Should I wear the yellow socks or the green ones?” In other words, unless you manufacture yellow socks, it doesn’t really matter. And those 11,000,000 bits of data hitting our senses? Our brain has the capacity to be tangentially aware of no more than about 40 choice bits of them at a time. When it comes to actually focusing on them, the number plunges into single digits.

So, given that we’ve gone from 11,000,000 down to, say, 4, those few things we focus on must be pretty important. And they are. To us, that is. The finely tuned filter that your brain uses to screen every fact lobbed at you is quite simple: Is it relevant to me at this moment? Will it affect me in some way? Do I need to pay attention to it? Because if not, your brain has 10,999,999 other bits of info to sift through, lest something super important sneak in under the radar and punch you square in the nose.

That radar is what neuroscientists call our cognitive unconscious. Imagine it as a tireless champion constantly watching over you, trying to keep track of what matters and what doesn’t, and keeping you informed. This, of course, flies in the face of what common sense tells us: that our conscious brain makes these calls. After all, we make conscious decisions all day long. It’s something we take pride in, and rightly so. Trouble is, the thinking part of your brain—the part that mulls over those four things your cognitive unconscious yanked out of the millions of irrelevancies vying for your attention—is very, very slow. It takes a surprising amount of concentration, stamina, and energy to make even the simplest decision. As Yuval Noah Harari points out in his book Sapiens, your brain is a mere 2 percent of your body weight, yet when you concentrate, it consumes 25 percent of your energy. In fact, thinking hard actually burns calories—clearly not enough calories, but still.

Your thinking brain is there to figure out how to handle things that your cognitive unconscious doesn’t automatically know the answer to, like whether the thirty-year fixed rate mortgage will cost you more in the long-term than the fifteen-year floating rate. Or, in eons past, figuring out where to hide so the hungry lion wouldn’t find you, and once said lion has galloped past, how to band together with other humans to turn the tables on all such predators.

This is no small feat and is often touted as our crowning achievement. The ability to reason, to ponder, to wonder, to analyze is rather glorious, and we couldn’t be having this conversation if we didn’t have the capacity to think about things. The problem is, we tend to believe that our thinking brain does the work all on its own, starting from scratch, and that is simply not the case. While what our thinking brain does is crucial, almost all of the heavy lifting is carried out backstage, in the dark, where we aren’t aware of it. Without the unsung vigilance of our ever-present cognitive unconscious, staying alive would be a far dicier proposition.

For instance, imagine you’re driving home from work, you round a bend and up ahead you see a wall of red taillights. If you had to rely on your thinking brain to reason it out, you’d think: Hmmm, red lights. Probably means those cars have slowed down. No wait, upon further empirical observation, I realize that they’ve stopped, and, gee, I’m going pretty fast. I guess I better put my foot on the… and by then you’d be impaled in the backseat of the car in front of you. But that would never happen because your cognitive unconscious has your back. In fact, if sometimes it feels as if your foot is stomping on the brake before your conscious mind has registered those red taillights, you’re right. Neuroscience has discovered that our cognitive unconscious often takes control and makes the first move. That’s because it evolved with one goal: to keep us alive and breathing with our sense of self happily intact. Without its ability to zero in on what matters and totally ignore the endless tsunami of irrelevant facts, figures, and data that surround us, we would have long since drowned in TMI while our conscious mind was furiously playing catch up.

Similarly, unless you know why your call to action—that change you’re asking someone to make—matters to your audience, your beautifully orchestrated pitch is going to be swept away by that same tsunami, where it will be swallowed by an ocean of unnoticed flotsam, jetsam, discarded facts, and bobbing plastic containers.

But before you can figure out exactly what matters to your audience (something we will do in Part Two), the question is: how do they know what matters to them? How do we? If our cognitive unconscious is always one step ahead of us, trying to make sure we get what we want, how does it know what that even is? The answer is simple. It knows our story, inside and out.

What Matters?

It turns out story far predates written language and evolved as an essential survival tool long before it was misclassified as “fiction” and seen as the purview of novels, movies, binge-worthy streaming video, and well-told lies. We didn’t invent story; we discovered it. It was already there because it is the lens through which our brain analyzes everything. That’s why in the beginning, story had nothing to do with fiction. Instead, it started as our go-to way of evaluating the meaning of everything we encountered based on one question: How is this going to affect me, given my agenda?

In the beginning that agenda was humble: physical survival. These days, there’s a bit more to it than that. Sure, we still want to live to see the dawn, but in a nice house, with a loving family, a good job, and maybe a little money in the bank.

We are the protagonist in our own life story, and we assess everything we encounter—whether physical, conceptual, or social—based on the effect it will have on us. It’s like the pre-flight announcement to “put your oxygen mask on first, before helping those around you.” After all, if you can’t breathe, what good are you to anyone else? You have to come first; evolution wouldn’t have it any other way.

Our survival is a mission our cognitive unconscious never deviates from. It is loyal to us to the death. That’s why in any given situation the metric it uses to determine the meaning of what’s happening is: Will this help me or hurt me?

We need its help because the facts we encounter, in and of themselves, are neutral. For instance, if I told you that it’s pouring rain, would it mean anything to you? I’m guessing not much, other than, “Damn, I knew I should have brought my umbrella.” Unless, that is, you’re a farmer in the midst of an epic three-year-drought who is about to lose land that’s been in your family for generations. Then you might be out there singing and dancing in that rain. But if it’s the day of your beloved son’s elaborate, long-awaited outdoor wedding, you might be curled up inside, sobbing.

Then again, that farmer might be the one who’s sobbing. Hell, maybe she never wanted to be a farmer in the first place, and the drought was about to force her stodgy family to finally sell the farm. And as for the father of the groom, he might have thought his son was making a big mistake, so he’s secretly delighted it’s pouring, hoping it will give the lad an eleventh-hour chance to come to his senses.

One fact: rain. Five completely different meanings—each one dependent not on the downpour itself but on how it will hurt or help the protagonist, given what they want. As you can see, meaning is subjective and always determined by context. Story is what provides that context, whether it’s the story we tell ourselves or a story someone else spins.

When you have no idea how or why or even if something will affect you, it becomes one of those 10,999,960 facts your cognitive unconscious filters out, along with algebra and the periodic table they told you it was so important to memorize back in high school. Without a context to give a fact relevance, that fact has no emotional resonance, and therefore no meaning.

That’s why the secret to getting your point across, to feeling heard and understood—and, let’s admit it, powerful—is first to understand why story rules our life, and then tap into its unparalleled transformative power of persuasion.

So why aren’t we doing that already? There are two main reasons.

The Objectivity Myth

The first reason we overlook the power of story is because, although we think in narrative, we don’t tend to perceive it as such. Instead, we believe that we’re seeing things “objectively”—that is, the way anyone would (well, anyone as sane, smart, and savvy as we are)—rather than “subjectively,” as defined by what our very specific life has primed us to see. That’s why what sometimes appears to you as a clear-cut, illuminating fact that demands instant action might leave someone else scratching their head and wondering what on earth you’re talking about. While this might sound obvious in the abstract, out there in the field it’s easy to forget. It’s like the old joke David Foster Wallace tells in This Is Water: An older fish asks two young fish, “How’s the water?” and as she swims away, one young fish turns to the other and says, “What the hell is water?”

Our subjective story is the water we’re swimming in. It’s only by understanding exactly how and why your personal narrative colors everything you see that you can make your point irresistibly relevant to someone else’s story.

So far we’ve been talking about our own personal “inside” story, but there’s another facet of story that we misunderstand. While story is how we’re wired to make strategic sense of everything that has happened to us from the second we’re born up to right this very minute, story is also what we use to anticipate what might happen to us in the future, catapulting us into a world that is often affectionately dubbed—and thus dismissed—as “make-believe.”

This brings us to the second reason we’re unaware of story’s overwhelming power. Story comes wrapped in a cloak of entertainment, obscuring the serious muscle beneath the flash and dazzle of a good time.

Now That’s Entertainment!

Given how potent story is when it comes to changing how we see things, you’d think we’d recognize its power. Instead, that power has been hiding in plain sight since the dawn of time. We’ve had advanced societies that didn’t have the wheel, indoor plumbing, or shoes, but story is a human universal—which should have tipped us off there was more to it than just a great way to spend a Saturday night.

The reason we tend to believe the whole point of a story is escapism is because it feels so incredibly good to get lost in one. We come home after a hard day at work, of doing real things in the real world, and what do we do? We turn on the TV, start watching a movie, or pick up a novel because we want to veg out and leave the trials and tribulations of reality behind. It’s our well-earned reward for doing something that matters in the rough-and-tumble world.

And story obliges. Getting caught up in a story presses the pause button and puts all our nattering concerns on hold. That’s why it’s so easy to see it as mere entertainment. Sure, we think, our lives would be far duller without all those stories, but we would have survived just fine, because let’s face it, story is just mind candy. I mean, it’s not like it serves an actual purpose or anything.

This couldn’t be further from the truth.

As I pointed out in Wired for Story, story was more crucial to our evolution than our much touted—and admittedly beloved—opposable thumbs. All our thumbs do is let us hang on. Story tells us what to hang on to.

Think of story as the world’s first virtual reality, minus the geeky visor. Without story, all we would ever be aware of is what’s happening right now, in the moment. We wouldn’t even know there was a tomorrow, let alone be able to speculate on what dangers or delights might be lurking there. How could we, because without stories we wouldn’t have a past either, so how would we know what’s dangerous or delightful anyway? We’d not only get in a whole peck of trouble, we wouldn’t have survived long enough as a species to have a story to tell.

STORY TOOL

Story was more crucial to our evolution than opposable thumbs. All our thumbs do is let us hang on. Story tells us what to hang on to.

Stories are simulations that allow us—from the safety of our own cave or La-Z-Boy recliner—to try out difficult situations we haven’t yet had to face, as well as imagine enticing possibilities we aren’t sure are worth the risk. Our goal? To see what it would feel like and what we would need to learn in order to survive.

Like, I see some red berries over there. They look delicious, and I’m starving. And did I mention it’s the Stone Age, so I can’t go to the market, buy a frozen burrito, take it home, and nuke it? But I heard this story about the Neanderthal next door who chowed down on a handful of those berries. They said she was foaming at the mouth and writhing on the ground before she died. I mean, she died, and that should be enough, but it also sounded really painful. So I guess I’ll forgo the berries and make do with a couple of cold, stale beetles and live to see the dawn.

In other words, story was so seminal, so crucial to our survival that nature saw to it that it was enjoyable so we would pay attention and not eat the red berries. Story feels good for the same reason food tastes good and sex feels good, because without it we couldn’t survive. And that great feeling we get when we’re lost in a story? It’s not ephemeral, it’s not arbitrary, and it’s not pleasure for pleasure’s sake. It’s the biological hook, the lure that paralyzes us, making the real world go away so we can fully experience the world of the story. That feeling is a surge of the neurotransmitter dopamine, triggered by the intense curiosity an effective story instantly engenders. It’s your brain’s way of rewarding you for following your curiosity and finding out how the story ends, because you just might learn something you need to know.

And to make sure we don’t slither out of a story’s grasp before that happens—and eat the damn red berries anyway—story instantly activates two other neurotransmitters: cortisol, triggered by the anxiety we feel for the story’s protagonist (Don’t eat the berries; if you do, you’ll croak!) and oxytocin, which makes us care about them (I don’t want you to croak. Please, eat the beetles instead.).

Story is a survival mechanism, and clearly a crucial one, evolutionarily speaking. Because back in the day, your brain was taking quite a risk by slipping out of the real world and getting lost in a story. Today the worst thing that can happen if you get sucked into a riveting story until the wee hours is that you’re tired and a little cranky in the morning (although, getting caught up reading the latest tweet storm on your phone while crossing the street can indeed be deadly). But in the Stone Age, getting distracted anywhere, at any time, was inherently dangerous. That means that the benefit of succumbing to story had to be pretty powerful.

It was. The inside information stories provided often meant the difference between life and death.

I Pledge Allegiance to My Tribe and the Story for Which It Stands

We’re wired to come to every story we encounter—from whispers at the water cooler and snippets overheard in the lunchroom, to gossip, rumors, and Sunday morning sermons—asking one unconscious question: What am I going to learn here that will help me make it through the night? What will I learn that will help me survive in the physical world and, more importantly, what will I learn that will help me survive the social world? Without a close-knit social world—a tribe—we would still be somewhere in the middle of nature’s pecking order, rather than top dog.

Our need to belong, to be part of a group, is just as biologically driven as our need for food, water, and oxygen. Sure, once we’d pretty much gotten the hang of the basic physical world—we knew better than to walk off a cliff, and we had a rudimentary understanding of where we stood on the food chain—evolution could have called it a day. But if we were going to master the world, there was no escaping the fact that we would have to band together. That meant we needed to learn how to do what we’ve all been advised to do since kindergarten: work well with others.

In order to accommodate that change, our brain had its last big growth spurt about 100,000 years ago, when the innate need to be part of a group was built into our neural wiring. This, as neuroscientist Matthew D. Lieberman astutely points out in his book Social, is the opposite of what we tend to believe about the brain: “Most of us have been taught that our big brains evolved to enable us to do abstract reasoning.…But increasing evidence suggests that one of the primary drivers behind our brains becoming enlarged was to facilitate our social cognitive skills—our ability to interact and get along well with others. All these years we have assumed the smartest among us have particularly strong analytical skills. But from an evolutionary perspective, perhaps the smartest among us are those with the best social skills.”

It was our ability to work together to figure out how to use our analytic skills to accomplish future goals, like living to see the dawn, that catapulted us to the top of the food chain. Indeed, according to Yuval Noah Harari, “Evolution thus favored those capable of forming strong social ties.” Neuroscientist Michael Gazzaniga echoes that in his book Human: “We are social to the core. There is no way around the fact. Our big brains are there primarily to deal with social matters, not to see, to feel, or to cogitate about the second law of thermodynamics.”

As we’ll see throughout this book, social intelligence—often mistakenly marginalized as a “soft skill”—is precisely what stories impart, and why they are so potent. We rip through every story we hear, hunting for insight into what other people might be thinking, feeling, believing—regardless of what they say out loud. Which brings us to the most potent truth of all: We don’t turn to story to escape reality; we turn to story to navigate reality. And there’s no escaping the fact that much of our reality is shaped by other people, all of whom have their own story.

STORY TOOL

We don’t turn to story to escape reality;we turn to story to navigate reality.

But until recently—evolutionarily speaking that is—our stories weren’t all that different. They couldn’t be. Because up until about ten thousand years ago, the world we lived in was pretty much of the what-you-see-is-what-you-get variety. Everything happened in real time, and we lived in groups that, according to evolutionary psychologist Robin Dunbar, didn’t exceed 150 people, even on holidays.

Those 150 people were our tribe, and our day-to-day physical survival meant working with them in lifelong, tight-knit social groups, where what we did was constantly on view, making lying about it a rather risky venture. Surely someone had seen what really happened and would gleefully waste no time letting everyone else know—the prehistoric equivalent of a viral video. That’s how gossip—yep, more stories—was born.

In fact, while we’ve given gossip a negative rap, scientists believe it served a crucial evolutionary purpose, keeping members of those early societies accountable. They had to be because the tribe shared a single, basic objective: live to see tomorrow. Their goals were clear, concrete, and immediate: hunt or starve, find water or die of thirst, avoid predators or be flayed. To achieve those goals, they had to work together. If someone didn’t pull their weight, the consequence of their deception was not only obvious, it could have a dire effect on the entire tribe. Being found out meant being ostracized—a deadly price to pay.

Then as now, the intense fear of social pain can keep us from deviating from our tribe’s belief system. Says Naomi Eisenberger, director of UCLA’s Social and Affective Neuroscience Laboratory, “The significance of social pain goes back to evolution. Throughout history, we depended on other people for survival: they nurtured us, helped to gather food, and provided protection against predators and enemy tribes. Social relationships literally kept us alive. Perhaps, then, just like physical pain, the pain of rejection evolved as a signal of threat to our lives. And perhaps nature, taking a clever shortcut, simply ‘borrowed’ the existing mechanism for physical pain instead of creating a new one from scratch, which is how broken bones and broken hearts ended up so intimately interconnected in our brains.”

Because of our innate impulse to remain true to our tribe, a request that asks us to act in opposition to our tribe’s beliefs comes across as a threat. It doesn’t matter a whit if everything you say is totally, completely fact-based—as far as we’re concerned, what you’ve really said is: “Put up your dukes.”

However, when a story tailored to your audience’s worldview makes the same point, it can not only spur the change you’re hoping for, but inspire them to champion your cause to their entire tribe.

THE TAKEAWAYS

The brain has ground rules for what info it will allow us to pay attention to, let alone retain. Story, however, comes equipped with an evergreen backstage pass, the better to whisk that info into our long-term memory. That’s why, when you begin creating your story later in this book, it pays to remember that:

1. Every second so much info is lobbed at us that our brain filters out everything that isn’t relevant to us. Enter our cognitive unconscious, the gatekeeper standing guard, blocking data it deems unnecessary for our survival.

2. We approach everything asking one question: Given my agenda, will this help me, or will it hurt me? If the answer is neither, it’s white noise.

3. Story is a survival mechanism, allowing us to make sense of both the past and the present, and so envision the future in order to plan for the dangers and delights that await us. Story is thus the language of the brain.

4. Increasing evidence reveals that our brain didn’t evolve so we’d get better at abstract reasoning, but so that we could better read other people. Our goal? To further bond with our tribe, without doing something stupid, lest we risk getting put on a permanent time-out.

2

FORGET THE FACTS

“A wealth of information creates a poverty of attention.”

—HERBERT SIMON, WINNER OF THE NOBEL MEMORIAL PRIZE IN ECONOMIC SCIENCES

Facts feel comforting because they seem sturdy, unemotional, impartial, perfectly logical, the very definition of something we can count on. Facts, after all, are objective, which the dictionary defines as “not dependent on the mind for existence; actual.” In other words: the indisputable rock-solid truth. Unfortunately, there always seems to be some soft, squishy bit involved, and that’s what the fact actually means to us.

- FACT: The Earth’s atmosphere is warming. (Sure, but humans aren’t causing it.)

- FACT: Human beings landed on the moon. (Yeah, right. You actually believe that movie-set footage?)

- FACT: Eating a healthy diet, not smoking, and getting enough exercise is the key to a long life. (What about my granddad? He drank like a fish, smoked like chimney, subsisted on bologna, and lived to be 105.)

As we touched on in the last chapter, what we don’t tend to realize is that we—and everyone else—view “objective” through our own subjective lens, our own personal narrative. And so while the fact itself may not depend on our mind for its existence, the meaning of the fact sure does. The ferocity of political debate makes it abundantly clear that each of us sees a very different so-called objective reality. But since our biology blinds us to our own subjectivity—it’s the water we swim in—when we smack up against someone who disagrees with our interpretation of the facts, we sagely think: If only I could get them to understand what’s really happening here, we’d all agree. So I’ll just explain it to them one more time. That is, if we don’t get so mad we storm off in a reassuring cloud of righteous indignation. I know I’ve done that more times than I’d care to admit.

But guess what? Since the facts mean something entirely different to them, they think we’re the blind one.

The good news is that they are listening to you. The bad news is they’re listening in order to frame their counterargument so, when you stop talking, they can explain it to you. Take a deep breath, because here’s the thing: they’re not doing it because they’re obstinate—in fact, chances are, they’re not even aware they’re doing it. Blame it on their neural wiring.

Once we believe something, we don’t think it’s a belief. We think it’s a fact—one that everyone else can see, if they’d only open their damn eyes. That’s why you can’t fight facts with facts. It’s not the facts themselves that are the problem, it’s the subjective meaning your audience reads into the facts that keeps them from hearing what you’re really saying. And, as hard as it may be to hear, vice versa.

That’s why before you can begin to create the story that will change how your audience sees the world, you need to first understand where on earth that subjective meaning comes from if not from hard, cold facts. Otherwise you run the risk of inadvertently doing exactly what we’re talking about here: mistaking the meaning that you read into facts as objective rather than subjective.

Thus in this chapter, we’ll explore what studies have uncovered about exactly how we’re wired to resist anyone who tries to challenge our beliefs. We’ll explore the science behind why it is that facts give the reassuring illusion of objectivity, which in turn causes us to misread their power. We’ll also see how story transforms facts into something we automatically absorb into our own belief system, often without being aware of it.

But first, we need to understand the truth about how we respond to facts—in their “factual” form.

The Facts About Facts

Our brain has neatly categorized facts into four distinct groups:

- NEUTRAL FACTS: These are facts that, as far as we can see, have no current relevance to us, which we are wired to deftly ignore. (Bubble gum contains rubber; Howdy Doody had forty-eight freckles.)

- WARNING FACTS: These facts represent something that’s clearly about to harm us, whether literally (Lion—run!), or socially (If mom finds out you wrecked the car, you’ll be grounded for life!).

- VALIDATING FACTS: These facts support something we already believe (I knew chocolate is actually good for you).

- CONFLICTING FACTS: These facts directly oppose what we know to be true (What do you mean the Earth is round? Whose Kool-Aid have you been drinking?).

It’s reactions like that last one that cause us sane people to earnestly marshal all the salient facts and figures to prove, once and for all, that the world is not flat—facts that validate what we think is true (In this case, we’re right. Right?). And, it’s those same facts and figures that Flat Earthers then go to passionate lengths to prove utterly false—never once giving a moment’s thought as to whether or not we might actually have a point. The result? We walk away feeling that we’ve neatly debunked their ridiculous notion, completely unaware that the only thing we’ve convinced them of is that we are, indeed, tragically misinformed.

Using facts to try to change someone’s mind about something they fervently believe at best leads to misunderstandings, at worst to fisticuffs—because as we’ll see in the next chapter, facts that counter our most deeply held beliefs instantly trigger anger, hence the phrase “those are fighting words.” Fighting words they may be; not because of the incendiary nature of the facts themselves, but because of the narrative your audience spins around them. These are the facts you most want to avoid, whether straight up, or in your story.

Neutral facts don’t fare much better. They might be completely, objectively, no-doubt-about-it true, but they will have no actual effect on us. Consider the fact that it’s 238,900 miles from the Earth to the moon, or that the first recorded use of amber as a color name in English was in 1500, or…Hey, wake up! I’m talking to you!

If you dozed off, it’s because your brain put its foot down and asked a very logical question: Why should I care? And it isn’t a flip question. As neuroscientist Michael Gazzaniga says, “Every decision is funneled through the approach-or-withdraw mode in the brain: Is it safe or not?” And here’s the fine print: not just safe in general but safe given our specific agenda.

Keeping ourselves safe is a demanding job, leaving us no time for abstract, conceptual, or neutral facts, regardless of how important someone else (even you) may believe those facts to be. Plus, think about what you’re being asked to do when someone gives you a fact: think about it, decide what it means, then put it into a context and tell yourself a story about it so you can figure out if, and why, it matters to you at all. That sounds like a lot of (unpaid) work. And as neuroscientist Paul Zak points out in Cerebrum, “Attention is a scarce neural resource because it is metabolically costly to a brain that needs to conserve resources.” Our attention is reserved for things that do matter to us, and we’d be fools to waste it on anything else.

You know what that means? All that trouble you got into for not paying attention in middle school, it wasn’t you—it wasn’t even a choice—it was your brain’s fault. Because here’s the thing: Even when you try to pay attention to something that feels totally irrelevant—like memorizing every American president from George Washington until now (with bonus points for including Chester A. Arthur)—it’s only when the teacher calls on you that you realize what you’re actually focused on is wondering how much longer until lunch. You know, something that does matter, especially on pizza day.

And yet, from elementary school on, we’re presented with facts as if, because they’re objectively true, they will matter to us. They may very well have a major impact on us if we don’t take immediate action, but without a story to put them into context, how would we know?

It’s a problem I’ve experienced firsthand. Years ago, I gave a talk on the power of story to a group from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) that was responsible for writing the scripts for their educational installation, Science On a Sphere. According to their website, it’s “a room-sized, global display system that uses computers and video projectors to display planetary data onto a six-foot-diameter sphere, analogous to a giant animated globe.” Can you picture that? (Me neither.) Instead, imagine going into a darkened room, and at its center is what appears to be a huge floating globe—it’s the Earth and it’s glowing, alive with oceans, storms, typhoons, and glorious sunsets.

Okay, now for the real problem. The NOAA’s goal was first to captivate the audience—and the hovering orb itself did a good job of that—and then, once the people were captivated, to help them grasp the very real, genuinely terrifying impending consequences of climate change. And—don’t laugh—the scientists couldn’t understand why sentences like the following didn’t seem to do the trick: “Carbon dioxide will increase, reaching levels of 717 ppm in the year 2100, which is almost double the carbon dioxide concentration in the year 2000. This model predicts an 8.8°F increase in North America and a 5.2°F increase globally.”

Is it a good thing or a bad thing? And, hey, since I’m not a fan of wearing sweaters, a mere eight-degree increase sounds okay to me. Not that I’d have listened long enough to get to the part about the temperature increase, mind you. The scientists were dumbfounded. How could such incendiary facts not instantly grab their audience and make people swear off plastic, SUVs, burgers, and long, hot showers forever?

It would be easy to be smug about their seemingly naive interpretation, if it weren’t for the fact that we do the same thing all the time. As Michael Gazzaniga points out, “People tend to think that others know and believe what they know and believe and also tend to overestimate the knowledge of others.” This tendency is known as the “curse of knowledge,” which basically boils down to once you know something, it’s nigh on impossible to put yourself into the mind of someone who doesn’t. It is a phenomenon brilliantly demonstrated by Stanford psychology student Elizabeth Newton in her 1990 PhD thesis, with a game aptly called “the tappers and the listeners.”

Newton was researching the notion that we “assume that others will define situations as we do.” In other words, we take for granted that other people see the same world we do and read the same meaning into everything that happens in it. So she divided study participants into two groups: tappers and listeners. It was a tapper’s job to tap out a simple song—think “Yankee Doodle Dandy” or “Happy Birthday”—to a listener, who would then attempt to name that tune!

But first the tappers were asked to guess what percentage of listeners they thought would get it right. They were such simple, recognizable songs, how hard could it be? The tappers, on average, were sure that at least 50 percent of the listeners would nail it. And the other 50 percent? Well, what can you say about someone who can’t even recognize “Happy Birthday”?

A lot, apparently. Out of 120 tries, listeners got it right only three times. Not to rub it in, but that’s a success rate of a meager 2.5 percent. The tappers were perplexed.

How could they be so wrong? What the tappers had failed to consider is that when they tapped out the song, they were expertly performing “Happy Birthday” in their head. Says Newton, “The tapping does not interfere with the melody; the tapping, rather, complements the melody and becomes an integral part of the performance.

“Your audience, meanwhile, is not privy to your mental performance and must focus exclusively on your tapping. What you imagine to be a meaningfully held note is, to your audience, merely an absence of tapping. A tap, outside of the vivid musical context into which you have incorporated it, is just a tap.”

That is what you risk when you lead with facts, like those NOAA scientists. I’m sure they thought those stats would instantly conjure up images of melting ice caps, food shortages, mass migrations—an uninhabitable Earth, basically. However, all the audience heard were a bunch of seemingly random numbers and measurements and percentages—neutral facts that told no story at all and so had no discernible meaning. At best it left them thinking, Gee, I know those scientists were trying to tell me something important, but I have no idea what.

The facts that do grab our attention are the ones that have a clear, concise, concrete consequence we can see. Such a fact doesn’t even have to affect us personally. It can still grab us by the throat if it touches our belief system, how we see ourselves, and how we want to be seen by those whose opinions we value—that is, our tribe, where social standing is everything. As in, if my four-year-old, Daisy, adores polar bears, maybe I shouldn’t eat so many burgers, because climate change is about to turn the Arctic Circle into a sauna, and when she grows up, she’ll blame me.

The only type of fact that, by itself, spurs immediate action is one that conveys undeniable imminent danger—from the decidedly deadly, “OMG, that asteroid is heading straight for the backyard!” to the merely mundane, “I wouldn’t eat that cake if I were you. Dad mistook salt for sugar again.”

Validating facts are also readily absorbed, because we already have the framework to unpack them, and they confirm something we already believe—which makes us feel smart. In other words, the facts fit into our own subjective narrative. Facts like that work wonders—if your goal is to support your audience’s status quo.

And it’s not. The entire point of your pitch, your ad campaign, your donor ask, is to persuade your audience to do something they’re not already doing. In other words, to change. Which, as we’ll see in the next chapter, is definitely possible, but not easy. Not because we’re thick-headed or ornery but, rather, because eons of experience taught our biology that changing the status quo can be quite deadly.

That’s why facts that challenge the status quo are met with instant resistance.

The key point is that it’s not the fact itself—the ask, the change, the point—that catapults us into fighting mode; it’s how the fact fits into our own personal narrative. Think of your audience’s personal narrative as the decoder ring they use to make sense of everything, the better to guard against what it has decided are false facts.

You know, fake news.

Decoding Our Decoder Ring

Just where does our decoder ring get the info by which it then interprets the present? From the past. Turns out nearly all the meaning we read into things isn’t built into our brain a priori, and isn’t inherently true. Nope. It’s there because our life, experience by experience, taught us how things work—often the hard way—so that we’ll survive and, hopefully, thrive in whatever tribe we happen to be born into. We’re wired with the built-in ability to adapt to our circumstances, to take the tribe’s truths as our truths and act accordingly.

For instance, take the idea that pink is for girls and blue is for boys. If you dress your baby boy in pink, well, that’s unmanly, society decrees—and it probably says something about you, too. Here’s the irony: According to our same society, the pink/blue gender designation used to be the exact opposite, as per a June 1918 article from the trade publication Earnshaw’s Infants’ Department, which said, “The generally accepted rule is pink for the boys, and blue for the girls. The reason is that pink, being a more decided and stronger color, is more suitable for the boy, while blue, which is more delicate and dainty, is prettier for the girl.” (Talk about the culturally defined gender roles baked into that statement.) It wasn’t until the 1940s and 1950s that the “story” behind the colors completely reversed.

Think we’ve left that notion behind? I was at a spring festival recently, standing in a long line to buy a basket so that the kids could collect eggs, and ahead of me were a man and his young son. When the boy eagerly pointed to the basket he wanted, his father glanced at it, then sternly said, “No. That one has a pink stripe on it. We’ll get the other one.” I mean, you had to squint to see the thin pink line, but that father was having none of it.

It’s easy to vilify that dad, which was my first impulse. But then I thought about it with the help of a calm, insightful friend, who pointed out that in the world the dad grew up in, a boy might be ruthlessly teased and ostracized for picking such a basket. What father would wish that on his son? His decoder ring told him that he needed to shut down that potential threat to his offspring’s future success right then and there—and, of course, a threat to our offspring is a huge evolutionary trigger all by itself.

What the dad hadn’t realized is that the world he grew up in (or thought he grew up in, via the stories he was told), no longer exists. Or, at the very least, it’s in the process of changing, in part because people are recognizing that these sorts of gender norms are not only confining (“Hey, can my kid have blue and pink? and maybe orange and green too?”), but they are also nothing but social constructs.

It’s not just cultural beliefs that we take as objective fact—we also internalize what our culture has found necessary to survive physically. For instance, if you grew up in Ghana, you might relish crunching into a fat, juicy termite; in Thailand, sucking down a wriggling worm is normal. For me having grown up in the United States, the mere thought of either makes my skin crawl. That’s not because there’s something objectively wrong with these dietary choices—in fact, insects are a great source of protein (apparently). But, sheesh, I was raised to squish bugs while chomping on a burger, which, when you think about it, isn’t all that different. In fact, you could make an argument that eating the ground up-flesh of dead cows is a tad grosser. Not to mention that, unlike stomping on bugs, few of us would have the stomach to actually slaughter a cow, however fond we might be of burgers.

And yet, ewww, worms.

Plus there’s the emotional and spiritual realm to consider when it comes to using our decoder rings to interpret otherwise “objective” facts. Someone reading this in India might be thinking, “Wait, you eat beef? Don’t you know cows are sacred?” Not to mention those who find the eating of any animal cruel and inhumane. And here’s the thing: each group is sure that they’re right. While that much might be utterly obvious, here’s the fine print: we tend to think that those who disagree with us have decided to believe in what they hold dear, and so when presented with logical evidence to the contrary, they can—and will—decide to change their mind.

The very notion that we’re wired to weigh the evidence, objectively, dispassionately, and then decide what to believe based on nothing but “empirical evidence” is itself a false belief that many cultures see as a cornerstone of human nature. As neuroscientist Tali Sharot points out in The Influential Mind, “As it turns out, while we adore data, the currency by which our brains access said data and make decisions is very different from the currency many of us believe our brains should use [italics mine]. The problem with an approach that prioritizes information and logic is that it ignores the core of what makes you and me human: our motives, our fears, our hopes and desires.” It’s that “should use” that’s so damning—so many of us have been led to believe that using nothing but pure data to make decisions is not only possible, but preferable, giving rise to the notion that making a decision based on anything but objective logic is a character flaw, a weakness.

Here’s the surprising, not to mention reassuring, truth: Evolution wisely knew that, by itself, analytical thinking wouldn’t get us far. Sure, it’s an ability that seems to set us apart from other species, but, as we know, what gave us the power to take over the world was something else altogether.

It turns out, our crowning glory isn’t critical thinking; it’s our ability to work well with others. That’s why from birth onward, our decoder ring tracks what things mean according to our tribe, so that we’re always primed to act in concert with the tribe’s beliefs, thus ensuring our survival. And to be really sure we were all on the same page, back when nature rewired our brain about 100,000 years ago, included was a neurological tweak that would give rise to a tool far more sophisticated and powerful than all the arrowheads, rock hammers, and slingshots put together: language. Our knack for making and communicating the subjective meaning of “objective facts” is what allowed us to band together, plan our next move, and well—here we are.

Why Even Objective Facts Can Feel Like Lies

The problem is that until recently there wasn’t much need for us to differentiate between an “objective” fact and our subjective interpretation of it. Why? Because the world we evolved in was extremely limited and didn’t change much, if at all—so as we know, what we saw was pretty much what we got. Sounds boring, but it wasn’t, because what we got was a world of scarce food and water, harsh weather, and roving predators way bigger and more deadly than us, which made survival a rather demanding full-time job, requiring round-the-clock vigilance without so much as a coffee break or a nap.

Because the strategic info that experience taught us was so reliable and unchanging, and because our tribes were so small, isolated, and homogeneous, for eons our subjective worldview and the world itself were just about one and the same. A lion will always see you as a tasty snack, so it’s always a good idea to run. Once life taught us a lesson, it made biological sense to encode it in our cognitive unconscious as an objective fact. Because, really, who was going to challenge it? Not the world at large, and certainly not the members of our tribe, without whom we couldn’t survive. Hey, it really does take a village. And because working together was the key to our survival, our tribal identity became our personal identity, as defined by the beliefs we shared. It was a brutally straightforward world, so survival demanded that everyone in the tribe wear pretty much the same decoder ring.

That world had a good run. But once we got really, really adept at working together, we realized we could outsmart those predators and grow our own damn food, so we stopped running, put down roots, and began changing everything we could get our hands on. We’ve spent the past 10,000 years doing just that, exposing the one flaw in evolution: it moves very, very slowly. While we’ve exponentially altered our physical and cultural environment—from figuring out how to deftly step out of the food chain to how to robocall billions of people in a nanosecond, offering to refinance their mortgage—there’s one thing we can’t change quickly: our neural wiring.

The world we evolved to navigate and the one we find ourselves in now are two very different places. The irony is that by learning to work together so damn well we were able to then break into millions of tribes—no longer defined solely by geographic location—defined by religion, wealth, political affiliation, and favorite song from the sixties. Now each tribe has its own distinctive decoder ring, and each of us has our own unique version if it—and it keeps changing all the time. That’s why in a world as diverse, complex, and dynamic as the globalized one we’ve created, facts are no longer as simple, concrete, and static as they once seemed.

Hell, we don’t even have a way to know if a fact is tethered to actual reality or not. Back in the day, a rock was just a rock, and if someone said a rock is a feather, proving them wrong was as easy as smashing them over the head with it. Today, we often have no way of proving whether or not a fact is true because we don’t have the complex knowledge to figure it out ourselves. Do you know how to figure out if the Hadron Collider really might create a low-velocity micro black hole that could lead to the destruction of the Earth? Me neither, and apparently that’s a real concern for some. (And not just the sort who believe the Earth is flat.)

On top of that, today’s proven fact may become tomorrow’s complete fallacy and back again. Eggs are good for you. Don’t eat eggs unless you want to have a heart attack by the time you’re…(clutch chest and keel over). Hold on there, eggs aren’t so bad after all. No, wait…oh, to hell with it, I’m going to have pancakes. Yes, yes, gluten free, of course.

So it’s not surprising that, as Belgian cyberneticist Francis Heylighen notes in the journal, The Information Society, today “individuals are forced to consider more information and opportunities than they can effectively process. This information overload is made worse by ‘data smog,’ the proliferation of low-quality information because of easy publication.” (Hello social media, I’m talking to you.)

Our neural wiring evolved to help us survive based on a largely static world that no longer exists. And because we’ve so outpaced evolution, good luck ever catching up. This leaves us with a biological legacy that trips us up big time: once experience teaches us the meaning of something—from what our parents solemnly intoned as true, to the stories we inhaled, to things that actually happened to us—we encode it as near immutable fact, and it becomes part of who we are. Once we believe something—down to the belief that my toothpaste is better than yours (and it is)—it becomes part of our identity, so to challenge it is to challenge both us and our tribe. In other words, it registers as a threat.

That’s why, while we’re skeptical of facts that are meant to show us something new, what really gets us riled up are facts that challenge what we already believe. We’re wired to instantly resist those facts—often as if our life depended on it. Because, according to our biology, it does.

To Hell with Sticks and Stones; Watch Out for Incoming Words

The main reason for our “put up your dukes” reaction to ideas that challenge us is simple. As I pointed out in Wired for Story, we’re wired to resist change, often at all costs, because evolutionarily speaking, in almost every instance, resisting change didn’t make us stubborn, it made us smart.

It all comes down to a phenomena called homeostasis that works like this: once a system’s in balance, its goal isn’t merely to stay balanced, but to stay in that particular balance, because past experience has proven it safe—after all, we’re still standing. So when a biological organism (that’s all living creatures, including us) finds an ecosystem that assures its physical survival, it’s wired to stay put.

STORY TOOL

We’re wired to resist change, often at all costs, because evolutionarily speaking, resisting change didn’t make us stubborn, it made us smart.

As long as we’re breathing, even if we’re miserable, we’re safe. So why leave our (often decidedly uncomfortable) comfort zone? Especially when doing so means stepping into the thing that, as we know, has always scared us more than anything: the unknown, the unexpected, where something worse could lurk.

That’s why we’re more than happy to stay put and plan on making that big change we’ve been contemplating when we’re rested, or when the time is right, or when Mercury is out of retrograde. As Mark Twain sagely advised, “Don’t put off until tomorrow something you can do the day after tomorrow.” Or, more likely, a week from never.

So it’s no surprise that when our equilibrium is threatened, whether by a hungry predator or by an idea that challenges our own, our innate reaction is to close ranks and fight it for all we’re worth. Even when said new info is something that would, in fact, make us safer.

Why would new ideas be as threatening as a masked intruder? Because while homeostasis began as a biological reaction to changes in the physical environment, it evolved to cover the social realm as well, giving rise to what neuroscientist Antonio Damasio calls “sociocultural homeostasis.” It’s why we’re not only willing to go to the mat to protect our plot of land from outside attack, but we’re just as ready to do battle to protect the beliefs that bind the people who live with us on that little slice of heaven.

This isn’t a decision we make consciously. It’s our brain dodging a speeding bullet, whether a literal bullet or a figurative one. In a study published in Scientific Reports, lead author Jonas T. Kaplan and his colleagues recruited people with self-described, deeply held political convictions. While his subjects were in an fMRI scanner, he read them short counterarguments, challenging their views. The result? They didn’t listen objectively, weighing the merits of each argument. Instead, they experienced the same negative emotions that signal a personal attack. They did what we all tend to do in that situation: they took it personally. The study concluded that “[t]he brain’s systems for emotion, which are purposed toward maintaining homeostatic integrity of the organism, appear also to be engaged when protecting the aspects of our mental lives with which we strongly identify, including our closely held beliefs.”

Yes, but why? As Kaplan explained in Vox, “The brain’s primary responsibility is to take care of the body, to protect the body. The psychological self is the brain’s extension of that. When our self feels attacked, our [brain is] going to bring to bear the same defenses that it has for protecting the body.”

To our brain, a physical threat and a challenge to our belief system register as one and the same. Both travel the same neural pathways, signaling an imminent attack, and our body responds accordingly, saving us the trouble of having to figure out what the heck is going on before it’s too late. We don’t decide to get mad. We don’t decide to fight. Our brain, fearing for our survival, takes the decision out of our hands.

Biologically, it starts with the amygdala, an almond-shaped structure in the brain’s temporal lobe that, as we’ll see in the next chapter, helps determine which memories are stored, based on their ability to help us navigate the future. Once our amygdala recognizes anything as a threat, it triggers fear, sending our limbic system, which regulates emotion, into high alert. Instantly our thinking brain shuts down, the better to free up the physiological resources we’ll need for fight or flight.

That is why when you want to persuade anyone of anything they don’t already believe, trying to do it with facts alone is the best way to do the exact opposite. Again, neuroscientist Tali Sharot: “In fact, presenting people with information that contradicts their opinion can cause them to come up with altogether new counterarguments that further strengthen their original view; this is known as the ‘boomerang effect’.” Talk about irony.

This happens even when we’re just being asked to make a seemingly small change, like being sure to thoroughly rinse the dishes before putting them in the dishwasher (guilty), or recognizing the superiority of chunky peanut butter. To an “objective” observer such changes might seem small, but when we’re the one being asked to make them, they don’t feel small at all. And no, it’s not because we’re making a mountain out of a molehill. It’s because to our biology, it is a mountain.

When you give someone a new fact, especially one that implies that maybe, just maybe, they’d be better off if they did something differently, it tends to come across as a big red banner proclaiming, “You’re making a mistake. You’re wrong!”

Seriously, does that ever go over well? As mentioned before, merely saying to one’s significant other, “We have to talk” dooms the conversation from the start. Why? Because however delicately you broach the subject, your beloved’s brain just did a quick calculation and realized that “we have to talk” translates to “there’s something you need to change.” And so, physiologically, your beloved begins to gear up for a fight.

But wait, you may be thinking, I wasn’t going to attack my significant other. All I wanted her to do was remember to put the cap back on the toothpaste tube.

Aha! So you were going to tell her she was doing something wrong. I thought so.

That’s what gets our attention. Now her goal becomes to prove you wrong. And here’s the killer thing: any empathy she may have had for you—because seriously, all that dried up toothpaste blocking the end of the tube is gross—vanishes. “Forget toothpaste,” she lobs back, “have you ever heard of a hamper? Or hanging up a wet towel?” And you’re off to the races.

As Chip and Dan Heath point out in Made to Stick, “The problem is that when you hit listeners between the eyes, they respond by fighting back. The way you deliver a message to them is a cue to how they should react. If you make an argument you’re implicitly asking them to evaluate your argument—judge it, debate it, criticize it—and then argue back, at least in their minds.”

Story, however, defuses the analytic part of the brain. Did you ever notice how when someone says, “Let me tell you a story,” people relax? Their body language changes, they lean in, all ears, as that dopamine rush whispers to their analytic brain, “Shhhh! Don’t talk. Don’t poke holes. I want to get lost in the world of the story.” I don’t mean that metaphorically. I mean it literally. Numerous fMRI studies have shown that when you’re lost in a story the same areas of your brain light up as would activate if you were doing what the protagonist is doing. You really are there, experiencing it as if it were happening to you. By allowing you to vicariously live through the actual boots-on-the-ground effect facts have in real life, stories inspire change in a way that the facts alone cannot.

STORY TOOL

By allowing you to vicariously live through the effect facts have in real life, stories inspire change in a way that facts alone cannot.

Let me give you an example. There was a study done in 2010 at Ohio State University to gauge, in part, what would have a greater effect on college-age women’s use of birth control: a news-format program about the hardships of teen pregnancy or an episode of a popular nighttime teen drama?

One group of women watched the news show—and it was really good. It had high production values and was filled with a lot of really scary facts, really scary figures, and everything that would happen to you from the time you got pregnant until you died. And p.s.: you died sooner. While it did have teenage moms and dads explaining how their lives had been upended, there is a massive difference between someone summing up an event after the fact and living through it with them. Yes, detail-rich stories about the past can be riveting, but a summation of the same situation locks us out because it simply states (some of) the facts, rather than doing what a story does: allow us to experience those facts in action—which brings us to the other group.

That group watched an episode of The O.C., in which high-school students Ryan and Theresa grappled with the heartbreaking consequences of an unintended pregnancy. No facts, no figures, no data, just the morning Theresa wakes up, and her world turns upside down.

I know you know where this is going. The women who watched the news show felt they were being told what to do, implying that they might be doing something wrong (uh oh). Feeling attacked, their brain, anxious to defuse any internal conflict, instantly came up with counterarguments. That would never happen to me; I’d never do that; I’m way too smart. And so ironically, the facts the teen moms and dads presented became contradictory facts—facts that were inconsistent with how the women saw themselves—rather than the warning facts they were meant to be. The point is: we learn from the experience of others not when they tell us what they learned, but when they allow us to learn it along with them—through an emotionally significant story.

Thus it’s no surprise that, according to the study, “the women who watched the news program were unmoved, reporting absolutely no change in their intention to use birth control.”

Not so those who watched Ryan and Theresa struggling with a predicament they definitely didn’t want to find themselves in. Why did the story—mere entertainment—have a far greater impact on something so life-altering? Says Emily Moyer-Gusé, co-author of the study, “Many of the women were able to put themselves in the place of the characters and sense they could end up in a similar situation if they weren’t careful.” This is probably why when contacted two weeks later, women who reported identifying with Theresa still felt more vulnerable and expressed a greater intention to use birth control.

“One of the reasons some people avoid safer sex behaviors is because they feel invulnerable—they have this optimistic bias that nothing bad will ever happen to them,” Moyer-Gusé said. “But if you vicariously experience a bad result by watching a narrative program, that may change behavior in a way that is difficult to achieve through a direct message.”

Yes! Story is more powerful than facts. Much more. But rather than being the opposite of “facts,” story is what humanizes facts and makes them accessible, especially when they would otherwise trigger us to shut down and fight back. That’s what makes story so powerful and so empowering.

What’s more, story is not soft science. As we’re about to explore in the next chapter, story is the only thing capable of making big ideas, dry facts, and abstract concepts accessible to the one biological system by which we make every decision.

Emotion.

THE TAKEAWAYS

The lure of using facts to make our case is strong, because they feel so sturdy, unassailable, and safe. But when we’re trying to persuade people to do something they’re not already doing, facts tend to come across as irrelevant, impenetrable, or threatening. Story personifies the facts so we can experience the specific effect they’ll have on us. Here’s why:

- Because attention is a scarce neural resource, we only focus on facts that we know are going to have an immediate, quantifiable effect on us—whether physical, social, or psychological.

- Just because a fact is objectively true doesn’t mean we’ll pay attention. If it doesn’t matter to us, or if we don’t have a context to give it specific, relevant meaning, we don't even hear it.

- We’re wired to assume that other people know what we know, believe what we and our tribe believes, and see the same world we do. The problem is that it’s dangerously easy to believe that if we toss out a fact, our audience not only understands what we mean but knows what to do as a result.

- Our biology compels us to resist change and to stick with the familiar—that is, the things we already believe—because, hey, it’s worked for us so far.

- Once we believe something is true, it becomes part of our identity, and so to challenge it is to challenge us, personally. To our brain, a physical threat and a challenge to our belief system register as one and the same.

- Story is what circumvents the brain’s defenses against change, allowing it to process new information rather than fight it.

3

EMBRACE EMOTION

“I’ve learned that people will forget what you said, people will forget what you did, but people will never forget how you made them feel.”

—MAYA ANGELOU

Here’s what I was taught back in elementary school: When making a decision, I should marshal all the facts, all the figures, all the data, and analyze them dispassionately, in that cold light of objective reason. And there was a caveat—while doing so, it was imperative to keep emotion at bay, because emotion is an irascible scamp, and if I wasn’t hypervigilant, it would tiptoe in, cloud my judgment, and then I really would run away and join the circus.

It was a simple, elegant lesson: objective reasoning would keep me safe. Listening to emotion was for weaklings who couldn’t see what really matters. It was as if reason and emotion were two rock ’em, sock ’em robots, battling it out for my very soul. Contrary to popular belief, it doesn’t work that way. It’s not a binary, either/or choice. Because, as we’ll soon see, boot out emotion, and you can’t make a single rational decision.

So, who do we have to thank for that tragic miscalculation? A guy named Plato.

Plato had a lot to say about human nature, and he seemed pretty smart, so we paid attention, and we’ve been paying for it ever since. Because one of his most fundamental beliefs—however reassuring—was wrong. Deeply, horribly wrong. What belief? That reason is not only superior to emotion but is best served up cold, sans emotion, which nevertheless lurks in the wings, chomping at the bit, looking for any excuse to steal center stage and drag us headlong in the wrong direction.

Plato had a great analogy for it. We humans, he said, are charioteers (insert image of Russell Crowe in Gladiator here, just for fun). Now, imagine Russell’s chariot is harnessed to two horses. Not any old horses, but horses that represent what Plato saw as the two sides of human nature. I’ll let him take it from there:

“I have said that one horse was good, the other bad, but I have not yet explained in what the goodness or badness of either consists, and to that I will now proceed. The right-hand horse is upright and cleanly made; he has a lofty neck and an aquiline nose; his color is white, and his eyes dark; he is one who loves honor with modesty and temperance, and the follower of true opinion; he needs no touch of the whip, but is guided by word and admonition only. The other is a crooked, lumbering animal, put together anyhow; he has a short, thick neck; he is flat-faced and of a dark color, with grey eyes and blood-red complexion; the mate of insolence and pride, shag-eared and deaf, hardly yielding to whip and spur.”

And the identity of those warring steeds? The white horse, that’s objective reason. The blundering dark horse? You guessed it. There skulks emotion. Which horse would you want to gallop off into the sunset astride, whilst dispatching the other to the glue factory post haste?

Not wanting to leave a shred of doubt about it, Plato patiently spelled it out: “If the better elements of the mind which lead to order and philosophy prevail, then we pass our life here in happiness and harmony—masters of ourselves and orderly.”

And that belief, my friends, has been at the foundation of Western thought ever since.

Big mistake. Because although most of us have been taught that emotion shrouds reason, muddling thought, and leading to impulsive, illogical decisions, neuroscience has shown that the opposite is true: Emotion is what determines every decision we make—and that’s a good thing. Emotion evolved to let us know, in a nanosecond, what’s safe, what isn’t, and what matters to us, and in so doing, emotion is what ensured our survival.

Emotion mainlines meaning.

In this chapter, we’ll explore why emotion gets such a bum rap (it starts with how we’ve been taught to define it), and why the only way to change how someone thinks about something is to first change how they feel about it; why effective storytelling depends entirely on emotional connection; how by misunderstanding the purpose of emotion we’ve inadvertently neutered the most potent tool in our toolbox, story; and how to begin to put that tool to use.

STORY TOOL

The only way to change how someone thinks about something is to first change how they feel about it.

Emotion Versus Emotional

When I say emotion I do not mean “emotional.” As it’s commonly used, emotional is a pejorative term that has in many ways hijacked the notion of emotion itself. It refers to a narrow band of emotion, one that’s so over the top that it will sling us over its shoulder, carry us away, and cause us to make disastrous decisions we’ll surely regret in the morning. And no one would deny that this does sometimes happen (not that we’d admit it when it does). But sadly, we’ve been taught to apply that definition to all emotion when it comes to decision making, as if to display emotion of any kind is suspect. The goal, we’re told, is to rise above it, or else we’ll fall prey to it. Even the dictionary defines an emotional decision as “actuated, effected, or determined by emotion rather than reason.”

The implication is clear: emotion can’t be good.

Being seen as emotional can trump everything else—regardless of how splendid your record is or how massively successful you’ve been. Just ask Oprah. In 2017 Jeff Fager, then executive producer of CBS’s august news magazine 60 Minutes, announced that Oprah would become a special contributor. He gushed, “There is only one Oprah Winfrey. She has achieved excellence in everything she has touched. I am thrilled that she will be bringing her unique and powerful voice to our broadcast.”

Or so he said. Turned out all that excellence was no match for something far more damning, at least as far as the show’s production team was concerned: Emotion. The problem was that while Fager praised Oprah’s unique and powerful voice, apparently he meant it metaphorically.

In reality, they found her actual voice a little too emotional. As Oprah pointed out in the Hollywood Reporter, “[It’s] never a good thing when I have to practice saying my name and have to be told that I have too much emotion in my name. I think I did seven takes on just my name because it was ‘too emotional’. I go, ‘Is the too much emotion in the Oprah part or the Winfrey part?’ They would say, ‘You need to flatten out your voice; there’s too much emotion in your voice.’ So I was working on pulling myself down and flattening out my personality—which, for me, is actually not such a good thing.”

She’s so right. And yet, society’s fear of emotion often demands that we project a generic neutrality, regardless of what we’re really feeling—as if there’s something unseemly in letting loose. The CBS execs had bought into Plato’s paradigm and so, they believed, had their audience. That meant reporting of any sort had to be delivered in a neutral tone, down to how the correspondent pronounced her name. This wasn’t just a matter of personal preference for them—clearly they thought there was something unprofessional, something that would cause them to lose money should Oprah convey too much emotion. That belief had to be incredibly strong, because, I mean, we’re talking about Oprah, for heaven’s sake, a woman who has spent her entire career proving how potent emotion is when it comes to connecting with your audience in order to make your point.

Oprah walked rather than tamp herself down, severing her ties with the show before a single appearance. Think about the irony: the execs’ fear of what had made her successful in the first place—her emotion—cost them the huge audience share she would have brought with her.

How irrational is that?

Big-box Emotions

Conflating emotion with society’s notion of “emotional” is bad enough. But it doesn’t stop there; our fear of emotion is reflected in the way we classify emotions. I’m talking about “big-box” emotions—that is, emotions we’ve rounded up, categorized, and named: anger, love, jealousy, hate, rage, joy, happiness, grief, to mention a few. In so doing, we’ve swept our most potent, nuanced emotions into neat, homogenized, oft sanitized definitions that we then use to sum them up, the better to keep a safe, objective distance from them.

It’s easy to see how tempting the drive to corral and tame emotion is. If emotion is out to get us, then we have to protect ourselves from it. But emotion can’t be walled in, and luckily for us, these big boxes leak all over the place. Emotion isn’t trying to undermine our safety, it’s trying to keep us safe.

Emotion evolved as an early warning system. Once triggered by a relevant fact, it’s the messenger sent by our cognitive unconscious to grab our attention, focusing us on what matters in the moment. That can be scary because emotions purposely disrupt the thing we most want to feel: in control. So we try to block them out—the better to think clearly, calmly. (Calm, by the way, is an emotion, but who’s keeping count?) The problem with how we view emotion, as neuroscientist Antonio Damasio points out in Descartes’ Error, is that “feelings and emotions are considered elusive entities, unfit to share the stage with the tangible contents of the thoughts they nonetheless qualify (italics mine).” In other words, good luck shutting them out.

Emotions are something we feel every moment of every day, and most of them are unnamed, wriggling out of big-box definitions, guiding our way whether we know it or not. After all, as Damasio makes clear in Self Comes to Mind, “No set of conscious images of any kind on any topic ever fails to be accompanied by an obedient choir of emotions and consequent feelings”—feelings we have “no power to prevent.” Sure we can dodge, rationalize, justify, deny, and work at numbing ourselves to them, but we can’t not feel them in the first place. Neuroscientist David Eagleman echoes that, saying, “Emotions do more than add richness to our lives—they’re also the secret behind how we navigate what to do next at every moment.”

Does that mean that no matter what we tell ourselves, we’re beholden to our emotions? Yes and no. Yes, in that we will feel them regardless. No, in that they’re half of the equation, along with reason. After all, as we said earlier, it’s not either/or, it’s both/and.

But emotion is the ultimate decider. And most of the time, it’s leading us in the right direction.

Emotion and Reason: Feel First; Think Second

Emotion comes first; thinking comes second. That’s how we survived back when there wasn’t all that much to think about, and very little room for error. You saw something moving in the bushes—emotion recognized it as a lion and sent you running faster than you’d have thought possible (if you’d had time to think about it, which thankfully you didn’t; it only would have slowed you down). Besides, while you were running, your brain had plenty of time to figure out why. Oh, lion! Got it! Once again, emotion saves the day—which, you have to admit, makes logical, rational sense. As cognitive neuroscientist Tali Sharot points out: “An emotional reaction is the body’s way of saying, ‘Hey, something really important is going on,’ and it is crucial that you respond accordingly.”

It was a lesson I learned one night, working late at home in our fifth-floor apartment. Deep in concentration, I heard the downstairs buzzer—odd at that time of night, but I wasn’t expecting anyone, so I ignored it; someone probably hit it by accident. A minute later, out of the blue, a strong adrenaline spike shot through my body, and in that moment, I heard distant yelling from the courtyard below. Without thinking, I leapt up and looked out the window. Smoke billowed from the window of the apartment next door. “Fire,” they were yelling “Fire.” I grabbed my laptop and my sleeping six-year-old son—and for some reason I’ll never understand, the handset of my cordless phone—and ran five flights downstairs. It was raining. We were barefoot. But safe. It felt like magic. It wasn’t. It was my trusty amygdala, sounding an alarm I couldn’t ignore.

Why? Because behind the scenes, my cognitive unconscious had been sifting through the incoming data, reading meaning into it: a growing number of voices in the courtyard late at night, their urgency, their rising volume, the buzzer ringing at midnight. Each thing in and of itself was normal. But taken together the message was clear: something is wrong. Cue the adrenaline; trigger the emotion.

Of course, sometimes emotion gets it wrong. That rustling in the bushes might have been nothing but an itchy squirrel. But here’s the thing: you can mistake a stick for a snake a hundred times and be just fine, but mistake one snake for a stick and it’s “Hello, pearly gates.” In evolution’s cost-benefit analysis, a little stick paranoia was a fair trade if it meant keeping you on your toes.

These days, when the danger of a snake lurking around the corner is, almost always, a metaphor, thinking often comes in handy. Like the time I woke up at midnight and had the impulse to sneak downstairs and eat the entire chocolate cake that was just sitting there in the kitchen. Thinking about that urge, rather than just acting on it, it occurred to me that I’d been trying to eat healthy, and no matter how many websites I’d gone to, I’d yet to find one that said the road to good health begins with eating a whole chocolate cake in the wee hours. Besides, I’d baked that cake for my daughter’s birthday the next day. I knew if she found the empty plate in the sink, it wasn’t going to go over well.

So I didn’t eat the cake.

Was it because of all the data I’d collected on the danger of late-night cake-eating? Of course not. It was because, given all that data, eating that cake would have made me feel bad (figuratively and literally—talk about inviting a major stomachache).

It all comes back to how you feel.

In fact, if you couldn’t feel emotion, you couldn’t make a single rational decision. As Antonio Damasio points out, “Even if our reasoning strategies were perfectly tuned, it appears they would not cope well with the uncertainty and complexity of personal and social problems. The fragile instruments of rationality need special assistance.”

Let’s sit for just a moment with that phrase: “the fragile instruments of rationality.” It makes rationality sound so weak; doesn’t it? But remember, it’s not binary. It’s not emotional versus rational—they’re on the same team, that is: team you. They need each other to make a decision that will help you survive, whether out in the jungle or in New York City, trying to navigate a metaphorical one. To that end, here’s something that might come as a surprise—without emotion, rationality is not just fragile, it’s moot.

Let me give you an example.

Damasio frequently writes about a patient he had, a man by the name of Elliot. Elliot was a successful guy: he had a great job, a loving family, and he was a role model at work and at home. Unfortunately, Elliot also had a brain tumor. Tests revealed that, thankfully, it was benign, and a team of skilled surgeons were able to remove every smidge of it, but not before it had damaged some of his frontal lobe tissue, which was also removed. He recovered from the operation, and on the outside appeared to be hale and hearty. But on the inside, Elliot was no longer himself.

His life began to fall apart. He lost his job and his family, he embarked on questionable endeavors that made no sense and ended disastrously, he lost what money he had to con men, and he was finally taken in by his parents.

What happened? Was it a previously undetected failure of moral character? Was he just lazy? That’s what several professionals thought, and so his disability benefits were cut off.

That’s when Damasio was brought in to answer the question: was Elliot’s behavior willful, or was it part of an underlying medical condition? Damasio ran a large battery of tests, and what he ultimately discovered was that Elliot had lost the ability to feel emotion. His “objective” knowledge, however, had not suffered at all.

He still tested in the ninety-seventh percentile in intelligence. He could enumerate, in great detail, every possible solution to any problem you could pitch at him. He just couldn’t pick one. He’d go into his office and wonder, should I do that thing my boss really wants me to do, or should I reorganize my file folders again today? And if so, would it be better to use the blue pen or the black pen? At lunch he’d go from restaurant to restaurant looking at menus, but he never went in, because he didn’t know what he felt like eating. Turned out even his extreme analytical intelligence didn’t do him a bit of good when it came down to making the simplest—and most basic—decision: what to have for lunch.

Can you image not being able to feel anything about anything? Ever. Think about how you feel when your beloved steps into view—savor it. Now imagine the sensation that races through your veins when your arch enemy strolls through the door, with that obnoxious know-it-all grin. Visceral; right? Now imagine that your beloved walks in, arm in arm, with that unscrupulous scoundrel and you feel…absolutely nothing.

How would you even know that you loved, or detested, either one? Reason can help you figure out why you feel the way you do (maybe). Reason can even try to tell you how to feel (definitely), but reason can’t make you feel it.

Only emotion can do that. Emotion is what causes you to pick the rebuilt turquoise 1954 Chevy truck over the brand-new Ford F-150. Emotion is what causes you to donate to the Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC) even though you’re saving every penny for that getaway you keep promising yourself. Emotion is what causes you to hire one job candidate over another, even though their résumés are equally good.

Objective reason traffics in general, one-size-fits-all “truth.” Hey, it asks, that Ford F-150 is far more reliable, so why pick the 1954 Chevy? Wait, you know you need a break, how can you donate money to strangers? And, Geez, both those candidates seemed perfect, what did you do, flip a coin? Logic, with its charts, graphs, and data-driven spreadsheets, has no clue.

Emotion, on the other hand, is neither objective nor general. Emotion is specific—it makes choices given what’s true for you, based on your experience. You picked the 1954 Chevy because your grandma drove one, and just thinking about it makes you feel hopeful; you donated to the SPLC because at assembly in the third grade, they played Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.’s “I Have a Dream” speech, and ever since you’ve felt in your bones how important it is stand up for those who can’t; you hired that employee because she reminded you of your mom’s best friend, the one who always came through and got things done.

The question is, how exactly, biologically, does emotion determine what’s true for you, personally?

Memory: The Creation of Your Personal Decoder Ring

As we know, beginning at birth, your cognitive unconscious has been monitoring what’s happening in your world for two reasons. First, to keep you safe in the moment, and second, to then use that info to create an evolving reference manual to help you make sense of what will happen in the future, gauge its significance, and act accordingly. We’re not just talking about your basic safety in the physical world—like look both ways before you cross the street, and don’t go out in the night air with wet hair or you’ll catch a cold (seriously, Mom?)—but your safety in the far more nuanced, layered, and, let’s face it, unpredictable social world.

How does your cognitive unconscious create your personalized metric, welding it in place in your memory? Through its partner: emotion. Emotion alerts your cognitive unconscious to the events you need to remember because they contain info that might come in handy in the future and allows everything else you experience to evaporate into the ether as if it had never happened. And, depressing as it may sound, that’s almost the whole shebang.

I have a vivid memory of the moment I had that very realization. I was in high school, tenth grade, and wandering the campus, deep in thought (and okay, yeah, cutting class). I was pondering the fact that, although I’d lived every single minute of the day before, I remembered very few specifics—it was already a blur. And then it hit me: the vast majority of my life up to then, which at fifteen felt like an incredibly long time, seemed to have dissolved, vanishing into a haze, even though I’d been present, alive, and engaged, day in and day out. It was a sobering thought. But easy to shake off, since at fifteen I thought I would live forever, even if I didn’t remember walking to the Orange Julius after school, or what dress I wore on Tuesday. And from then to now I’ve enjoyed the irony that I knew, in that instant, that while there was so much I’d lose track of the second it was over, I’d always remember that particular moment. And I have. Because it taught me something important about life and made me feel smart.

But I wasn’t nearly as smart as I thought I was, because I still didn’t quite get it. I bought into the common notion that even if we don’t have easy access to all our memories, they’re there in our brain, rattling around somewhere. After all, we were told—completely erroneously, as it turns out—that we only use 10 percent of our brain, so I figured that’s probably because the other 90 percent is stuffed with all those forgotten memories, like what a gerund is, the name of the restaurant on Ventura Boulevard with the cowhide booths where we used to eat when I was seven, and how to multiply by fractions. Memories just keep piling up like dust bunnies under the bed, I thought, and you can get at them if you have to, but you need a really long broom.

This was supported by the popular assumption (also wrong) that your memory is like a video camera with endless tape and unlimited battery. The idea was, if something happened, well, then we recorded it. Why? I just told you: because it happened. And then, the theory went, all those memories were stored somewhere in our brain and preserved—pristine, objective, reliable. Remembering something (provided you could find it) was akin to taking a marble statue out of storage, looking at it, and then carefully sliding it back in place, complete and unchanged. It’s such a comforting notion, don’t you think? And totally untrue.

This is yet another blow to the belief that if you tell someone something, they’ll remember it because, well, you told them. That may explain why your audience not only didn’t retain what you said, they forgot you ever said anything in the first place.

Memory didn’t evolve so we could remember a bunch of facts or to give us something to savor as we stroll down memory lane. Like emotion, the biological mechanisms that record memory evolved to keep us safe because, at any moment, life is quite capable of catapulting us straight into that aforementioned most dangerous of realms—the unexpected. As neuroscientist Dean Buonomano makes clear in Your Brain Is a Time Machine, “Memory did not evolve to allow us to reminisce about the past. The sole evolutionary function of memory is to allow animals to predict what will happen, when it will happen, and how to best respond when it does.”

Memory has one goal, and it all boils down to something so logical, so reasonable, that it almost sounds mechanical, like a perfectly calibrated, individually crafted algorithm. But unlike Amazon’s oft-clueless “you might also like” predictions (you want me to subscribe to a gigantic monthly box of Cheez-Its? Ah Amazon, ye know me not!) our brain’s algorithm is far more accurate. It has to be, or we wouldn’t be here.

From the second you drew that first breath, your brain has been on the lookout for reliable patterns. If I cry real loud, that nice person will come in and give me milk. Got it. Once a pattern is deemed trustworthy, it becomes a tacit expectation. And when those expected patterns are broken? Adrenaline spikes, emotion surges, and your brain instantly yanks up the memory of what you thought would happen and tries to figure out why it didn’t, all the while scrolling through relevant memories, the better to assess what the heck is going on, and what you should do about it. Says Buonomano, “Whether you realize it or not, on a moment-by-moment basis your brain is automatically attempting to predict what is about to happen.”

When Emotion Meets Memory: You Feel Me?

Because emotion’s goal is to help you navigate the future, when something happens that gives you fresh inside intel on what’s safe, what isn’t, and how your boss might feel if you rearranged your file folders for the third time this week rather than getting her the report she said she needed by noon, emotion ushers it past all those irrelevant facts—like names, dates, and what you had for breakfast—giving it a VIP pass into your long-term memory.

Neuroscientist V. S. Ramachandran explains it thusly in his book The Tell-Tale Brain: “The amygdala works in conjunction with past stored memories and other structures in the limbic system to gauge the emotional significance of whatever you are looking at: Is it friend, foe, mate? Food, water, danger? Or is it just something mundane? If it’s insignificant—just a log, a piece of lint, the trees rustling in the wind—you feel nothing toward it and most likely will ignore it. But if it’s important, you instantly feel something.” And I’d add to that list of insignificant things, facts you cannot unpack, and facts that seem to have no concrete relevance when it comes to navigating your day-to-day life.

It makes sense, since strong emotional memories (think: those tinged with love, shame, joy, grief, or anger) are pretty hard to forget. That’s why coupling emotion with info vastly improves the chance that the information will be encoded into long-term memory, making sure it’s safely stowed for handy future reference.

The stronger the emotion, the more resilient the memory. It’s no surprise that, as cognitive neuroscientist Elizabeth Phelps points out in the journal Current Opinion in Neurobiology,“Memories of emotional events have a persistence and vividness that other memories seem to lack.” And, for the most part, that is a good thing.

Contrary to popular belief, emotionally infused memories aren’t irrational—they are, in fact, deeply rational. Says science writer Jonah Lehrer in his book, How We Decide, “Human emotions are rooted in the predictions of highly flexible brain cells, which are constantly adjusting their connections to reflect reality. Every time you make a mistake or encounter something new, your brain cells are busy changing themselves.”

This flies in the face of another false notion that many of us may have tucked away in our cognitive unconscious: that once it’s all wired up, our brain is incapable of much change. We are, indeed, capable of change. If we weren’t, how could we adapt to circumstances outside our control?

The good news is that change is possible; the bad news is that it’s really, really hard. We tend to change because something completely outside of our control forces us to. In other words, change is only a necessity if a new experience makes it necessary for survival (or for remaining a member in good standing of our chosen tribe, which is basically the same thing). That’s why the only way to change how someone feels about something that experience has taught them, is to give them a new experience, the kind that instantly causes them to reevaluate what, up until that moment, they felt was true.

Does that mean you have to stage actual events in people’s lives? Thankfully, no. Knowing we couldn’t learn everything through experience, biology gave us, shall we say, an online option. We can do it vicariously through story—the next best thing to being there.

Virtual Reality: The Biology Edition

In the case of the young women who either watched an episode of The O.C. or a news show on the dangers of teen pregnancy, we saw that it was the story, not the facts, that made them feel how important birth control is. Because story doesn’t provide us with objective info, story brings that info to life—our life—via emotion. Now we’re going to dig into exactly how that works—biologically speaking.

“Storytelling provides humans a powerful means for sharing emotions with others,” writes cognitive neuroscientist Lauri Nummenmaa in the journal Neuroimage. Stories “enable us to ‘catch’ the emotions described in spoken and written language.”

It goes even deeper, as it’s not just the emotion that is contagious, it’s also the reasoning behind it. Story translates facts into experience, making them concrete, giving us contextual understanding of their meaning. Simply put, stories allow us to viscerally experience how the facts will impact our life, because when we are lost in a story, we don’t just feel what the protagonist feels, we understand why they feel it.

STORY TOOL

When we are lost in a story, we don’t just feel what the protagonist feels, we understand why they feel it.

That’s not metaphor; it’s fact. Our brains literally synchronize with the protagonist or storyteller. Neurological studies have proven that people’s brain activity becomes synchronous when they listen to an emotionally engaging story. Says cognitive neuroscientist Tali Sharot about brains absorbed in story, “Synchronization was observed not only in brain regions important for language and hearing but also in those involved in creating associations, in generating and processing emotions, and in enabling us to put ourselves in the shoes of others and feel empathy.”

We are literally on the same wavelength. One story; thousands of people all feeling the same thing, for the same reason. Nummenmaa writes, “Emotional language apparently provides a way for bringing minds together to facilitate social interaction by enhancing synchronization of thoughts, brain activations, and behaviors across individuals.…We constantly remap others’ emotional states into our own corresponding…brain areas.”

There is a game changer in that statement. To wit: we learn from the experience of others not when they tell us what they learned, but when they allow us to learn it along with them—through an emotionally significant story.

That’s why when you’re creating your story, it can feel scary—because you have to engage emotionally rather than play it safe with good old reliable objective data.

Plus, since story is about how someone learned something, it implies that in the beginning there was something important that they didn’t already know. And maybe even that—gulp—they made a mistake. That can be especially difficult if you’re telling a story about yourself. Your palms can start sweating just thinking about it. Admitting mistakes of any kind makes us feel vulnerable. That’s why we’d much rather skip over that part, thank you very much, and talk about something we already know, because that makes us feel smart and, by extension, safe.

The irony is that trial and error is the only way to learn something new, which means either we’re making mistakes all the time or we’re stagnating. This sentiment is neatly summed up by Teddy Roosevelt, “The only person who never makes mistakes is the person who never does anything.” That’s probably one of the reasons we love story so much—it’s way easier, not to mention safer, to learn through other people’s mistakes.

Thus, it’s not surprising that admitting mistakes is one of the biggest factors in creating a powerful story, whether it’s your protagonist or you admitting to doing something that did not turn out as expected. When you admit that something went wrong, your audience is thinking, Wow, me too! I make that kind of mistake all the time. We’re more alike than I thought.

That’s what grabs them, allowing them to instantly identify, and so empathize, with you. After all, most of us feel vulnerable most of the time, and we’re trying to keep it under wraps. Especially since we tend to think that everyone else knows exactly what they’re doing—it’s just us who are a little lost. So when someone has the guts to break the silence and say, “I’ve made this mistake,” or, “I’ve done this thing that’s weird,” the immense relief we feel knowing we’re not the only one makes us root for them.

That’s why feeling vulnerable is such a benefit: it means you have the courage to take a chance. After all, that’s what you want your audience to do: take a chance, try something new, feel something new.

The overarching point is that emotion is not something to fear; it’s something to embrace. Emotion is what allowed us to survive and take over the world, and it’s where true intelligence lies.

Emotion isn’t the monkey wrench in the system. Emotion is the system.

STORY TOOL

Two rules about emotion:

- It isn’t something to fear; it’s something to embrace and listen to.

- It isn’t the monkey wrench in the system; it is the system.

But there’s a caveat. While emotion is what makes ideas stick, when you’re trying to persuade anyone of anything, the goal isn’t simply to trigger emotion in general. It’s to trigger the specific emotion that signals why the information is important to your audience—a lesson legions of robocallers have yet to learn. Sure, robocalls instantly trigger emotion: annoyance. And it does cause us to take action: basically, never answering the phone if we don’t recognize the number. Clearly not what they had in mind.

If you want people to take positive action, they have to care. That’s why the first thing a story has to do is make us care about the protagonist, and the best way to do that is to let them be vulnerable. How else will we know they’re really human, just like us?

In order to create a story able to do just that—which is what you’re about to do—first we need to look at what a story really is. It might surprise you.

THE TAKEAWAYS

Story is powered by emotion, and so are we. That is not soft science; it’s biology. And for good reason: it’s what allowed us to survive thus far. Understanding the role emotion plays in life, and in story, allows us to create stories that speak directly to our audience, making points that the facts alone could never dream of. This is why it pays to remember that:

- Emotion isn’t ephemeral, arbitrary, or irrational. Emotion is a survival mechanism.

- Emotion isn’t simply relegated to neat, big-box definitions but, instead, is layered, nuanced, and ever-present.

- It’s not emotion versus reason; it’s not either/or. It’s both/and—but emotion is the decider.

- Emotion dictates what will be encoded into long-term memory. Emotion’s criteria is: will remembering this help me navigate the future?

- Because emotion evolved to let us know which memories are keepers and which we can safely discard, emotion-infused memories are far more vivid, stable, and long-term.

- Stories that persuade center on vulnerability, causing us to identify with the protagonist and arousing stronger emotion.

4

STORY: WHAT THE BRAIN CRAVES

“Narrative imagining—story—is the fundamental instrument of thought. Rational capacities depend upon it. It is our chief means of looking into the future, of predicting, of planning, and of explaining.”

—MARK TURNER, COGNITIVE SCIENTIST

Years ago, I was asked by a local aquarium how they could use story to persuade their audience to become better stewards of the earth.

“Okay,” I said, “what’s your call to action? What do you want your audience to do when they leave the aquarium?”

The bearded man who headed the education department leaned forward, looked me earnestly in the eye, and said, “Our goal is to have our patrons go home and think deeply about the issues.”

That’s when I knew they were in trouble.

Think deeply? About what, exactly? Why? To what end? That sounds like work. Unpaid work, at that. It takes energy, focus, commitment, desire, and…hey, what’s for dinner?

This is precisely why story doesn’t ask us to think: thinking is a choice, and with so many genuinely important things vying for our attention this very minute, who has the time? Plus, what the hell does a steward do, anyway?

The purpose of an effective story—the story you’ll create—is to change how your audience sees things, to spur them to do something right now. That is what makes all stories a call to action, because once we see things differently, we do things differently. That’s why your goal isn’t to create a story to show your audience how great your idea, brand, or cause is—regardless of how utterly, completely true that is. I’m sure the newly redesigned LaGuardia Airport is, ahem, utterly captivating by now. That future fact didn’t matter to me even a teeny tiny bit back when I was on that slow shuttle bus, trying desperately to figure out how to salvage the meeting all those renovations were forcing me to miss.

Instead, your goal is to create a story that will help your audience see how your idea benefits them in the moment, given who they are, and how they see themselves. To do that, first we have to upend much of what we’ve been taught about story itself and then redefine it.

To that end, this chapter lays out what a story actually is, based on what your audience is wired to crave and respond to in every story they hear, so you can build a story guaranteed to resonate with them. We’ll zero in on the most surprising, counterintuitive element of story, and then, using a potent case study, we’ll examine how and why story transforms how the audience sees the world, and therefore what they do in the world. We’ll end with a cheat sheet you can use to start the process of creating a story, which is exactly what you’ll be doing, step-by-step, from now on, so by the end of the book you’ll have created a draft of your own story, a story that you can use to persuade your audience to see the world in a different way and take up your call to action.

But first, let’s tackle one of the things that may be holding you back: your tacit notion of what, exactly, a story is.

Redefining Story

Okay, pop quiz: right now, if you had to define what a story is, what would you say? At first it can seem blazingly obvious, but when it comes to actually putting it into words, it’s like what St. Augustine said about time, “You know what it is until someone asks you to define it.”

We all innately know a story when we see one, thanks to the biological effect story has on us. A story instantly grabs our attention and yanks us into its world, no questions asked, substituting its reality for ours, and we are there. The story has commandeered our brain, and it feels so good, so deliciously urgent, that we remain blissfully unaware of the power it then has over us. This probably accounts for the fact that, when we try to sum up what constitutes a story and the real reason why it has us in thrall, even the most brilliant among us tend to fall woefully short.

Aristotle gave it a shot, declaring—wrongly, as it turns out—that the events come first when creating story, which he went on to describe as consisting of: “a beginning, a middle, and an end.” It’s a notion so revered that it’s currently taught from kindergarten up. But think about it: what besides Zeno’s paradox and Uncle Joe’s long, rambling remembrances at Thanksgiving doesn’t have a beginning, a middle, and an end? And how on earth does that help you create a story, anyway?

The dictionary definition of story is equally unhelpful and misleading: “A story is about something dramatic that happens, an account of imaginary or real people and events told for entertainment.” The problem with that notion is threefold: it’s vague, it defines story as solely for “entertainment,” and the one thing it emphasizes—“something dramatic that happens”—focuses on what a story is not about: the external events.

Unfortunately, most of us have been taught to think of a story in exactly that way: as being about something external that happens. That is what Aristotle, and the writing world, call “the plot.”

It feels so true that it’s easy to see why even Aristotle was fooled. After all, the plot is what’s visible. When we’re lost in a story, it’s natural to assume that this is what has grabbed us, and therefore it’s what we need to focus on when creating a story, whether it’s part of an ad, a mission statement, or a pitch letter.

It isn’t.

In the decades I’ve spent working with writers, diving deep into what makes story work, the realization that surprised me most was this: What grabs us, what pulls us in and makes us care are not the external events, regardless how overtly dramatic. An earthquake, a tsunami, an asteroid obliterating all of downtown Akron can be so startlingly boring that you start to wonder if there’s something wrong with you. (There isn’t.) Because what makes those situations riveting is the internal effect they’re having on someone we care about. Without that, they’re just random facts, regardless how objectively “dramatic.”

Here’s the secret: As counterintuitive as it may seem, a story isn’t about what happens in the world. A story is about what happens in the mind of the protagonist—the person through whose eyes we’re experiencing those events.

STORY TOOL

A story isn’t about what happens in the world. A story is about what happens in the mind of the protagonist.

That realization was a game changer for me. It meant that we’d had it backward.

Which brings us to the question: okay then, what is a story?

A story is about how an unavoidable external problem forces the protagonist to change internally in order to solve it.

A story isn’t about how someone solves a problem. It’s about how the problem causes someone to realize something, internally—something that has been preventing them from solving said problem. It is that inner struggle that has us riveted, not the bombs bursting in air.

And the realization that the protagonist’s inner struggle leads to is what answers the question your audience is always tacitly asking: “Why does this matter to me?”

It’s What’s Inside that Counts

That is not to say that the plot doesn’t matter. It does. But contrary to popular belief, external events are not what your audience is focusing on. Brain imaging studies reveal that when it comes to story—whether it’s encapsulated by a news headline, a picture, a donor letter, an ad, or a novel—our brain is on the lookout for something else altogether.

According to neuroscientist Steven Brown, who runs the NeuroArts Lab at McMaster University, “Our brain results show that people approach narrative in a strongly character-centered and psychological manner, focused on the mental states of the protagonist of the story.”

We’re not talking about long fictional stories. Brown’s study didn’t monitor the brains of people leisurely reading a novel or munching on popcorn while watching a movie. Rather, study subjects read short factual headlines, such as “Surgeon Finds Scissors Inside of Patient” or “Fisherman Rescues Boy from Freezing Lake” to see what areas of their brain would activate as they made sense of it—that is, as their brain did what brains naturally do: translate the headlines into a narrative. The result? The second the subjects saw the headline, what sprang into action in their brain were the “components of the classic mentalizing network involved in making inferences about the beliefs, desires, and emotions of other people as well as oneself.”

According to Brown, when we’re grabbed by a story, we’re instantly making inferences about the protagonist’s beliefs in order to pinpoint their intentions and what is motivating their actions. We’re not hooked by what the protagonist is doing; we’re on the hunt for why they’re doing it.

Marcel Just, director of the Center for Cognitive Brain Imaging at Carnegie Mellon University, agrees. “One of the biggest contributions of brain imaging is to reveal how intensely social and emotional the human brain is. To me it was a very big surprise. Ask people to read some innocuous little narrative, and the brain activity shows that they’re computing things like the character’s intention and motivation. I think there is a constant tendency to be processing social and emotional information. It’s there, and it’s ubiquitous.”

The same thing is true when we encounter people out here in real life, including our audience—the people whose minds we want to change. Because if we understand why someone is doing what they’re doing, not only can we anticipate what they might do next, but we can ferret out what might be keeping them from hearing our call to action in the first place.

The question is: what part of their story is keeping them from hearing ours?

Everyone Has a Story

It’s easy to assume that all that matters is that your brand, idea, or cause is relevant to your audience’s life. Climate change might leave them underwater, literally; that new toothpaste really will make their teeth blindingly bright; who doesn’t want takeout food delivered hot, fresh, and with a smile? But if that were enough, you wouldn’t need a story—you could just give them the facts, and they’d do what you think they should on their own. We all know how well that works.

It’s not just that what you’re advocating has to be relevant to their lives, it must be relevant to their story, which is a very different thing. Often something can be 100 percent relevant to our lives, but we still wholeheartedly reject it. For instance, I lay awake at night worrying about how to save the planet—you know, conceptually. But when I read an article about how eating mealworms is nutritious, delicious, and planet-saving, did I go right out and buy a can of mealworm stew? Yes, that was a rhetorical question.

STORY TOOL

What you’re advocating can’t just be relevant to your audience’s life; it must be relevant to their story.

The point is, each of us has a story that we live by, but as we know, for the most part we are not aware of it, the same way David Foster Wallace’s young fish had no idea what water was. If pushed, we tend to think of our story as a summary of everything that’s happened to us: where we were born, who our parents were, where we went to school, that year the mean kid took our Twinkies every day at lunch (serves him right, considering they turned out to be poison), and the scraggly dog who always followed us home until Mom let us keep her. But those are just the facts, ma’am, not a story.

Our story takes those same events and goes a layer deeper. Because as we’ve discussed, it is what those experiences taught us about survival, especially social survival, that is automatically programmed into our decoder ring. That is our story. Every minute of every day, behind the scenes, our self-narrative is deftly guiding our every decision based on what we gleaned, applying it to what’s happening now, and suggesting what we should (probably) do next.

The problem isn’t just that we don’t see our internal ongoing narrative as a story, it’s that evolution taught us to see the pattern of logic we’ve stitched together as just, you know, life. It’s us reacting to the things that happen, the way any person would. Well, any sane person, that is.

And so when we talk about something, our default assumption is that everyone else reads the same meaning into it that we do—the way the tappers were sure the listeners would instantly peg the song they were beating out. After all, it was playing loudly in their head, how could anyone miss it? So when your office mate rolls his eyes and says he can’t believe Matilda in accounting wore that horrid red sweater again today, it would never occur to him that you think that sweater is the most beautiful thing you’ve ever seen.

Nor would it occur to him that he just told you something about himself. But he did—perhaps he has a thing for Matilda, perhaps he pays more attention to the way women in the workplace dress than he should, perhaps he himself enjoys wearing women’s clothing, just not that (horrid) red sweater.

Whenever we talk about anything at all, we’re inadvertently revealing a piece of our own story, even when we think we’re playing it close to the vest. We’re never simply recounting something that happened; rather, in ways large and small, we’re always giving others insight into what matters to us, and why.

We’re also revealing something else: our misbeliefs. That is, the things we wholeheartedly believe are true but aren’t.

But It Feels So True

A misbelief is something that life taught us early on, often in childhood, that we’ve used to make sense of the world ever since—something that was only true once, in one specific situation, but that we took to be a general truth, or something that was never true at all. But since we learned it the hard way—through personal experience—we have no reason to question it. That’s why we don’t think of it as a misbelief at all, we think of it as a really helpful bit of inside intel that we’re lucky to have learned early.

We all have defining misbeliefs. Things like “showing emotion makes you weak” or “always agreeing with someone makes them like you.” It’s often a cinch to spot someone else’s misbelief. It’s a tad harder to spot your own (yes, that’s an understatement). The problem is that because it can be so easy to see other people’s misbeliefs, the natural assumption is that they’re aware of them, too. We assume they know what the truth is, and they’ve purposely decided to ignore it. Or, at best, we assume they’re uninformed or misguided, so explaining the truth will set them straight. And if it doesn’t, well, they’re ignoring reality on purpose.

By now it will come as no surprise that as far as they’re concerned, we’re the one with the misbelief. Make no mistake: misbeliefs are tenacious, and even when challenged with irrefutable facts, they instantly evoke strong emotion—stay away, danger!

Navigating that danger is story’s bread and butter. Story is about what it takes for the protagonist to overcome a misbelief in the face of unavoidable danger—an internal evolution known in the writing world as a character arc, which begins with the protagonist’s misbelief in full force, dictating the action they take. The story then tracks this ongoing inner struggle until the protagonist’s “aha” moment, when they finally see their misbelief for what it is—not only wrong but also keeping them from getting what they really want. In the story you will create, you will aim the power of that struggle at your audience’s misbelief. Because as you’ve probably surmised by now: your protagonist is a stand-in for your audience, trying to navigate a problem they have, using their belief system, and coming up short.

In the pages ahead, we’ll explore how to build such a story, using everything we’ve learned thus far about our neural wiring, enabling you to not only change your audience’s mind but also to move them to action.

To do that, as counterintuitive as it sounds, your story’s focus won’t revolve around the action you want them to take. Instead, it will change the meaning that action will have for them, that is, the way it will make them feel, because emotion, as we have seen, is the conduit, the live wire.

The question is: what does that kind of internal transformation look like? And how do you open someone’s eyes to the fact that something they believe is wrong without totally alienating them?

To illustrate exactly that, let’s dive into a case study, breaking down a brilliant story, step by step. It’s a wildly successful ad campaign that engaged both men and women, changing their worldview—and yet it’s for a product men cannot use. The video garnered 76 million views globally after three months (the objective was 10 million); it was the most-viewed video in the company’s history. And, most astonishingly, a sixty-second version of the video ranked as the most popular digital campaign of the 2015 Super Bowl.

Why “astonishingly?” Because the brand is Always, the company that makes Long Super Pads with Wings. No, that is not an enhanced flying iPad—we’re talking about what we used to euphemistically call “sanitary napkins.”

Now, that’s a story.

Let’s break down what they did to capture that many hearts, thus changing that many minds. This is the same process we’ll be going through in the next section of this book as you begin to create your own story.

CASE STUDY: ALWAYS

In 2013, the brand Always needed to reach a new generation of girls.

Attitudes had changed. Getting your period was no longer seen as something shameful or so embarrassing that it had to be kept secret.

In the old days, back when the fact that girls even got a period was something polite society deemed unmentionable, only one thing mattered: a product’s “effectiveness.” The less said, the better. Confidence—which was Always’ calling card—came from keeping that secret. That is, from not being mortified that one has had an “accident.”

Now, effectiveness is a given. Besides, no one was saying Always wasn’t effective. That wasn’t the problem.

The problem was, if Always was only promoting how effective their product was, good luck getting anyone to mention it on social media (regardless of the shifting attitudes toward natural bodily functions, it’s not easy to overcome the “ick” factor). As the company lamented, “Nobody will ever share anything that has the Always logo on it.”

Leo Burnett, the ad agency tasked with coming up with a new campaign, summed up their previous advertising strategy this way: “We had always communicated it in a functional way, promising women to fix a physical problem, so that they could be more confident during their period. So confidence in the product led to self-confidence. Yet this logic was exactly what women were starting to reject…If we were to stay within this territory, we had to move from a rational proposition to a much more emotional one.”

They had to find a way to matter to their audience.

They knew that the point wasn’t how great the product was. The point was to let girls know that Always understood them, that the company was on their side—that the company saw the real them. Better yet, that Always saw the best in them—something that others, the girls included, might not see.

Okay, like what?

Research revealed that puberty—the moment when girls suddenly need this product—was also the moment when a girl’s self-confidence plummets. But that info, in and of itself, is just a fact, data. The question was: why?

The team dug deeper and discovered that not only did “more than half of girls lose confidence during puberty—[but also] a contributing factor to that drop are societal put-downs based solely on gender.”

Okay, but that’s still a bit too generic. The story is always in the specifics, so the next question was: what put-downs, exactly? That’s when the agency hit pay dirt, determining that “only 19 percent of girls and women sixteen to twenty-four have a positive association with the expression ‘like a girl’.”

Here’s how Judy John, executive creative director of Burnett’s Toronto office, describes the instant they found the ad campaign’s mission: “We wanted to address the things that contribute to the drop of confidence in girls. And the moment someone on the team said, ‘Let’s change the meaning of Like a Girl,’ we all felt it in the room. That was it.”

Notice she said they felt it. Sure, they had a ton of data, facts, charts, in-depth research. And that helped. But in the end, they didn’t reason it out. They didn’t need a spreadsheet or a mathematical algorithm to zero in on their mission. They took in the data, and the ultimate decision was made by their emotion. Just as emotion was what would drive the campaign.

The team knew that saying you run, throw, fight, do just about anything “like a girl” had become an unintentional insult at best, implying weakness cloaked in vanity. The message is that girls aren’t as strong or capable as boys, and all they care about is looking pretty. So, girls, why even bother? You’re only making fools of yourselves. Boys are strong, capable, the standard of all things—and girls are cute when they’re mad.

The team knew that the deeper problem is because this societal attitude is ubiquitous, it isn’t long before young women begin to internalize it. By the time they’re teenagers, it’s become a self-fulfilling prophecy. Soon it feels like fact, not fiction.

The internal transformation Always wanted their audience to make was now clear. They wanted girls to realize that the accepted negative stereotype of “like a girl” is total bunk, that they should kick it to the curb and reclaim #LikeAGirl, redefining it as an empowering positive.

And so the #LikeAGirl campaign was born. Now, the question was, how could they tell a story to spur that transformation?

The First Step: The Misbelief

Always needed to establish what the problem was—the “before” part of the transformation—because that would mark the beginning of the protagonist’s character arc. To do that, they decided, their ad’s audience would have to see how teenage girls had already internalized the negative societal notion of “like a girl.”

Life had taught young women that, because they were female, they inherently “ran like a girl,” which was code for “you can’t run well, no matter what you do.”

The story’s first job wasn’t to tell us how untrue that misbelief is. It was to allow us to see it in action, but—and this is crucial—it needed to be done without shaming the girls for believing it.

And lest you wonder if their ad was staged and scripted, here’s the kicker: it was not rehearsed. In fact, the participants did not think they were in an ad at all. The young women, men, boys, and girls in the video had simply answered an open casting call—they had no idea what the filmmaker’s agenda was, or what she was looking for. So when they were asked questions, they didn’t try to say “the right thing.” They said what they believed to be true.

As the campaign’s video opens, we see a large soundstage—cameras, sound engineers, and the director, award-winning filmmaker, Lauren Greenfield. A teenage girl walks to her mark, stops, looks into the lens.

Greenfield asks her to show what “running like a girl” looks like. Grinning, she jauntily prances in place. Next, another teenage girl flips her hair, patting it, as if keeping it neat is far more important than, you know, actually running. Another girl waves her hands as if she’s apologizing for running at all. All of them exaggerate looking helpless and clumsy and doe-eyed. Grinning, giggling. Like they’re in on the joke. It’s clear they feel smart doing this because it proves that they know the score: girls are silly.

Then Greenfield brings a young man onto the stage and asks him to “fight like a girl.” At first he looks at the camera as if to say, “What? Girls don’t fight—what does that even mean?” Then he brings his hands to his face and ineffectually bats them, a caricature of someone trying, rather ineffectually, to shoo a fly, while he bobs and weaves. He giggles, too.

Greenfield then asks a young boy to “throw like a girl.” With a sly grin, he mimics a girl cocking her arm way too far back and then, with the merest flip of the wrist, “accidentally” drops an imaginary ball. “Awww,” he coyly laments.

Point made: running, fighting, and throwing like a girl is an exercise in frivolity.

They all got it. Accepted it as true. It was simply a fact they’d been taught about how the world works. In their minds, they weren’t being mean or degrading to women. They were just exemplifying a truth.

That was the misbelief that needed to be upended. But how?

The Second Step: The Truth

At this point, Greenfield could have simply called all the kids together, sat them down, and explained why the degrading notion of “like a girl” was wrong—backed by a PowerPoint presentation brimming with colorful graphs, in-depth charts, and complex scientific data.

She didn’t.

Because that would have only made them defensive. They might have said she was shrill, or a snowflake, or too PC. Or any of the retorts we use when one of our long-held beliefs is challenged. Because it doesn’t feel like it’s the belief that’s being called into question, it feels like it’s our intelligence. That never ends well.

Instead, Greenfield brought out a younger girl, who, at ten, hadn’t yet reached the age where the cultural gender divide becomes so blindingly binary—separate, but not equal. When asked what running like a girl looks like, she gave it her all, running in place like it was a race she was determined to win. When an even younger girl was asked what it means to run like a girl, she blinked and said, “It means run as fast as I can.” Duh.

The difference was perfectly summed up by Anna Coscia of Leo Burnett. The younger girls, she said, “ran and fought and hit as hard as they could, with confidence, pride, and incredible self-belief. They had clearly not been influenced yet by the ‘rules’ that define womanhood and were simply being themselves. For them, doing something ‘like a girl’ meant doing it as best as they could.”

Indeed. As they watched the young girls, it was clear to all the teenage girls and boys who’d enacted the demeaning gender stereotypes that running “like a girl” didn’t have anything to do with how well you ran or fought or threw. It just meant that you were a girl, and you were running.

Misbelief challenged. Eyes opened. And no one confronted the older kids. They made the comparison themselves.

Next the question was, if “like a girl” isn’t a factual statement about how girls run, throw, and fight, then what is it?

The Third Step: The Realization

This is the place in a story where, given what the audience had just experienced, they began to revamp their internal logic. What they thought was true clearly wasn’t. So, what was?

Greenfield turned to the young boy who’d thrown “like a girl” by dropping the ball. “So, do you think you just insulted your sister?” she asked.

He looked shocked, as if the thought never occurred to him. “No,” he said and then stopped short, “I mean yeah, insulting girls, but not my sister.” And then the penny dropped; you can see it in his eyes. His sister is a girl. If he’s insulting girls, then…uh oh.

The beauty of it is that, in asking that question, Greenfield wasn’t vilifying the boy; she was vilifying the belief—a very different thing. It allowed him to look at it without feeling that she was shaming him and to see it for what it is: wrong. Any shame he might have felt came from his own realization, rather than anything she said to him.

Next Greenfield turned to a young girl and asked, “Is ‘like a girl’ a good thing?”

“I don’t know,” she said. “It sounds like a bad thing, like you’re trying to humiliate someone.”

Then Greenfield asked the first teenage girl we saw—the one who “pranced” in place—how she thinks it affects girls when they hear “like a girl” used as an insult.

“It definitely drops their self-confidence,” she said. “You feel like you’re strong, but when someone says, ‘like a girl’, it’s kind of like telling them they’re weak, not as good as them.”

Each person was now rethinking what they believed. Not because someone told them what was true. But because of what they had just experienced.

Greenfield then asked another teenage girl what advice she’d give to girls who were told they swim, run, kick, fight, or throw like a girl.

“Keep doing it,” she said, “because it’s working. You’re doing it right; it doesn’t matter what they say.”

Having seen the damage done by the misbelief they themselves had when they walked onto that soundstage, those girls’ inner narrative changed. So did the boys’. Doing anything “like a girl” no longer meant doing it poorly. Doing something “like a girl” meant giving it your all, wholeheartedly and with passion. It meant being your whole, authentic self.

The Fourth Step: Transformation

The final step happens when your audience’s worldview is transformed by what they’ve now realized, triggering an external change. This is the moment when they hear your call to action loud and clear, and not because you’re telling them what to do, but because it’s the logical—emotional—reaction to what they’ve just realized. Your message has now become part of your audience’s self-narrative, and following your call to action isn’t your idea. It’s theirs.

This plays out flawlessly in the video as, finally, Greenfield turned to one of the teenage girls who’d pantomimed a self-deprecating stereotype of running “like a girl.” “If I asked you to run like a girl now, would you do it differently?”

The girl smiled at the camera. Nodded. “Yes,” she said. “I would run like myself.” And she did—fast, focused, and determined.

Says Coscia, the goal was “to take viewers on an emotional journey. You go from laughter, to surprise, to anger, as you realize how language can affect the way girls perceive themselves. You end in tears when the older girls realize that they have been sucked into a cultural cliché and they are given the chance to do it all again, this time just being themselves.”

And there you have it: Misbelief, Truth, Realization, Transformation.

The impact of the video surpassed the creators’ expectations. The internal transformation these girls—and boys—went through changed how viewers saw the world. Remember that at the outset only 19 percent of girls and women ages sixteen to twenty-four had a positive association with “like a girl”? After watching the video, that number skyrocketed to 76 percent. It didn’t change how just women saw the world. It changed men, too. Two out of three men said “they’d now think twice before using ‘like a girl’ as an insult.”

When Always launched a sixty-second version of that video during the 2015 Super Bowl…okay wait, this time let’s pause here for a sec. Let that really sink in: they ran an ad for a feminine care product during the Super Bowl, an event known for ads for beer, cars, and the kind of fast food that only aspires to be food. Traditional “guy stuff” often hawked by scantily clothed, impossibly skinny women. It’s no wonder that no company had run such an ad during the Super Bowl before—an ad about empowering girls? By a company selling menstrual pads and panty liners? Who’d watch that?

Apparently everyone. Adobe, which monitors the social buzz around the Super Bowl ads and publishes a top ten list, found that the Always #LikeAGirl ad came in at number one, with more than 400,000 social media mentions. And remember that they were looking for an emotional tie to their brand? The ad, Adobe added, “also drove the highest positive sentiment across social media mentions, with 84 percent of mentions focused on feelings like admiration and joy.”

On March 9, 2015, Always received a United Nations award for the impact the campaign had on female empowerment around the world.

It doesn’t get better than that.

The #LikeAGirl campaign helped free girls of the unrealistic, negative expectations society had put on them, so they could be what they wanted to be: themselves. Because in the end, that is our deepest desire: to be who we are, and have the people we care about love us for it.

The old campaign did the exact opposite. It didn’t celebrate the girls, it celebrated how effective the product was, the better to keep others from knowing who had their…(Shhh! It’s embarrassing). It made girls feel diminished, as if they inherently had something shameful to hide.

The new campaign made those same young women feel like Always saw—and valued—them as they are in total. That made all the difference.

And so they took action. Girls and women were now eager to share their thoughts and triumphs with the hashtag #LikeAGirl, thus sharing the Always logo, tripling the brand’s Twitter followers, and growing their YouTube channel by a mind-boggling 4,339 percent.

That is the power of story.

Of course, to create transformative story, first you have to find your audience’s misbelief by digging into their self-narrative, their story. And that is exactly what we’re about to tackle.

THE TAKEAWAYS

From here on out, we’ll be applying everything we’ve learned about the brain and about story to the creation of your own story. To that end, here is a handy cheat sheet, beginning with what a story is really about:

A story is about an inner realization that leads to an external transformation. In the beginning, the protagonist has an internal belief that is not true—this misbelief is what’s keeping your audience from hearing your call to action. The events in the story—the unavoidable problem the protagonist faces—will force them to confront and overcome their misbelief in order to solve the problem.

To create a story capable of changing someone’s mind, there are four stages your protagonist’s worldview must go through, culminating in taking up your call to action.

First: Misbelief

This is the closely held (erroneous) belief that your audience enters with. To simply tell them they’re wrong is to challenge both their self-identity and their loyalty to their tribe. It is this belief that’s keeping them from hearing your call to action.

Second: Truth

This is the point you want to make. The events of the story are constructed to show your audience that the belief they think is helping them, isn’t; instead it’s hurting them. It’s keeping them from getting what they want and being who they really are.

Third: Realization

The event(s) in the story cause your audience to—on their own—question their misbelief. This experience finally allows them to see it for what it is: wrong.

Fourth: Transformation

This is the moment when, having realized that their misbelief has blinded them to what will actually help them achieve their true agenda, your protagonist’s (and by extension, audience’s) worldview is transformed. This is what allows them to address the external problem—whether it’s working to stop climate change, damaging societal norms, or a wonky website—by taking up your call to action.

5

YOUR AUDIENCE, ACCORDING TO YOU

“There are no facts, only interpretations.”

—FRIEDRICH NIETZSCHE

When my kids were little, we used to love watching The Chipmunk Adventure. And you know how it is with books and movies you love: there tends to be that one line that sticks, one you then use over and over, with raised eyebrows and a wicked grin, one that becomes an inside joke. For us that line came during a scene in which Dave, the human surrogate dad (I think, I hope) of the three chipmunks—Alvin, Simon, Theodore—was away on a business trip. He calls home and when Miss Miller, their ditsy babysitter, answers, he asks, “Is Alvin available?”

To which, clearly confused, she replies, “Available for what?” Alvin is standing right there, mind you.

It always got a laugh, because what Dave meant was so blindingly clear to us: can I talk to Alvin? How could Miss Miller not see that? But now I’m feeling a tad guilty at how easy it was for me to declare Miss Miller dense and laugh at her expense (even if she was a cartoon). Because, really, she had a point. I’m guessing her train of thought would have gone something like this: If Dave wanted to talk to Alvin, he would have come right out and said so, but since he asked if Alvin was available, he must have something entirely different in mind, and for some reason, he’s being cagey about it. Thus, the completely logical response was, in fact, “Available for what?”

The point is that very often when we think we’re communicating what we want someone to do—that is, our call to action—as far as they’re concerned, we’re not. That’s because, like Dave and Miss Miller, we’re wearing a decidedly different decoder ring, so we don’t actually know the meaning they’ll read into what, as far as we’re concerned, we’ve very plainly asked them to do. In other words, we think we know our audience, but we don’t.

And, even more shockingly, while we think we know what we want them to do, we often get that woefully wrong, too. I know; it sounds impossible. How could you not know what you’re asking your audience to do? Sheesh, that’s the whole reason you’re creating this story. But like so many things that seem utterly obvious at first blush, there is a bit more to it than meets the eye.

That’s why in this chapter we’ll work on nailing down who exactly you’re trying to reach and what you actually want them to do. First we’ll define who your audience inherently isn’t. Then we’ll take a look at what you want your audience to do, and how, in your opinion, it will benefit them. That will allow us to begin zeroing in on the specific audience who needs what you’re offering—always keeping in mind that this is still your take on them, the external truth as you see it. (In chapter 6, we’ll dive even deeper: we’ll try to see them, and their world, from their point of view.)

Note: We’re about to put everything we’ve learned thus far into practice, and you know what that means. Yep, homework! This book is designed to help you create the first draft of your story, one that will move your audience to action. To do that, there will be exercises in every chapter going forward, taking you through the process, step-by-step. You’ll find them at the end of each chapter in this section, aptly called “What To Do,” so by the time you finish the book, you will already have the experience of creating an effective story of your own.

Who Is Not Part of Your Audience

There are two wrong choices we often make when defining who our audience is, mistakes that pretty much guarantee that no one will hear what we’re trying to say. So right off the bat, let’s clarify who your audience isn’t.

It is not:

1. You.

2. Everyone.

We often assume that because our point matters to us, it will matter to our audience—and for the same reasons. It won’t, and this assumption can blind us to a humbling truth: when we’re trying to persuade anyone of anything, we are pretty much irrelevant. They don’t care why we think it’s crucially important that they canvas for our candidate; download our time-saving, soul-boosting, meditation-in-ten-seconds app; or even do their own damn laundry. They care about one thing: how our point, what we’re asking them to do, fits into their belief system, their self-narrative, their tribe’s worldview and solves a problem they already have. That doesn’t make them selfish or egotistical, nor does it make us selfish or egotistical for not recognizing our own blindness. Rather, this tendency can be summed up in one simple truth: we don’t see the world as it is; we see it as we are. This will be your biggest stumbling block if you’re blind to it, or your biggest asset if you harness it.

STORY TOOL

We don’t see the world as it is; we see it as we are.

The thing is, even when we’re aware of the “curse of knowledge,” we still have a propensity to take for granted that our audience knows the same things we do and wants the same things we covet. I mean, who wouldn’t want a fine-line tattoo of a simple wooden house on their right forearm? Wait; that’s me. Did I mention the weeping willow with the tire swing on it, or the owl flying overhead? (Full disclosure: This is an aspirational desire, not one I’ve yet had the courage to put ink to.)

As neuroscientist Tali Sharot warns, “When attempting to create impact, we first and foremost consider ourselves. We reflect on what is persuasive to us, our state of mind, our desires, and our goals. But, of course, if we want to affect the behaviors and beliefs of the person in front of us, we need to first understand what goes on inside their head and go along with how their brain works.”

That’s why, in order to create a persuasive story—a story that will allow others to see the world the way we do—we have to find the place where our expertise intersects with a need they already have. Sometimes their need is easy to spot, because it’s right there on the surface.

It’s something I witnessed firsthand long ago, in the unlikely realm of car repair manuals. I worked for many years at John Muir Publications. It was famous for a book that Muir, the great-grand-nephew of the famed naturalist, self-published in 1969 called How to Keep Your Volkswagen Alive: A Manual of Step-by-Step Procedures for the Compleat Idiot. (Side note: I will never understand how the Complete Idiot books didn’t pay homage to him, not to mention take up his clever misspelling of Complete.) Muir’s book forever changed the way instruction manuals were written because he had the visionary idea of stepping out of his own reality as an engineer and ace mechanic and looking at VW repair from the viewpoint of a mechanically challenged car owner (aka the rest of us). While Muir himself died before I joined the company, his method lived on.

Here’s what he did: He would start with a VW in need of a specific repair, recruit someone who didn’t know a crescent wrench from a croissant and read him the instructions he’d written on how to fix it. Then he would sit back and not intervene, or so much as arch an eyebrow when the woefully ignorant subject reached for a lug nut, even though the text clearly specified a wing nut in plain English. Instead, he went back to the drawing board, until all anyone needed was a copy of the book and a set of secondhand tools in order to change the spark plugs, tune the engine, or rebuild the clutch.

It was a brilliant approach. By slipping off his personal decoder ring and looking at the repairs through the eyes of someone who had never set foot in a garage, Muir was able to identify the knowledge that he, as a mechanic, took for granted, and make sure it was clearly laid out for the uninitiated reader. His book went on to sell more than two million copies.

Okay, you may be thinking, Got it; my audience isn’t me. I can work with that. But as long as I’m broadening my horizons, why not dream big? Why can’t my audience be everyone?

There Is No Everyone. There’s Just You and Me and Everyone We Know

Trying to reach everyone is the same as trying to reach no one, and it has just about the same effect. That’s because there is no “everyone.” There are only individual people, who band together based on their common interests and beliefs, with the goal of survival, whether physical, social, or both.

What’s more, if you try to reach everyone, your focus shifts from grabbing their attention to not offending anyone in the process. Now all your creative energy is focused on being toothless because each faction of “everyone” will have a different misbelief that keeps them from hearing your call to action. There can be no single, overarching truth to counter…what, exactly? So no resulting realization. No transformation. No emotion. You’ve created a story as bland, benign, and let’s face it, as boring as possible—which is the exact opposite of what you want.

But wait, you may be thinking, my goal is to stop climate change, and there’s a perfectly logical argument for casting the widest net possible: It’s going to affect us all, not to mention the generations to come, and there are things each and every one of us could do right this very minute to slow it down. So why can’t the audience be everyone?

The answer is simple. While we are wired to need other people, we’re not wired to need every single other person. We’re wired to need those people whose tribe we find ourselves a part of, the tribe that guarantees our social survival, from which our self-identity then springs. Sure, as we grow, we may leave one tribe and join another (adjusting our decoder ring accordingly), but that tribe is never “everyone.”

So even if you are trying to reach “everyone,” you’ll need a different story for each tribe, because each group’s belief system will have a different take on your call to action. For instance, a study in 2013 led by Dena Gromet at the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania, revealed that while conservatives will buy energy-efficient light bulbs based on the money saved, a significant number will change their mind if there is a “protect the environment” sticker on the package. Therefore if your goal is to sell energy-efficient light bulbs because they’re a great way to reduce our carbon footprint, your job isn’t to convince conservatives on the importance of conservation. Instead, it’s to dive into their story and find out what matters most to them, given what you want them to do. In this case, what they want is to save money, because being frugal is key to their belief system—as far as they’re concerned, that is the actual benefit you’re bestowing upon them. And in so doing, they never have to know buying green light bulbs will also reduce their carbon footprint. Mission (stealthily) accomplished.

The point, according to Gromet in National Geographic, is that “you can lose significant portions of people who would otherwise be interested in these products when you use that environmental labeling. It indicates that different messages can reach different groups.” Indeed.

Given that people who are concerned about the environmental impact of energy-hogging light bulbs are already using “green light bulbs,” creating a campaign pitching “money-saving light bulbs” would not only help the environment, but reach a whole new audience.

Okay, now that we know who your audience inherently isn’t, there’s one more potential category to dispense of. This time, it’s up to you.

Thanks, But No Thanks

It may sound counterintuitive, but I can virtually guarantee that there are some potential customers, clients, and donors you don’t want to reach with your message—although they very well may be clamoring to leap onto your bandwagon. The problem is, they’re primed to misunderstand what you’re offering. So chances are, it won’t be long until they start complaining, insisting you’re withholding things that you never promised in the first place, and threatening to announce it on social media, nonstop, 24/7. Soon you find yourself either trying to give them something that is, in fact, impossible, or scrambling to put out a thousand little fires, leaving you unable to do your best for the audience to whom your service is best suited.

The question is: Who, specifically, don’t you want your audience to be—who would you turn away?

For instance, in my own story-coaching business, I want clients to hire me to help guide them as they dig deep into what they’re trying to say, and so write the most compelling, powerful story they can. So my obvious audience is writers.

But which writers? Anyone who wants to write a story? No. Definitely not.

Over the years, I’ve learned to ask: within the wide group of people who could be my audience, who would I pass on? (Full disclosure: That benign sounding “learned to ask” is a euphemism for what the flaming, mortifying mistakes I made along the way taught me.)

So what did I learn? I learned to pass on writers who aren’t willing to dive deep and do the hard, often painful work of dredging up the real story they’re after. Writers who want to argue with every bit of feedback and tell me their bestie, their mom, their writing group told them that what they were doing is just fine. I don’t want to work with writers who only want positive feedback, and whose real goal is to have me say, “Why, this is brilliant! Let me introduce you to my agent.” I don’t want to work with writers who can’t kill their darlings (for you nonwriters, yes, that is a metaphor). I don’t want to work with writers who want a guarantee that they’ll be able to finish their book in three months, or even three years, or that it will be published when they do finish—none of that is my call.

Taking on such clients is not only a headache for me, ultimately costing me time and money, but worse, I end up letting those writers down because I cannot give them what they want.

It took a lot of soul-searching to come to the conclusion that, even though it meant turning away clients, it’s the sadder but wiser writer for me, those who have been in the game long enough to know that unless they’re willing to do the hard work, their book will have a guaranteed audience of one.

The good news is that by defining who you don’t want your audience to be, you’re also further defining who you do want to serve. It enables you to refine what your mission is, and therefore your message. It also helps you weed out people whose tribal belief system probably wouldn’t have meshed with yours anyway, keeping you from the seductive temptation of trying to win them over, or worse, watering down what you do in order to appeal to the widest possible audience.

Your audience does not need to be big. It just needs to be made up of individuals who have the potential to become superfans, whose goal will then be trumpeting your call to action as if it were their own—because it will be.

Now that we’re ready to define who your target audience is, the question becomes, um, okay, so what do you want those people to do? Because unless you know exactly what you’re offering, it’s impossible to figure out who will be receptive and who will quickly take to Twitter to denounce you, at best, as hopelessly clueless.

Calling All Calls to Action

It sounds so simple: what exactly is your call to action? It can be a harder question than it appears because we’re all driven by our specific end goal, which feels totally, abundantly clear—to us. We want our audience to donate to our cause, to buy our product, subscribe to our service, vote for our candidate—or even, geez, just clean up their room before the boss comes over for dinner. Pretty clear, right?

But let’s say your goal is to mobilize your audience to fight climate change. You’re envisioning a world with crystal blue skies, plentiful clean drinking water, and enough real food to feed us all, snacks included. Great, I’m right there with you. But what action do you want me to take? What, specifically, will my compatriots and I be mobilized to do once we’ve heard your story? Please don’t say form a committee to discuss possible avenues of action in an open-ended and egalitarian forum. Because you know we’ll spend most of our time figuring out whose house to meet at and who’s going to bring those healthy, eco-friendly snacks. Heck, even deciding which snacks to bring might necessitate the formation of a sub-committee.

Let’s face it; we need leaders, and right now that’s you. Which means that your goal is to come up with as many concrete calls to action as you can, so that you can pick the one that will help you identify, and then motivate, your target audience.

Keep in mind that your ultimate goal might not be the same as your story’s call to action. In fact, your product might not even be referenced in your story. Always’ #LikeAGirl campaign didn’t mention their product once, and the call to action was most decidedly not “buy our Ultra Thin Maxi Pads.” Although, of course, the company’s end goal was to up their market share by winning more customers who would do exactly that. But to reach that goal, the campaign’s call to action was to inspire their target audience to feel the kind of emotional connection to their brand that comes from knowing someone is on your side, and to pay it forward by sharing their own experience of redefining what #LikeAGirl means. Instead of being an embarrassment, posting empowering moments with the Always logo attached would become a show of solidarity, a positive association that would strengthen their brand.

That’s why the one hard-and-fast rule is that what you want your audience to do can’t be conceptual, vague, or abstract. It has to be concrete, specific, and actionable. Because without clear steps toward achieving your call to action, your audience will be left with the unsettling feeling that you want them to do something but they’re not exactly sure what. Or, in the words of Miss Miller, “Available for what?”

What’s Your What

Whether or not you can envision how your audience will get from where they are now to where you want them to be, chances are you can see that end goal. It’s as simple as filling in the blank:

I want my audience to ____________.

For instance:

- I want my audience to download my new app.

- I want my audience to vote for my candidate.

- I want my audience to fund the new wing of my museum.

- I want my audience to snack on mealworm muffins.

If your goal sounds like that, great. It’s clear, concise, and doable (okay, except maybe those questionable muffins).

But if, like that educator at the aquarium who wanted people to go home and “think deeply about the issues,” you’re not exactly sure what your specific call to action is, why not take a page from his book and think deeply about it, focusing on the specific things you’d want your audience to do once they’ve thought deeply.

For instance, let’s say our nonprofit’s overarching goal is to promote composting and mulching in order to combat climate change, reduce waste, and get people in touch with nature (at least in their own backyard). Our call to action list might look something like this:

- I want people to compost their food scraps and build soil with it in their backyard.

- I want people to use their leaves as an overwinter mulch rather than bagging them and getting rid of them.

- I want people to harvest the abundant insect life this will foster, ultimately moving to a diet based on cricket-flour cookies, deep-fried grasshoppers, and termite ragout—insects, the most sustainable protein ever.

Sounds great; doesn’t it? But remember, this list of potential calls to action is what we want our audience to do. The question they’ll be asking is the one we’re all wired to ask: What’s in it for me?

How Will What I’m Offering Benefit My Audience?

This probably seems obvious. Benefit, are you kidding me? If they take up my call to action, they’ll help ensure world peace. They’ll make sure there is breathable air for their kids. They’ll be riding the best, sleekest bike on the road instead of driving that gas guzzler. Can’t we just move on? No. That kind of utter assurance is, itself, a red flag. Because the surer you are of what that benefit will be, the more likely it is that you’re not really seeing it from your audience’s point of view—and so, by extension, you won’t be able to tell a story they truly identify with. The good news is that this tends to be a signal that there are even more potent benefits lurking beneath that very obvious surface. In other words: dig deeper.

Here’s a handy rule of thumb (and this works in all arenas): When something is head-smackingly clear to you, it most likely means there are a ton of things you’re taking for granted. This is not to say that you’re wrong; of course, people would find world peace, breathable air, and a nifty, ultralight bike to be a benefit. But if you stop with the obvious, you’re selling yourself—and your idea—short. Because, chances are, there is a lot more to it than that.

With our composting campaign, it’s easy to sum up the benefit in one big general sentence: It’ll help reverse climate change. But wait, there’s more! For instance:

- Compost will enrich the soil and be able to grow more plants.

- They’ll be able to cut back on or maybe even stop using chemical fertilizers, which will save them money.

- Hey, they’ll also save money by reducing their garbage bill.

- They’ll help improve air quality.

- They’ll spend more time outdoors raking and getting in touch with nature.

- They’ll learn to love cricket stew. (It is the way of the future. We’ll get used to it; right?)

Once you get started, it’s surprising and exhilarating to see how long the list can grow. For some things, though, the benefits might at first be more conceptual, which is another red flag. For instance, vote for my candidate, and you’ll get someone who will:

- Work tirelessly for you. (Yes, but to do what?)

- “Drain the swamp.” (Define swamp.)

- Address climate change. (Yes, but how?)

- Uphold national values. (Which are what?)

- Shoot from the hip. (Yes, but at whom?)

The problem is that those benefits are so generic they can be interpreted a thousand different ways; rather than being inclusive, ultimately, they’re empty. Your goal here is to be as specific as possible about the actual, boots-on-the-ground benefit your audience will get. And don’t be afraid to be controversial. As in:

- Vote for my candidate, and she’ll put everything she has into instituting single-payer health care, so everyone can go to the doctor (including you).

- She’ll fight for a universal basic income for everyone (so you don’t need three jobs and four roommates just to make the rent).

- She’ll go to the mat to institute an assault rifle ban (so your kids won’t need those bulletproof backpacks after all).

In other words, be bold. Be honest—even if it scares you. As we’ll discuss in the pages to come: if it makes you feel vulnerable, you’re on the right track.

Sometimes, though, finding even one concrete benefit isn’t easy. For instance, if you’re asking people to donate to your cause—say, the building of a new wing on the art museum—what will it get them?

- Um, they’ll get to see more art?

- Their art museum will become world-class?

- It will boost tourism to their city?

See? This one is harder. Because really, how does it benefit them? That’s not to say it won’t, just that sometimes it’s surprisingly difficult to separate how your call to action benefits you from how it might benefit your audience. That was the mistake LaGuardia Airport made with their “Gee, aren’t we great!” announcement. Whoever wrote it was sure that the sleek, modern terminal they would one day unveil would be seen as a real benefit by the weary, inconvenienced travelers, never pausing to consider that in reality, many of them would never be back to reap those lauded benefits, anyway.

LaGuardia should have taken lessons from Los Angeles International Airport (LAX). LAX addressed the chaos caused by its massive renovation by focusing on the travelers themselves, instead of how spiffy the airport would be long after they were gone. Mindful of the nightmarish congestion caused by their project, LAX wanted to get ahead of the problem. Their goal was to “take the edge off the airport’s construction woes and bring a warm touch to stressed-out travelers arriving at LAX amid ongoing construction that is part of the airport’s $14-billion overhaul.” So they got local celebrities—including Los Angeles Dodgers third baseman Justin Turner, L. A. Philharmonic director Gustavo Dudamel, and chef Susan Feniger—to record a warm welcome and point out things those travelers might enjoy in the city. They didn’t negate the problem, they acknowledged it, put it in context, and then made us feel as if they were on our team.

The difference between these announcements and LaGuardia’s is that LAX focused on how we feel and on our lives going forward, rather than on how great their airport was going to be. My personal favorite is Jimmy Kimmel’s welcome, because he hits the problem square on, no excuses: “Hi, I’m Jimmy Kimmel. Welcome to LAX. We apologize for all the construction, but you’ll forget all about it once you get on the 405. Anyway, we hope you enjoy your stay in Los Angeles. And if you need anything at all, call Matt Damon; he has no friends.”

It’s hard not to smile hearing that (unless, of course, you’re Matt Damon). And as studies reveal, smiling releases dopamine, endorphins, and serotonin, which then alleviate stress, lower your blood pressure and heart rate, and relax your body—a definite benefit for those weary travelers. What’s more, you know that old saw, “smile and the world smiles with you”? Turns out to be a biological fact. So suddenly those other travelers don’t look so weary, so much like strangers. Instead we’re all united in a shared experience, facing a hardship with a smile, which makes us feel kind of brave. It might seem like a small thing, but I can tell you, had LaGuardia played a similar announcement on that bus, even though it wouldn’t have helped me get to that meeting on time, it would have made me laugh, and more important, feel seen.

That’s why you need to get to know your audience, so you can find the place where what you’re offering provides something they’ll see as a benefit.

With that in mind, it’s time to start zeroing in on who your audience actually is.

Getting Specific: Okay, So Then Who Is Your Audience?

Out of everyone left, who, exactly, will be your target audience? Chances are you have many groups to choose from. For instance, with our composting campaign, it’s easy to come up with a bunch of possibilities:

- Gardeners

- Urban homesteaders

- Homeowners

The notion of gardeners sounds promising. Surely there are a ton of gardeners who might be interested, and they’re already out there in the yard, digging. The problem is that there are just as many who might find mulching and composting way too inconvenient, time consuming, and maybe even kind of icky. In the thanks-but-no-thanks category, competitive lawn gardeners, ornamental gardeners, and Martha Stewart-type gardeners are probably out. While they might be interested, chances are, to these people, backyard composting and overwintering leaf mulch is just going to look “messy,” which would force us to work overtime trying to figure out how to help them pretty it up (good luck with that). And a quick Google search nets a long list of types of gardeners, from “clueless” to “Mr. I-Want-It-All” (whatever that means), which tells us something: gardeners are a less specific category than they sounded at first.

The next possibility: urban homesteaders—people who practice urban agriculture and strive to be self-sustaining—seem like the perfect audience. Too perfect. Because chances are, they’re not only already composting, but also they could probably teach us a few tricks. Our goal isn’t to preach to the choir; it’s to bring new converts into the fold.

So what about that last possibility: homeowners. They sound like the least likely category because, as yet, we haven’t even figured out if they garden at all. But since, like you, one thing we do know a lot about is our own mission, we’re well aware of how people feel about climate change. Right off the bat, we know that seven out of ten Americans are worried about it (including more than 50 percent of homeowners), that 70 percent worry they’re not doing enough, 73 percent say they’re motivated to make changes, but 51 percent aren’t sure what they can do. That means that a slew of homeowners are already on board conceptually but are still looking for a way to help. And because they own a home, they very well may have a backyard and might even dabble a bit in gardening. Score!

And there’s something else: This tells us that right now many of them might be feeling powerless in the face of climate change, so finding a simple solution “in their own backyard” might empower them, inspiring them to convince their friends and neighbors to do the same.

They have the potential to become the kind of superfan we need.

It feels like we know exactly who our audience is, but believe it or not, we’re still in the land of the general. How can you tell? Close your eyes. Can you see those homeowners who believe in climate change? Or are they still a faceless group, a demographic on a chart?

You’d have the same problem if you identified your audience as truckers from Tacoma. Hipsters from Hollywood. Recent retirees in Richmond. Or even rock climbers, tweens, or middle-aged men who like to watch football. Like our homeowners, these groups sound specific, and it might feel as if we’ve nailed it. But the truth is categories like these are still way too general.

To be effective, we need to refine it further. Is it tweens who are in the 4-H Club, or the ones who only listen to indie rock? Is it middle-aged men who like to watch football because they’ve bet thousands on the game, or guys who watch because they’re reliving their high school glory days? Big difference.

Once you’ve zeroed in on your specific target audience, the goal is to close your eyes and envision the one person you see as embodying the group. What do they look like, what are they wearing, what is an average day like for them?

This is crucial because the story you’re going to create will have a protagonist—one person who will embody your target audience’s misbelief and face a problem that forces them to confront it, triggering a realization that allows them to solve the problem. The person you’re zeroing in on now? Think of them as your potential protagonist.

For instance, for our composting campaign audience, I’m picturing Cosmo, a dad in his late thirties. In my mind, he’s a guy who worries about climate change but doesn’t exactly know what to do about it. Neither he nor his wife, Wanda, both of whom work, have a lot of extra time, especially given the kids’ schedules. They try to eat healthy, love those pre-measured meal kits you can order to then cook at home, but feel a tad guilty about all the packaging. Cosmo has a fine-line tattoo of a house on his right forearm.

But what we’re most interested in revolves around the change we want Cosmo to make to his normal routine—that is, what he currently does with his kitchen scraps, what he does with the leaves in the fall, and how he fertilizes the plants in his backyard (that is, if he even has a garden). Because that’s what we’re going to ask him to change. What we’ll have to then drill down to is the personal benefit he’ll get from making that change. As we’ll see in chapter 6, we don’t tend to make changes based on some amorphous future benefit the change might net us. So as much as Cosmo may care about stopping climate change, if we can give him an immediate benefit, it’s way more likely he’ll make the change we’re advocating.

But keep in mind that this is still our version of who our audience is. It’s the story we tell ourselves about them, which might be quite different from the story they tell themselves. As social scientist Brené Brown points out in Dare to Lead, when trying to figure out why anyone does anything, simply beginning with “the story I’m telling myself about what you’re doing is…” is a game changer. Because it makes it clear to us that this is our story about what someone else is doing, not theirs. And it opens us up to the possibility that we could be wrong.

For instance, everything I just told myself about Cosmo, who in my mind represents our target audience, could be completely and utterly wrong. Our target audience might abhor those meal kits, (hey, I just threw them in because I always see those big boxes on my neighbor’s porch, and it sounded good), and they might not have any kids at all. And, yeah, that fine-line tattoo is what I want. I was projecting my beliefs and desires on him, envisioning him as part of my tribe, instead of trying to see him as part of his.

STORY TOOL

Don’t envision your audience as part of your tribe. See them as part of theirs.

That’s why I can’t stop here with my version of Cosmo’s worldview. Because while this is the first step when it comes to thinking specifically rather than generally, I’m still making a lot of assumptions, without realizing it. That’s why in chapter 6 we’ll begin questioning those assumptions, clearing them away until we can see Cosmo the way he sees himself.

The point is, without digging deeper, chances are good that the story you’ll create will revolve around what you think your audience’s concerns are, and why you think they should take up your cause, buy your product, or hire you.

That’s why once you’ve identified your audience, you have to identify with them. While that’s much, much harder, it’s also far more rewarding.

But how can you figure out what someone else thinks, short of being clairvoyant or, even more frightening (because it feels eerily possible), using some new Silicon Valley app? Happily there are other ways, because mind reading is exactly what we’ll be tackling in the next chapter, sans magic or implanted computer chips.

WHAT TO DO

Yes, this is an assignment. Break out your paper and pencil, fire up the old laptop, and take a moment to write down your thoughts and make them real.

- Who don’t you want your audience to be? Why? (Be as snarky, heartfelt, brutally honest, and vulnerable as you dare. Let it all out. It can be deliciously cathartic; trust me.)

- What do you want your audience to do—what is your ultimate goal? How would you answer the question, “I want my audience to (fill in the blank).”

- Make a list of potential calls to action that would result in your ultimate goal. Dive deep and don’t just think it; write it out.

- Go over the list you just made and figure out the benefits you believe your audience will derive from each call to action. How would it help them?

- Who, in your view, would benefit most from heeding your call to action? Why?

- Close your eyes and envision the one person who embodies the group. How old are they? Where do they live? What are they wearing? Be as specific as possible.

6

YOUR AUDIENCE, ACCORDING TO THEM

“It’s hard not to like someone once you know their story.”

—MR. ROGERS

We’re about to take a deep dive into our target audience’s mind, with these three things in ours:

1. How will your call to action benefit your audience based on their specific worldview?

2. What beliefs do they have that you’ll be butting up against when asking them to change?

3. Based on their worldview, how will the change you want them to make help them become their most authentic self?

Knowing answers to these questions will help you create a story that will make your audience feel heard, and it bears repeating: People don’t listen until they feel heard.

Which means that in order to create a story that will move people to action, it’s not enough to simply pinpoint your target audience. Yes, knowing who you want to reach and having a general notion of their worldviews is a great start. But knowing it intellectually isn’t enough. In order to persuade, you have to go deeper still. You have to empathize with them. That doesn’t mean simply knowing why they’re doing what they do, it means being able to actually feel the compelling internal logic behind it, without demeaning it, vilifying it, or rolling your eyes.

That’s why in this chapter we’ll tackle what may be the hardest step of all: truly seeing the world through your audience’s eyes. We’ll explore why this is so important, and why it can feel so hard, even given everything we already know. Our goal is to discover a need they have, a problem they’re facing, that—as far as they’re concerned—our call to action can solve. Otherwise we risk inadvertently misunderstanding, or worse, making light of something they care deeply about.

This is important even when you’re trying to reach an audience of one: your teenage daughter, your boss, or your neighbor who lets his new dog bark all night long. And make no mistake, even when your audience is a million people, that’s still a million individual people.

The biggest obstacle to genuinely grasping other people’s internal logic is our pesky tendency to make assumptions about what drives their behavior. Like the one that I just made about your neighbor: that he lets his dog bark all night long, implying that he’s totally aware of how annoying that is and doesn’t give a damn. In fact, maybe he gets off on knowing that he’s destroying your night’s sleep. That makes your blood boil as you grab the phone to call the cops and report him.

But…maybe that’s not the true story. Maybe your neighbor has been trying hard to quiet Fido down, but nothing is working. You see, Fido was his mom’s dog, she died a month ago, and the mournful pooch has been howling at the moon ever since. Truth is, your neighbor’s using every ounce of strength not to howl along with him. Even if you were sleep deprived, realizing that would break your heart, making you want to comfort the poor man, rather than bring charges against him. And maybe buy some earplugs. (I find a white noise machine works wonders.)

The point is, knowing who your audience is and what they normally do is only the beginning. To convince them to do something different, you need to feel like you’re part of their community, part of their tribe.

But be forewarned, one of the hardest things about seeing your issue from your audience’s point of view is that you might discover that they think you’re a 100 percent wrong, and a big fat idiot to boot. As we discussed back in chapter 2, thanks to our biology, that’s something it’s nigh on impossible to contemplate without your blood pressure spiking so high that you have to sit down for a moment and fan yourself. It’s not a sign of intellectual weakness; it’s just your brain’s way of protecting you from what it is wired to perceive as a full-frontal attack. It’s probably why, as columnist Franklin P. Adams so sagely pointed out, “Seeing ourselves as others see us would probably confirm our worst suspicions about them.”

But there’s another way of looking at it (once your pulse is back to normal). In fact, the initial anger you may feel when you realize how much they disagree with you can be useful. It can be a starting point for empathy, as in, “Hey, I bet that’s exactly how they feel about me when I tell them that they’re wrong.”

I learned that lesson recently while reading a political editorial by a pundit whose worldview I share. She was clever, biting, and deliciously snarky about the supporters of a politician I particularly disagree with (okay, fine, utterly detest). She called them “myopic whiners.” Yes, I thought, exactly. But then it hit me. Were a pundit on the other side of the aisle to call my tribe “myopic whiners,” I’d be livid, and from that moment forward, I wouldn’t listen to a single word that so-called pundit said.

The point is, you have your reasons for believing your audience should follow your call to action, and they have their reasons for why they’re not already doing so. Reasons that mean a lot to them, reasons they feel in their bones.

However—and this is the key—we now know that their reasons don’t get their power from external logic, even when there is external logic. Their reasons are powered by emotion. And ours are, too. That’s why you aren’t simply trying to find out what your audience’s reasons are; your goal is to find out why those reasons have the meaning—the emotional weight—they do.

In a nutshell: You’re not looking for how to best potential buyers, donors, voters, or customers in an argument, or to create a story that shows them how smart you are or how great your product is. Instead, you’re looking for a way in, for the place where their worldview meshes with what you’re offering, for how you can benefit them.

Thus, it helps to hit the mute button, silencing that voice in your head that’s always judging, thinking how much better off people would be if only they just did what you want them to do without asking so many questions. After all, we humans aren’t wired to do things simply because someone told us to; if we were, we’d all have sent our bank account number to that nice Nigerian prince. We do things because we want to. That’s why your story has to allow people to make up their own minds, while at the same time making them feel that there is only one real option. The Always video didn’t appear to have any “message”—it just gave people the opportunity to see things differently and, based on their own internal logic, change how they interpreted what they experienced.

As you dig into your audience’s worldview and how they see themselves, the key to empathizing with them is to ask the most potent question of all: Why do they believe what they believe?

It’s Not About What They Do; It’s About Why

Let’s say we want to reach those recent retirees from Richmond we mentioned in chapter 5. Our goal is to envision someone who epitomizes that group, and so we begin with the logical assumption that what they want is to find a way to put their hard-won expertise to work, to spend more time with the grandkids, and to chow down on better early-bird specials. But, logical according to whom? Uh, that was me.

What if the truth is that they love to wear faded jeans and T-shirts and still have that old motorcycle stashed in the garage—they don’t see themselves as nearly as old as we thought they did, and they certainly don’t care about early-bird specials? I’d be in big trouble.

The question is how exactly do you discover what your target audience really wants? Big companies do their research via focus groups—traditionally in person and now sometimes online—made up of people they believe represent their target audience, recruited for a price, who answer probing questions aimed at determining how they really feel about some aspect of that company’s product—without knowing which company commissioned the group. But that kind of formal research is expensive, time-consuming, and may not even reveal the desired results, since, as we’ll discuss in chapter 7, people are often, shall we say, less than truthful, especially when the “real” answer might be a tad embarrassing (or so they believe).

Luckily, you can conduct less formal, but still effective, market research in both the digital world of social media, and in the real world of actual people actually interacting in the wild. And lest you dismiss the latter, remember that a reconnaissance mission out into the good old flesh-and-blood world is sometimes the most effective (and only) means of delving into your audience’s worldview.

For instance, the above-mentioned bikers of a certain age might not spend much time on social media. Thus, fieldwork in the actual field might be in order—perhaps a trip to a casino, or a classic bike show, or even to an Ultimate Stones tribute concert. Whether the goal is simply observing them to get a better idea of what they’re passionate about or, that done, chatting them up—because people love to talk about things they care about—the info gleaned can be surprisingly revealing.

What’s more, being there in the flesh allows you to step into their world and experience what it feels like firsthand. What are the slogans on their T-shirts? What brands are they wearing? What kind of spending money might these folks have, based on the kind of purchases they’re making? It’s a great opportunity to eavesdrop (just don’t let them catch you). What do their conversations suggest about how they see the world?

But since meeting your target audience in real life is not always doable, financially viable, or physically possible, there’s the other arena, that most potent avenue of inquiry: social media—an avenue most of us have already traveled in search of revealing tidbits about those in our personal lives, things they might not even realize are out there.

Like when you’ve just met someone you’re crazy about—what do you do? Be honest. I’m not saying you’re the suspicious type, but you’ve been around the block. You’d be a dolt if you didn’t Google them; right? You know, so you can see if you’re truly compatible (and be sure they’re not an ax murderer, or worse, married).

While an online search can’t replace genuine one-on-one interviews, it comes close. In fact, there are times when the self we reveal on social media is (unbeknownst to us) more transparent than the self we present in person. Like that parent who posts daily about their eight-year-old’s latest academic accomplishment, not realizing they’re coming across as a helicopter parent and making us feel kind of sorry for that poor kid who never has a minute to go outside and play.

With that in mind, hop onto Instagram, Twitter, Facebook, Reddit, or whatever took their place five minutes after I wrote this, in search of members of your target audience. You’re looking for inside info on how they see the world, what they like, and of course, what they had for lunch. And where. And with whom. (Sounds creepy, I know. But, hey, when it comes to stalking our audience, we’re rank amateurs compared to Siri and Alexa.)

How do you find those representative members in the first place? You might begin on Instagram by looking up causes or brands similar to yours to see who follows them, then follow the followers. What do they post? Who else do they follow? What memes do they like, or better yet, repost themselves? What other brands do they follow? What causes do they support? What kind of blogs do they link to, and what kind of comments do they leave?

You’re not just looking for what they do; you’re on the hunt for why they’re doing it. Learning what their concerns, fears, and desires are is a good start. But the deeper question is: What is the belief system behind those concerns, desires, and fears? What tribe are they loyal to? (After all, that tribe is your target audience.) What matters most to them? Who are their heroes? What keeps them up at night? What would they rather die than admit to?

Themes will emerge, and you may find that the one thing that brings everyone in your target audience together is something that had not occurred to you at all, completely changing the benefit you assumed you were providing. For instance, let’s say your product is a new high-tech bike, with an ultra-lightweight carbon frame. You may have seen its key benefit as being faster, sleeker, and so cutting-edge that everyone on the block will be jealous. After much research, you’ve defined your target audience as urban commuters ages twenty-five to sixty, who could ride it to get to work (as opposed to rural folks), are fit enough to do so, and have the disposable income to buy a pricey bike. But upon further digging, you’ve discovered that these people aren’t thinking about bikes at all. What they are longing for is a way to get to work on time, given that traffic has turned their morning commute into a noxious parking lot—a problem that your bike could solve. Different desire, different place where your product meshes with their world; therefore different benefit, different story.

That’s what happened with our composting campaign: we focused on gardeners first, thinking that they already were out there getting their hands dirty, so composting would be an easy ask. But we soon realized that not only were there myriad subsets of gardeners, but also we were looking at it backward to begin with. The question wasn’t could someone compost; it was why would they want to?

As it turned out, there was another, much larger group we could zero in on: homeowners. After all, many of them worry about climate change and have backyards, so they have both a place to compost and lots of leaves to get rid of. That much we could figure out on our own, and based on that, I picked Cosmo as my protagonist, the dad we want to convince to compost his leaves instead of bagging them and setting them out by the curb.

It’s time to dig deeper, so we can see the world from his point of view. What about his motive? Why would he be receptive to our ask now? Is there a fear more up close and personal than gradually rising temperatures? What about his kids? A quick internet search reveals that seven in ten teens believe that climate change will cause a great deal of harm in their lives, much of it thanks to Mom and Dad’s generation (ouch).

So far, so good, until…

It was the next deep dive that opened my eyes. Turns out I’d fallen head first into the very trap we’re trying to avoid: I picked Cosmo—the dad—due to my own bias (true story). I want to live in a world where men and women are equal partners when it comes to household tasks and child-rearing. After a little digging, I discovered that men tend to do more yard work than women (sigh), and that men are also becoming more engaged in caring for their kids than ever (yay). But further research revealed that women around the world are “leading the way toward more equitable and just solutions to climate change,” and what’s more, moms still do 65 percent of the child-rearing as compared to dads, which helps explain why it’s the social media feeds of the moms in my online research that seem to reflect the most anxiety over the impact of climate change, especially on their kids. So, mom it is. The person representing our target audience now flips from Cosmo, the dad, to Wanda, the mom.

Diving into the social media of such moms, a potent composite starts to emerge: The daily NatGeo pictures that she reposts tell us that she loves the outdoors, her Instagram shots of the kids out hiking and biking show us that she relishes being with her family, and the story she shared about building a bird feeder with her seven-year-old lets us know that she enjoys hands-on projects. The fact that she supports politicians who combat climate change tells us what her priorities are. Which means what we’re asking her to do could indeed help her become—and be seen—as her most authentic self.

Based on the articles she “likes” and the people she follows, we can see that she’s always on the hunt for activities that can bring her family together. Great! That’s yet another place where we offer a benefit: composting gets us outside, and surely the kids could help.

What is she afraid of? Based on the articles she retweets, she wants to know what her kids are up to, she wants to connect with them, and she doesn’t want to be left behind as they grow up. She’s afraid her kids are spending too much time inside, mesmerized by screens. She’s afraid that the world her generation is leaving for her kids will be unlivable. Unsustainable. She’s afraid that, given how busy everyone is, there’s no way they can come together. Yet another place we can offer a benefit. We’re on a roll.

Note that, like those would-be bike riders we were talking about, none of this has to do with our specific call to action. There’s nary a word in her social media posts about composting, gardening, what she does with the family’s food scraps after dinner, or what she and her family do with their leaves in the fall. That is totally fine, because as we’ll see in chapter 7, the problem we’re going to solve for Wanda has nothing to do with her view of leftovers or the care and maintenance of her yard, but with her view of the world, herself, and a problem she has identified.

Digging for this specific info is crucial. Because while Wanda is just one person, she represents the tribe we want to communicate with, our target audience. Remember, the person we’re envisioning will most likely be our story’s protagonist, and it’s only by zeroing in on her belief system that we can speak her language. If you get this part of the equation wrong, your campaign can go down in flames.

Let me give you an example.

CASE STUDY: MOTRIN

In 2008, Motrin launched a video campaign aimed at new moms. Taxi, the independent shop that created the campaign, knew the surface stuff: moms had begun wearing their babies in a sling or carrier, and that can give them backaches. Fair enough.

Unfortunately, they didn’t dive into why the moms were opting for slings rather than strollers. So someone who—I’m taking a wild guess here—was not a baby-wearing mom wrote the copy, and while they did manage to touch on the real reason moms (and dads) wear their babies, they did it in a decidedly snarky way: “Supposedly,” says the twenty-something female voice that narrates the fifty-second animated video, “it’s a real bonding experience. They say that babies carried close to the bod tend to cry less than others.”

Supposedly? As if it might not be a bonding experience? Research (and the experience of parents themselves) says it is. Why say supposedly? Especially since Motrin’s target audience already wears their babies. They’re not considering it; they do it. So why suggest that they may be making a mistake, unless your goal is to sell them a stroller?

My guess is that the agency wanted to “sound millennial” without figuring out what a millennial mom would actually say.

And for heaven’s sake, why go further with, “They say babies carried next to the bod cry less”? They, who? Why throw shade on something that these moms already know firsthand? It does reduce crying.

Even more tone deaf, the video boldly asserts why the creatives at Taxi believed moms were wearing their babies in slings: because it “seems to be in fashion.” Something women did because “it totally makes me look like an official mom.” It would be funny if it wasn’t so patently condescending.

And finally, in the in-for-a-penny-in-for-a-pound category, the voiceover ends with: “And so if I look tired and crazy, people will understand why.”

Tired and crazy is clearly how some ad exec saw these moms, but it was definitely not how the moms saw themselves. As one woman tweeted, “I think they were trying to be edgy and even pissed off my husband.” Yeah, the ad hit a home run, but for the wrong team.

And while the narrator complains about back pain—a lot—she never once mentions pain relief. The video simply ends with the unintentionally ironic tagline: Motrin: We Feel Your Pain.

Hardly.

Once the fledgling mom blogging community got wind of the campaign, the backlash was swift and furious. This was not a community they wanted to alienate, given that according to Forbes “women drive seventy to eighty percent of all consumer purchasing decisions,” including over-the-counter medications. Oops.

The campaign was pulled.

Imagine if they genuinely had empathized with those moms, women who were willing to take on back pain because it meant being closer to their babies, soothing them so they didn’t need to cry. The video might have taken an entirely different track: We know how much it means to you to snuggle your baby; we laud you for it and want to ease your pain during those long walks, so you can focus on what really matters—bonding with your cutie pie.

The bottom line is: if the story you create doesn’t take place within the world of your audience’s belief system, they, and their tribe, will, at best ignore you, and, at worst, rise up against you. They’ll smite you, even, with babies safely stowed in their slings.

Where’s the Catch?

That’s what your audience will be asking themselves. Wouldn’t you? There’s always a catch. It’s the other half of the equation. When you ask a member of your target audience to try something new, you’re also asking them to give up something they’re already doing.

The question is what, specifically, will they have to give up in order to do what you ask? As in:

- Instead of driving to work in your comfy car, I want you to ride a bike.

- Instead of quickly scraping your table scraps into the garbage disposal, I want you to compost them and then use them in your garden. (Oh, and have a garden.)

- Instead of riding your 1960 Harley with the pack on Saturday mornings, I want you to volunteer at the food pantry.

- Instead of chowing down on a juicy steak, I want you to eat a big ol’ slab of Tofurkey.

- Instead of stumbling into Starbucks every morning to buy that eye-opening cup of triple-shot espresso, I want you to donate five dollars a day to save the rainforest.

Having researched your target audience’s worldview, either in person or online, by now you know that, to them, driving to work is when they listen to their favorite podcast before having to face their crazy boss, that Saturday morning motorcycle ride is what makes the rest of the week worthwhile, and coffee is the elixir of life (or at least a reason to carry on with it). One of the biggest errors we can make is believing that when we ask them to trade one behavior for another, we’re asking them to make an even swap, in an emotional vacuum.

STORY TOOL

When you ask your target audience to trade one behavior for another, remember: it’s not necessarily an even swap, and it never happens in an emotional vacuum.

Make no mistake, it’s not just an external, surface change you’re asking your audience to make; it’s an internal one. You’re asking them to give up something that not only matters to them but could also be at the heart of their identity.

For instance, I feel most like myself in plain, unadorned black clothes. If you wanted me to wear a colorful, frilly dress, well, I’d rather die (figuratively, unless there are ruffles and bows, then, really, shoot me). Because a dress like that would identify me as “girly” and would make me feel physically confined and deeply uncomfortable. And yet, on the surface, it seems so simple. I mean, I wear clothes, and basically the purpose of clothes is to keep us from being naked in public (string bikinis notwithstanding). So in the grand scheme of things, what difference does it make if I wear black jeans and a T-shirt or a frilly red dress with bangles? None, probably. But we’re not talking about the grand scheme. We’re talking about one person’s sense of self.

When you know what the internal change you’re asking your audience to make means to them, it becomes abundantly clear that they have deep-seated reasons for what they’re already doing, whether they’re aware of it or not.

Those mothers didn’t wear their babies in a sling as a fashion statement or to prove they were a “real” mom; they did it to bond with their children, to reduce crying, and because it’s way easier to get things done when you have your hands free. I don’t wear unisex black clothes because it’s in style or cool; I wear them because they make me feel like I’m strong rather than girly, which, in my mind, is linked to being submissive. And, look: I know that many women love looking girly, and that it in no way whatsoever makes them submissive. But the point is that, for me, it’s such a deeply rooted association that if I wore those clothes, that’s how it would make me feel. Showing me a “gorgeous” haute couture frilly dress, no matter how stunning, isn’t going to make a bit of difference.

Seriously, don’t even try. I am not your target audience.

What stands in your way is the internal meaning your audience reads into the external change you want them to make. That is what your story has to target. Or, if it’s an intractable belief—like what wearing a frilly dress means to me—you’ll have to either dive back into their story and find another way in, or realize that you’ve chosen the wrong target audience. That’s why knowing which beliefs can’t be budged is just as valuable as knowing which ones can.

STORY TOOL

Knowing which beliefs can’t be budged is just as valuable as knowing which ones can.

What you’re looking for is a pressing concern, a worry, a fear your audience already has that your call to action can help remedy, without challenging all that they hold dear. That is the benefit they will reap by heeding your call to action.

And speaking of benefits, there is hidden benefit in all the digging you’re about to tackle in the “What to Do” section. Given how much you will learn about your target audience, you may find yourself empathizing with them in a way you didn’t at the start of the process.

Because once you know their story, you’ve vicariously experienced what matters most to them. By putting yourself in their skin, you’ll be better able to feel why they’re doing what they’re doing, and by extension, why it makes sense to them. You’ll know what makes them feel good about themselves, and what makes them feel like their true self. Chances are, you’ll then have a notion of what their misbelief might be—the thing that will keep them from hearing your call to action. That is what your story is going to open their eyes to.

That’s potent information, and you’re going to need it. Because in chapter 7, you’re going to tackle the biggest challenge when it comes to convincing anyone to do anything they aren’t already doing: getting them to change voluntarily.

WHAT TO DO

Take the time to research your target audience just as we did with Wanda. Find someone who embodies that audience and, if possible, go to the places where they congregate with their tribe. Then dig into relevant online profiles. Your answers to the prompts below can be as long as you need them to be. As you search online, always have a pen and paper at the ready. Based on what you’re seeing, how would you answer the following prompts?

- This is what matters most to my audience right now: _________________________

Be on the lookout for their biggest concern in the present. The goal here is to be concrete. In other words, name something they can actually do something about.

- This is what my audience most desires in order to become their most authentic self: _________________________

What do they aspire to be; what is their goal? Be specific. For instance, you might note that the individual who represents your target audience follows the hashtag #tinyhouse. This might reveal that they aspire to live in a simpler way that offers more financial freedom.

- This is what my audience most fears: _________________________

What do they stay up at night worrying about? As always, be as specific as possible. For instance, your audience’s posts might reveal that they worry about being shamed for their lack of patience with sorting and recycling, or judged for their devotion to cheesy romcoms, or wonder how on earth they’re going to pay for their kid’s education.

- This is what my audience is doing now instead of the ultimate thing I want them to do: _________________________

What external thing would they have to give up in order to heed your call to action? What emotional ties, if any, might they have to what they’re doing now?

Given what you’ve uncovered, take a shot at answering the three questions we started with:

- How will my call to action benefit my audience based on their specific worldview?

- What beliefs do they have that I’ll be butting up against when asking them to change?

- Based on their worldview, how will the change I want them to make help them become their most authentic self?

7

IDENTIFYING YOUR AUDIENCE’S HIDDEN RESISTANCE

“It isn’t the mountains ahead to climb that wear you out; it’s the pebble in your shoe.”

—MUHAMMAD ALI

Now that you can see the world through your audience’s eyes, we’re about to return to an unfortunate truth: change makes us deeply, biologically uncomfortable.

As we know, the status quo, even when it’s not ideal, feels safe, while something new feels like a risk. And risk is scary, because as bad as things might be now, changing could make them even worse. So we wait until we’re kicked out of our corporate job to open the microbrewery we always dreamed of; we put off repairing the hot water heater until the basement floods; we keep chowing down on deep-fried Snickers until a heart attack teaches us how delicious kale really is.

That is the mode your audience is in right now. They’re standing pat until they have no choice because, all joking aside, if it ain’t completely and totally broke, why fix it?

This is why your story needs to make them feel as if the change they’re being asked to make isn’t a change so much as it is an invitation to actualize something they already believe, deep down. In fact, effective stories often show the audience that they already have the courage—and ability—to do something they’ve been afraid of trying because it felt risky.

But to create such a story, you have to answer what can be the most elusive question of all: Why isn’t your audience already doing what you want them to do? What is holding them back?

Because here’s the thing: even if you asked them point blank, they might not know the answer. Or, more likely, they’d give you the wrong one.

This gives you an advantage, because now that you can empathize with them, you don’t just know what they believe, you can feel why they believe it—but because you aren’t them, you can also see where they may be wrong. You can see things they can’t.

In this chapter, you’ll use that newfound ability to zero in on the specific misbelief that’s keeping your audience from embracing your idea, even if they themselves can’t quite name it. That will allow you to identify a problem they already have, which your call to action can solve, so you can begin to build your story.

With that in mind, let’s start with what we’re not looking for. Because even after all the digging we’ve done, it’s still embarrassingly easy to assume that we’re on the hunt for a mistaken belief about something objective and quantifiable—cost, quality, usefulness. Those are surface, logical objections, and logic loves what you can see and measure; but what drives human action is what lies beneath the surface. As we know, one of our biggest stumbling blocks is the ingrained belief that data and objective facts will do our persuading for us. It is one of our most deeply rooted misbeliefs, planted by a society that tends to fear emotion over all else. That’s why it shouldn’t come as a surprise that study after study proves that what many economists believe—that people do not act against their self-interest when it comes to their economic behavior—is yet another myth.

What matters most isn’t saving money; it’s saving face. We want to do things that show the members of our tribe that we’re on the same team, because that’s what keeps us safe and makes us feel worthy. Most of the time. When it doesn’t—when what we want and what our tribe expects from us appear to diverge—the misbeliefs that keep us from being our authentic selves take hold. That is often where your audience’s resistance lurks.

It reminds me of one of my favorite interchanges on Mad Men.

Don Draper, head of creative at Sterling, Cooper, Draper, Pryce, has walked out of a presentation that Dr. Faye Miller was giving on the importance of consumer research (yep, those focus groups we were talking about). Later, she follows him into his office and confronts him for leaving her presentation early. He dismisses the notion that her research can help him better understand customers, arguing that she doesn’t know the first thing about how advertising works.

But she turns the tables on him. “Look,” she says, “we’re both in the same business, and I’m not embarrassed to say it’s about helping people somehow sort out their deepest conflict.”

“And what is that?” he asks, voice dripping with condescension, eyebrows raised.

“In a nutshell?” she counters, raising her eyebrows to match his. “It all comes down to what I want versus what’s expected of me.”

After a startled pause, he blinks, pulls back, considers, and finally reluctantly concedes, “That’s true.”

Or, as Brené Brown points out in The Gifts of Imperfection, we struggle with the difference between fitting in and belonging. While at first those two sound like the same thing, they are not. Fitting in implies we’re hiding who we really are; belonging is being accepted for being ourselves. The two are mutually exclusive. Often we struggle to fit in, when what we really want is to belong, to be seen and valued for who we really are.

That’s why we evaluate everything based on the question: “What does this say about me?” Hence it bears repeating that the real question the audience asks themselves isn’t, “Is this a good idea, cause, product, or service in and of itself?” Rather, their unspoken question is, “How could this help me and how could it hurt me in terms of how others see me, and how I see myself?”

It’s an emotional cost-benefit analysis.

We all do it. Even me. (Even you.)

The goal is to find the specific misbelief that keeps your audience from realizing that your call to action would make them feel even more like themselves than they do now. To meet that goal, we have to harness everything we learned about them in chapter 6, so we can view the world through their belief system, their decoder ring.

Strap Yourself into Your Audience’s Head; It’s Going to Be a Bumpy Ride

First, a word of warning: Even given everything we already know, it’s easy to mistake what your audience is doing as a result of their misbelief for the misbelief itself; that is, mistaking the “what” for the “why.” For instance, refusing to walk under a ladder is the what; believing that something bad will happen if you do is the why. A misbelief is rooted in why your audience is misreading what is happening. So to create a story that would convince someone that walking under a ladder is totally safe, you wouldn’t need to get to the bottom of how they feel about ladders, but rather why they’re so superstitious in the first place.

STORY TOOL

Don’t mistake what your audience is doing as a result of their misbelief for the misbelief itself.

That doesn’t make the desire to point out their obvious error about the safety of walking under a ladder any less tempting. It’s especially challenging when what has them all riled up—what looks like their misbelief—is something you can objectively disprove with facts. But one glance at the furious faces of people brandishing signs that say, “Keep your government hands off my Medicare” tells you that explaining that Medicare is a government program is not going to help. Because that’s not what their anger is about. It’s about their concept of fairness: they believe that the government takes their hard-earned tax dollars and gives them to people who didn’t work as hard as they do, which makes the government itself unfair. Thus “government hands” refers to their distrust of the federal government, rather than to the entity that runs Medicare. That’s why pointing out that Medicare is a government program wouldn’t make a difference, because it wouldn’t touch their real concern.

Our next impulse might be to simply dismiss such people as “just being emotional,” and move on. And, yes, they are being emotional. But that emotion stems from a specific, complex system of logic that binds them to their tribe. Remember the study we discussed in chapter 2: the emotion they’re feeling is not a character weakness; it’s their brain trying to protect them from a physical or social threat. And that, as we know, triggers actual pain.

What might seem like the simplest request to you, can sound to your audience like a full-throated, frontal attack that they’ll do just about anything to avoid. Story, however, allows us to try on facts we’d otherwise fight in the privacy of our own mind. Sure, some beliefs are unalterable, story or not—for instance, deep-seated political and religious beliefs. But when you bump into a seminal belief, it doesn’t necessarily mean game over. It just lets you know that you need to look for another way in.

That’s something communications expert Jane Praeger explored with her graduate students at Columbia University. Their goal was to convince young Republicans of the dangers of nuclear energy. Rather than trying to convince them based on their own beliefs, Praeger’s students conducted extensive interviews. As they listened without judging, they began to see the world through the young Republicans’ eyes. They very quickly realized that “in order to have any chance of succeeding, we would have to work out a way to connect with them on an emotional level.” Based on what the students learned from their research, the solution was to jettison environmental arguments and instead question the use of nuclear power from a national security standpoint.

The misbelief they could counter wasn’t “nuclear energy is 100 percent safe and has no environmental downside”—because that challenged a major tenet of their tribe’s belief system, which eschews being thought of as a “tree hugger.” The misbelief they could safely target was “nuclear power plants don’t pose any threat to our national security.” Because they’d discovered that what mattered most to those young Republicans was family, safety, and keeping the nation secure.

So Praeger’s students pointed out that terrorists had considered striking nuclear power stations, many of which have a very poor safety and security record. (Terrifying; I know.) To make it even more personal, they pointed out that the nearby Indian Point nuclear facility was only thirty miles from Manhattan, and if it went, so would they.

As with the #LikeAGirl campaign, Praeger’s students did not vilify the young Republicans’ belief in the innocuous nature of nuclear energy. Nor did they tell them what to do or how to feel. They didn’t say “Hey, now that you see the danger, clearly you should be opposed to nuclear energy.” Instead, they left the decision up to them, simply suggesting that given the danger, it might be a good idea to develop alternative energy sources and use them when possible. Totally their call.

That changed minds.

New Is Not Enough

So what’s holding your audience back? There’s one glib—and incredibly tempting—answer that we need to shred right out of the starting gate: because they don’t even know about it yet. It’s easy to believe that the only reason people don’t already use your product, believe in your cause, or embrace your idea is because they’ve never heard of it, and so all you have to do is tell them about it, and they’ll be eating out of your hand.

STORY TOOL

Don’t assume that the only reason people don’t already use your product, believe in your cause, or embrace your idea is that they’ve never heard of it.

That can indeed work, but only when what you’re offering is something they’ve been longing for but never dreamed was actually possible. Invent an app that sucks calories out of candy, and your most pressing need will be getting out of the way of the stampede.

But with anything other than that, you’re probably in trouble.

Let’s take a new look at a classic example. In 1947, when instant cake mixes were first introduced, the box proclaimed that all you had to do to whip up a homemade cake was “Just add water and mix!” There was nothing like it on the market, the mixes were cheap, and they saved time. Who could argue with that?

And yet they stayed on the shelves.

General Mills hired a couple of psychologists to figure out what the problem was. It turned out that since homemakers were used to baking from scratch, they wanted to add their own creative contribution to the mix. They felt left out. And a little guilty for claiming the cake was homemade, when they hadn’t done anything but pour water and stir.

The problem had nothing to do with the cake mix itself, it was how using it made the bakers feel about themselves. The solution? General Mills simply removed the powdered eggs (proving, once again, that less is more, and in this case, cheaper, too). The new mixes required that the baker add their own fresh egg. As a trip down the baking aisle of any supermarket will confirm, it worked—too well, probably.

The problem was with the story that General Mills was telling themselves about their audience. We can even deconstruct it using the following handy template.

THE MISBELIEF: Everyone wants to do the easiest possible thing. (And what could be easier than just adding water and baking? It’ll sell like hotcakes.)

THE TRUTH: People don’t want things to be so easy that they, themselves, feel irrelevant. (I bake to show my family how much I love them; using a mix feels like cheating. The dog could make this cake.)

THE REALIZATION: Everyone needs to feel like they’re part of the process; that’s how they get their sense of purpose and authenticity. (Sure, while easy is good; effortless isn’t. Lesson learned. Can’t make an omelet—or a cake, apparently—without breaking a few eggs.)

THE TRANSFORMATION: All we have to do is take out the powdered eggs, and customers will feel included. How easy is that? (We’ll give them less, and they’ll buy much, much more. Talk about a win-win.)

Their new tagline was simply: “Add an egg.”

The moral of the story? Resist the urge to say, “Hey, there’s nothing in my audience’s belief system that would make them resistant to my message once they’ve heard it.” Often, there is a reason—you just haven’t smacked up against it yet—and you must take the time to pinpoint it.

How else can you create a story that counters it?

Why Don’t They Just Say So?

Hey, you may be thinking, now that I know my audience so well, why don’t I just ask them what’s holding them back? Great idea. The only problem is, it won’t work. If asked point blank, those homemakers would not have been able to say exactly why they weren’t going for the new supereasy cake mix. Not that they’d purposely lie. It’s just that in such scenarios, even with the most open and earnest participants, either:

1. People will tell you what they think you want to hear (because they want you to like them, and don’t want to offend anyone).

2. People won’t admit to things that make them feel vulnerable (because if they do, you might not like them).

3. What they tell you in all sincerity won’t be the “real reason” (because the real reason is scary for them to contemplate).

4. They don’t know the “real reason” anyway (because truly, they’ve never even thought about it).

The one thing you can be pretty sure of is that no matter what reason they give for their resistance, it’s never the real one. Because while most people know what they want to feel, more often than not, they don’t know what will make them feel that way. Before we get into strategies for overcoming this all too common challenge, let’s lay out the usual progression, from the logical surface answer to the genuine, heartfelt reason.

My friend and colleague, Jennie Nash, who runs a book-coaching service called Author Accelerator, was trying to figure out what keeps writers from hiring a coach. The writers’ end goal is clear: they want to write a successful book. So why not hire a book coach? The surface, quantifiable reason—the logical reason—was obvious: the price, because it’s not cheap. That was certainly the safe answer. But research showed that money was not the reason.

Okay, then, was it time? Author Accelerator demands that writers commit to a certain number of deadlines. But that turned out to be a plus. Nothing concentrates the mind better than a rapidly approaching deadline, especially one you’ve paid for. Having a deadline made people feel like they were serious about their work. Real writers.

Was it fear of feedback? Again, no. Writers wanted feedback because it would let them know they were on the right track. Plus, writing is lonely work and having someone who knows your story and cares about it as much as you do is a major plus.

Okay, then if it’s not something external and measurable, the question becomes, what do the writers want to feel?

They want to feel that their book and its success belongs to them alone—their voice, their story, their truth. They fear that if they hire a coach, they’ll lose that sense of ownership. It wouldn’t really be their voice. They fear the coach would commandeer the whole project. And readers would find out. And that would not only be humiliating, but also it would wreck the fundamental thing a writer wants, which is to be a creator, a person who made something worth paying attention to.

That turned out to be the real stumbling block: the misbelief that if you need help, you’re “lesser than”—a failure. A “real writer” would have been able to go it alone. If you had help, the product wasn’t even yours anymore.

When Jennie told me this story, I could relate. When one of the most talented and successful young writers I ever worked with sold her first novel, she begged me not to let anyone know we’d worked together—on the advice of both her high-profile agent and her venerable publisher. They were afraid that it would taint her image in the eyes of the reading public and that readers would realize she wasn’t the wunderkind they wanted to promote her as.

She truly was a wunderkind. I had simply helped her drill down to the story she was telling; the story, the work, was all hers. Still, these professionals were afraid that somehow my having helped the author would make her, and her novel, seem less of an achievement in the eyes of the public. But has anyone ever finished reading a novel they absolutely loved, read the acknowledgments, seen the author thank those who helped her, and then thought, Wow, I guess she’s not a real writer after all. I knew it.

Yet that’s what this writer and her publishing team were sure would happen. It made the writer feel vulnerable, like she was an impostor. It didn’t matter that it was not true.

The good thing is that, in the end, she had the courage to admit it to me. Often what makes us feel vulnerable is the last thing we’ll admit to. But ironically, as we’ll soon see, that’s often the very thing that makes us a hero in other people’s eyes. Vulnerability is story’s lifeblood. Because there is nothing more inspiring, more powerful—or harder—than admitting to something that makes us feel exposed. In order to tell a good story, that is exactly what your protagonist has to do: face their misbelief, in order to overcome it.

The following case study is a great example of just that.

CASE STUDY: MOTEL 6

In 1986 when Joe McCarthy took over as CEO of Motel 6, he knew he had a real problem. Occupancy rates were falling two percentage points a year; something had to be done, and quick. He hired Stan Richards of The Richards Group to create a campaign to stanch the flow and, hopefully, reverse the tide.

Richards recruited a nationwide focus group, made up of people who’d stayed at a Motel 6 within the last three months. When asked where they stay when they’re on the road, each person mentioned a national motel chain, but none mentioned Motel 6. The researchers asked the question again. And again, no mention of Motel 6, even though each and every person had stayed in one. So, feeling rattled, the researchers asked a third time. Maybe there was a chain they’d overlooked? Hint, hint. By that time the participants were exhausted, and still no one came up with Motel 6.

And then, just as the researchers were about to call it quits, cancel the session, and rethink their strategy, one lone person piped up and said, “You know, if it’s late at night, I’ll stay at a Motel 6. And I can save enough money by doing that; I can spend it on a tank of gas.”

It took real courage to say that. Because everyone else could have been thinking, What a cheapskate. I bet she dumpster dives, too. Instead, encouraged, someone else said, “I do the same thing. And I can save enough to bring a gift to my grandchildren.”

Says Richards, “The Motel 6 confessions continued. It occurred to us that this was simply a group of people who did not want to be perceived by the others in the room as being cheap or poor. As they traded stories, their initial embarrassment transformed into pride. They didn’t stay at Motel 6 because they were cheap; they stayed there because they were frugal.”

The very thing they thought damned them actually made them heroes. And that one courageous soul was the biggest hero of all. Why? Because she was brave enough to admit to something she thought would make her look bad. In other words, she was willing to be vulnerable (even if she did hedge her bet by saying, “If it’s late at night…” implying it was either Motel 6 or sleeping in the car, so you know, why not?) And in doing so, she was rewarded. Because it turned out that staying at a Motel 6 wasn’t something to be embarrassed about; it was something to be proud of. How did she realize that? By observing the reaction of others in her tribe, who immediately started recounting similar experiences.

She had given voice to what they were afraid to say.

Now Richards knew two things. One was the misbelief they had to overcome: Staying at Motel 6 is embarrassing because it’s cheap, and since the chain’s very name touted its low price—Motel 6 was originally so named because $6.00 was what a night’s lodging cost—they had a pretty big problem.

And the other thing they’d found? The antidote: Keep the benefit—saving money—but reframe what it says about the customer. Because there’s a big difference between being cheap and being frugal. Being cheap makes you stingy; being frugal makes you smart and lets you splurge on that fluffy stuffed bunny for your adorable granddaughter.

But seeing how hard it was for anyone in the focus group to admit to having stayed at a Motel 6 in the first place, it was a sure bet that the motel chain’s target audience shared that embarrassment, and so they were not going to wax eloquent about the nights they spent at Motel 6 to friends and family.

So, how do you counter that? How do you take something that looks like a liability and flip it into a benefit, one that makes that weary traveler into the hero of the story?

If those old-school economists were right, then all you’d have to do is point out how much money they’d save, and Motel 6 would be fully booked. But we go against our economic self-interest all the time, because, as your mom has been telling you since you were a kid, money isn’t everything.

The goal of the people in that focus group wasn’t to save money, it was to avoid social stigma.

The Richards Group needed a story that made the point that staying at Motel 6 doesn’t announce to the world that you’re a skinflint, or worse, low on funds. So they created a radio campaign featuring Tom Bodett—at the time a little-known National Public Radio storyteller, who according to David Fowler, then a creative director at the Richards Group, had “a voice that was immediately likable and distinct, delivering witticisms with commonsensical charm.” Bodett became their down-home spokesman, personifying the fact that staying at Motel 6 doesn’t mean you’re cheap, it means you’re smart and saving your money for more important things than frilly hotel rooms and cold marble lobbies—things like your kids’ education.

They also picked Bodett because he sounded like he was part of their target audience’s tribe. When Fowler called to hire him, Bodett asked, “Why me?” Without missing a beat Fowler answered, “Because you sound like the kind of person who stays there.” As Bodett muses, “I sound like I use the product myself. I do use it. I come from very common stock, and I’ve always been uncomfortable with pretension and all the forms it can take, including disingenuous broadcasting.”

Bodett took it a step further. During his first recording session, he ad-libbed what’s been Motel 6’s defining tagline ever since: “We’ll leave the light on for you.” In an interview in Ad Age in 2007, he summed it up nicely: “I think ‘We’ll leave the light on’ works because it is one of those spontaneous and practical things we say to each other all the time.”

Indeed. What lonely traveler isn’t looking for a safe haven on a dark night far from home? It’s comforting to know that someone cares enough to leave the light on, especially someone who understands what you’re really about and helps you achieve your goal.

Motel 6 has flourished ever since. Says Richards, “Despite being dramatically outspent, Motel 6 is still regarded as the best value for the money compared with all others in the economy-lodging segment, achieving thirty years of continuous growth.”

That is the power of a perfect story.

THE MISBELIEF: Staying at Motel 6 means you’re cheap.

THE TRUTH: Staying at Motel 6 means you have better things to spend your money on than meaningless amenities; you’re saving it for what really matters.

THE REALIZATION: If I stay at Motel 6, I’m not only being smart, I’m living up to my values. They really get me; no wonder they leave the light on for me. We’re on the same team.

THE TRANSFORMATION: Not only will I stay at Motel 6, I’m going to recommend it to my friends, lest they stay away for the same reasons I would have. Paying it forward feels good.

Drilling Down to the Deeper Why

Even if you have the opportunity to do individual interviews—or if it’s your spouse, your boss, or your moody teen who you’re trying to convince to see something differently—getting others to acknowledge their deepest fear is no easy task. As we know, people aren’t likely to reveal their misbelief right away—especially since often they don’t even know what it is themselves. Luckily, thanks to all the time you’ve spent researching your target audience via their online behavior, there’s a thought experiment you can conduct in the privacy of your own home (they’ll never know).

It begins with a simple question based on your call to action, something external, something generic, and that’s fine; it gives you something to dig into and keep asking, “Why?” Because the obvious, surface reason the audience gives for what they’re already doing almost always masks something far more personal, potent, and guarded.

First, let’s take a stab at drilling, layer by layer, into the real reason why someone wants what they claim to want. We’ll start by asking Jack (who I just made up) what he wants, in general, and why. Here goes:

US: What do you want?

JACK: I want to make a lot of money. (I mean, who doesn’t?)

US: (Wow, how superficial can you get?) Why?

JACK: Because I want to take more lavish vacations. (There, I sound prosperous, right? Or was that too over the top? Don’t want them to think I’m a jerk.)

US: (Superficial and materialistic.) Why?

JACK: Because I want to spend more time with my family. (That’s okay to say, I hope, at least now I don’t sound like a complete a-hole.)

US: (Aha, human after all, I knew it. Now we’re getting somewhere.) Why?

JACK: Because lately we’ve been drifting apart. (Why did I admit that? I bet now they think I’m weak.)

US: (Now I feel for you; that has to be hard. And note: what Jack thinks will make him seem weak is what actually makes us empathize.) Why?

JACK: Because I’ve been spending so much time at work. (Hey, I gotta do what I gotta do, but it does get exhausting. And lonely.)

US: (Poor guy—sounds like a vicious cycle.) Why?

JACK: Because people who can’t take their families on vacations are failures, and if I’m a failure, my family won’t love me. Hell, I won’t love me. (Wait a minute, do I really believe that?)

US: (Bingo!) Oh Jack, let me give you a hug.

THE MISBELIEF: I have to work 24/7 so my family will see me as a success and love me.

THE TRUTH: My family feels rejected because I’m always working.

THE REALIZATION: It’s not about money; it’s about spending time together.

THE TRANSFORMATION: I’m going to work less, maybe take that short beach vacation my kids keep clamoring for.

Obviously that was an imaginary reenactment, the success of which depended on me forcing Jack to be honest and more emotionally articulate as the questions got more personal. Or rather, success depended on me forcing myself to step out of my mindset and into Jack’s, in order to envision what might really be driving him.

This is an imaginative leap, which might feel scary at first. But given the work you’ve already done, and your newfound understanding of your target audience’s worldview, chances are you’ve developed a sense of empathy for them. Trust that understanding, as well as any intuitive insights that might arise in response to this type of questioning.

Another helpful technique when trying to get to the bottom of things is to continually ask: “And so?” Let’s imagine your teenage son texts while driving. You’ve told him how dangerous it is, run down the statistics with him, made him watch terrifying YouTube videos until he solemnly swore he won’t text and drive—but your cell phone bill tells another story. Is it just that he’s young, he’s callous, he thinks he’s invincible? Maybe. But maybe, by digging into it, we can unearth what’s really driving him.

The example below is a thought exercise, because chances are no one’s teenage son would admit to so much—but he’d think it. The key, whether you’re doing this for real or on your own as an exercise, is not to judge your audience no matter what they admit to, you know, short of killing puppies in the basement, and in that case, run.

YOU: Why do you text when you drive? (How can you when it’s so unsafe???)

HIM: It’s safe, Mom—if it wasn’t, I wouldn’t be here, right? It’s called multitasking. Plus, if I don’t text while I drive, I won’t be able to answer my friends right away. (It makes my heart pound just to think of it.)

YOU: (And that’s more important to you than breathing?) And so?

HIM: They’ll think I don’t care. (Or realize they don’t care.)

YOU: (What are you, high? Don’t react. One problem at a time…) And so?

HIM: They might, you know, get mad at me. (Or think I’m too chicken to text and drive, or not worth texting at all. Especially Becky.)

YOU: (Mad? Why would that make them mad?) And so?

HIM: They’ll text someone else instead. (What if Becky texts Malik? I know he likes her.)

YOU: (Ah, now we’re getting somewhere. You’re worried your friends won’t like you—wait, I bet it’s Becky you’re thinking about.) And so?

HIM: I’ll be left out, Mom. Got it? (I can’t believe I admitted that!)

YOU: (It’s so hard not to throw my arms around you and give you a hug.) Got it.

Note that the mom in our simulation didn’t judge her son, out loud, that is. But of course, because she knows how deeply wrong what he’s doing is—like all of us when we know we’re right—she was silently judging him. Wisely, she kept those thoughts to herself, because had she so much as hinted at them, he’d have bolted—and she never would have gotten to the truth, which made her stop judging and want to give him a big old hug instead. To get there, she simply continued to drill down, asking the neutral, “And so?” until she discovered that the “why” behind her son’s surface behavior wasn’t so surface after all.

At that moment, she realized why all the scary facts about the dangers of texting while driving had fallen on deaf ears. They didn’t do a thing to quell the real reason he texts while driving. It’s not because he’s a yahoo, feels invulnerable, or even due to a general sense that he might miss out on something big, but because he’s afraid that if he doesn’t text his new flame back pronto, she’ll feel that Malik, who always texts right back, is more into her.

That one piece of information reframed the problem to be solved. It was never about getting the boy to understand the dangers of distracted driving, it was about upending his fear that every text demands an instant answer, lest he lose his girlfriend. Something that, to him, feels more important than breathing.

It’s what answers the question: What is my teen’s texting really about? Which, in turn, tells us the misbelief the story needs to uproot. It’s a misbelief, I might add, that we grown-ups suffer from, too, because one of the other big reasons teens give for texting while driving is that they’ve seen their parents do it for years.

Seriously, if your son’s new flame can wait, then the boss can too—am I right? (Yeah, it is hard.)

This is the kind of exercise that builds empathy. In the above scenario, the mom got through her son’s surface-level objections—the justifications he was giving her for texting and driving—to the deeper why: what he felt he stood to lose if he didn’t. This in turn allowed her to feel her son’s anxiety, longing, and fear because it reminded her of specific situations in her own life when she’s felt the exact same way. We are more alike than we sometimes want to admit.

STORY TOOL

Resist the urge to tell your audience how wrong their misbelief is. Trust your story to make the point.

Even so, once you’ve drilled down to the real reason your audience is doing what they’re doing, you still may find yourself itching to point out, lovingly and with the best of intentions, how deeply wrong their misbelief is. Resist this urge and trust your story to make the point. If that mom had leapt in and said, “I know you feel like you’re missing out and you have to answer Becky’s text right away, but the truth is…” by then he wouldn’t be listening anymore. Because she’s telling him what to do. And she’s not the boss of him (even when, yeah, she kind of is). Instead, as we’ll soon see, you need to tell a story that mainlines your point straight into your audience’s brain.

Turning a New Leaf

Let’s turn back to our composting campaign and see if we can pinpoint our audience’s misbelief and then use it to identify a problem our call to action can solve.

First, let’s review. We’re hoping to encourage our target audience, as represented by Wanda, to get more organic matter into the soil in her backyard by:

- Composting their food scraps.

- Rather than bagging up and carting their leaves away, using them right there in the backyard as mulch.

While we know that Wanda cares deeply about climate change, we also know that there are so many different things she could do that it becomes overwhelming, so she’s probably doing very little. Especially given how busy she is. So although she’d be totally empathetic to our concerns and would listen carefully to what we’re hoping she’ll do, chances are she’ll put off implementing it until tomorrow, or the next day, or, wait, what was it she was supposed to do again? The point is, the unending demands on her daily life make it really hard for her to change anything at the moment, especially something based on the vague promise of a better world in the future.

So clearly, asking her to take on a new burden is not going to work. Instead, let’s focus on something up close and personal that she is struggling with right now. Since Wanda is a composite of our target audience, created by using info gleaned from internet research on what many parents stay up at night worrying about, we can hone in on Wanda’s current struggle. We’ve learned that parents like her believe their kids are too attached to their screens; they know that it would be better for the kids to spend more time outside, as a family; they’d love to find an activity that will bring them all together that doesn’t cost a lot, but the kids are already so overscheduled with academic activities that there’s simply no time.

Perhaps Wanda’s misbelief—which then leads us to her problem—revolves around her kids, whom she fears are inheriting a world that is becoming unlivable. As much as she’d love to spend more time outdoors with them, making time for play seems frivolous considering the overwhelming challenges in the world at large that she has to prepare them for. Play won’t help them gain the skills they need to survive—and thrive—in the 21st century.

But what if it could? What if we can make our ask feel like play?

That means that we may need to refine what, exactly, we want. Our goal has been to get more people to compost food scraps and use leaf mulch in their backyard gardens, but we know that not everyone is a gardener (in fact, given her schedule Wanda might not garden at all). However, everyone can help to fight climate change—helping to build soil, fight the heat-island effect, and capture carbon, among other things—just by keeping their leaves out of the landfill. Is there a way we could make doing that fun?

What we’re looking for is a way to make heeding our call to action a benefit to Wanda in the moment, based on a problem she’s already struggling with. So what if we launch a campaign aimed at getting her to stop bagging up and trashing her leaves, but rather, contributing them to a neighborhood garden network? It’s something the whole family can participate in, and—this is the point—it tackles a big problem in a way that feels like play. It’s not just one more enrichment activity that plies her kids with boring info (you know, facts) on how they can fight climate change at home, it gives them the experience of actually doing it. It brings them together, it gets them outside away from their screens, it gives them a sense of camaraderie and purpose, it cements community ties, and, yes, leaping into leaf piles is a blast.

THE MISBELIEF: Every enrichment activity just adds more stress to my kids’ lives, to my life, and becomes yet another thing piled onto everyone’s already long to-do list. There’s no time for play—but that’s just the way life is these days.

THE TRUTH: Something as simple as raking the leaves with your kids and bagging them up for the neighborhood garden network can be an enrichment opportunity—disguised as playtime.

THE REALIZATION: We have time for this. We would have raked those leaves anyway—but now it has a purpose, and it makes me feel like I’m doing something (however small) about climate change with my kids. Plus, I’m showing them how to take care of the Earth, be a good citizen, and connect with nature and the neighborhood.

THE TRANSFORMATION: Maybe I can get the whole neighborhood to contribute—and maybe, just maybe, I’m not too busy to have a backyard garden myself. I mean, if the kids are into it…

Problem solved. Notice, too, how the other thing we were thinking of asking her to do—composting food scraps—isn’t mentioned at all? Sure, that’s still important, but it didn’t solve a problem she was facing. Especially since getting the kids to help her compost sounds an awful lot like grunt work, something more apt to send them scurrying for their screens than for a composting bucket. In other words, when trying to convince your audience to change their behavior, just like with your kids, it pays to pick your battles.

Your goal is now to find the misbelief your story will upend. The next step will be to zero in on the point your story will make. A point that will resonate with your audience, opening their eyes not only to their misbelief but also to what that misbelief has kept them from seeing: how your call to action benefits them.

WHAT TO DO

Now it’s your turn. Based on your research, imagine someone who embodies the folks you’ve studied; give them a name. This will help them feel real. Take a minute and put yourself in their mindset. Zero in on their situation in life and their specific hopes and fears. Then start with a surface-level objection they might have to your call to action, and imagine a conversation in which you respond to every answer with “Why” or “And so?” Look for the place where what you’re asking them to do smacks up against how they see the world. Then, based on everything you’ve gleaned about your target audience, the two questions to dive into with gusto are:

- What misbelief does my audience have that may keep them from heeding my call to action? The goal is to pinpoint the belief that your story will spur them to reconsider.

- What problem does my target audience already have that my call to action can solve?

8

WHAT’S YOUR POINT?

“The human mind is a story processor, not a logic processor.”

—JONATHAN HAIDT, SOCIAL PSYCHOLOGIST

I’ve often heard that some of the biggest ideas were born on the back of a cocktail napkin. Legend has it that a single sketch, a sentence or two, gave us Southwest Airlines, the Laffer Curve, the MRI scanner, Finding Nemo, and, for better or worse, Shark Week. Whether those stories are true or apocryphal, I admire the way a napkin’s limited real estate forces one to get to the point.

But there’s a major difference between starting out by sketching a fledgling idea on a napkin and boiling a big idea down to a few simple, elegant lines. Instead of starting on a cocktail napkin, right now you’re ending up on one, and that’s a far more potent position. It enables you to create something simple that goes astonishingly deep.

And that’s the goal right now: To take what you’ve learned so far about your audience’s worldview and reduce it to its essence, to the one, single point that your story will make—a point that will enable your audience to hear the siren song of your call to action without you even asking.

The question is: what point will your story make?

We’re not talking about the logical point that, no doubt, you could make very astutely right this very second. That is your point, and I don’t blame you for being passionate about it. But your story’s point is different. Your story will challenge your audience’s misbelief, using their subjective logic. That is why the point will resonate with them, revealing their misbelief for what it is: wrong.

The point your story makes is that realization. It’s not a fact or figure. You won’t even state it outright. Arguments, debates, op-ed pieces make a stated, explicit point. Stories make an implicit point. In fact, chances are, your audience won’t think you’re making a point at all because they’ll have drawn the conclusion themselves, without knowing it was a conclusion they were carefully led to.

It is the experience your story gives them that will make the point for you, allowing them to feel why your idea, product, or service is of benefit to them. And not just an external benefit, as in “if you use my toothpaste, your teeth will gleam,” but an internal benefit, as in “your gleaming smile will light up the room, and no one will know how socially awkward you’re actually feeling.”

That’s why in this chapter we’ll first establish the specific point your story will make and then dive headfirst into finding the emotion that will drive that point home. The question is: what emotion will your story evoke, in relation to the point you’re making, so that the two are fused together in one single memory—a memory your audience’s brain will deem worth keeping for future reference?

It’s that feeling that will catapult your audience out of their easy chair and into action. For instance, “Just Do It!” gets me up every time. Like so many people, it’s my very favorite tagline ever, because it makes me feel in control. It cuts through the chatter in my head, like: “Yeah, yeah, a few more minutes of sleep would be nice, and it’s cold outside, but in my heart I know I should ‘Just Do It!’ ” It instantly reveals the bazillion other, shall we say, less strenuous choices for what they are—excuses not to run—and helps me focus on what I know would make me feel best in the end, even if it is hard. In fact, the harder it is, the better I’ll feel for having done it. (Note: this is a dramatization; I am not a runner. But that simple tagline is part of the reason I’m sitting here now, writing this, instead of checking my email, or, hey, wasn’t I going to wash the car today?)

It breaks down to this simple metric:

1. Changing how your audience feels about something…

2. …changes how they see something…

3. …which makes them want to do something.

With their misbelief out of the way, your audience can now see things as they actually are. It was the moment when the young women in the Always video realized that the phrase “like a girl” was an insult and decided to reclaim it. The point was: Traditional societal norms are harming you, you can fight back, and we’re on your side. It was the moment when those weary travelers realized that staying at Motel 6 didn’t make them cheap, but, rather, it made them smart. The point was: We know that being frugal is a positive, and we’re there to help you do just that. The realization reframed the situation they found themselves in, allowing them to read a very different meaning into it. As T. S. Eliot so astutely said, “The end of our exploring is to return to where we began and to see it for the first time.”

Your story thus sets your audience free, so they can feel the truth of the point you’re making: this is how my idea, product, or cause will help you. This being that key benefit you discovered they’ll get from taking up your call to action.

By now that benefit might be very different from what you originally thought it would be. As in, “I can’t believe I thought that the key benefit my candidate offers voters is that she’ll work tirelessly to curtail climate change, when really, the benefit they’re passionate about is that she’ll bring industry back to their state.”

From the very first word or image, your story will build toward a very clear, very concrete point—behind the scenes. A story is a Trojan horse. Inside, it carries a message; outside, it carries us. And once your story has us, we’re yours. Because even when we’re aware of the emotional effect a story is meant to have on us, it’s nigh on impossible to resist your point. That’s why although in real life we have the power to hold back tears when something truly painful happens, we still end up sobbing uncontrollably at a commercial for sugarless gum. Because, as I’m deeply fond of saying, we’re wired for story, and when a story has us in its grasp, basically we’re toast.

Let’s take a closer look.

CASE STUDY: EXTRA GUM

“The Story of Sarah & Juan” is a two-minute video that follows the evolution of a relationship between two attractive gum chewers, beginning in high school when Sarah breaks the ice by offering Juan a stick of her Extra gum. We watch as they bond over the next ten years, along the way weathering what might have been insurmountable setbacks in their relationship, always coming together over a stick of gum, which is sometimes offered as an olive branch (but much more chewy).

What Sarah doesn’t know is that Juan keeps each gum wrapper, sketching a little picture on the back of it. At the end, she walks into a deserted art gallery, and there are all the gum wrappers, framed, lining the walls. On each is a simple line drawing, made over the years by Juan, chronicling the moments we’ve seen in their relationship. The last drawing is the only scene that hasn’t yet happened. It’s of Juan, on bended knee, holding up an engagement ring. Seeing it, Sarah’s hands fly to her mouth, she tears up, turns, and there he is, doing exactly that, looking up hopefully. Seriously, I’m crying as I write this. (It’s no surprise that the video earned more than seven million YouTube views and more than 78 million Facebook views, with more than 1.1 million shares within a week of its October 8, 2015, digital release.)

So, what is the point of the video, which on the surface merely follows the evolution of Sarah and Juan’s relationship from the moment they meet over a stick of gum to the moment he pops the question by way of a decade of gum wrappers?

The point is that in truth, a lowly stick of gum can cement a lifelong relationship. The gum is the glue that holds them together (kids, don’t try this at home). It counteracts the audience’s misbelief that gum is something lowly, basically irrelevant, a literal throwaway.

What was the emotion that video evoked? Joy, ugly crying joy—even though we know how unabashedly sappy it is. The message is clear: it’s love and gum that will keep us together. Forever. The commercial’s call to action is to buy their brand of gum, which it has deftly stuck to a very powerful emotion: joy. That’s way better than the things you usually find gum stuck to, like the bottom of your shoe or the underside of your desk in the third grade.

Unlike the Always campaign which never once references their product in any way, this campaign’s call to action is implicit throughout. Because Extra gum is featured from beginning to end—and because we’ve been around the block a couple of times—the moment Sarah offers Juan that first stick, we know full well what the call to action is: buy our gum. But we don’t resist it because the story is so viscerally involving that the gum becomes what in literary terms is known as a visual metaphor. So every time we see it, it’s not a cheesy commercial come-on, it’s a symbol for what, against all odds, brings (and keeps) Juan and Sarah together: enduring love.

Staying True to Your One and Only…Point

A word of caution before you begin tracking down your story’s point. You may find an embarrassment of riches and so be sorely tempted to break this cardinal rule: there can be only one point, even though there are so many reasons why your audience’s misbelief is wrong, so many savvy points you could make to counteract it. For instance, the notion that chewing gum is meaningless and kind of low-brow could have been countered by a story revealing any of the following: chewing gum suppresses appetite, relieves stress, boosts your memory, helps protect your teeth, helps you quit smoking, reduces bad breath, and helps your gut recover after surgery. Wow, that’s a long list, and I’m not making any of it up—studies have proven all those things.

Likewise, I’m betting that right now you could come up with a ton of great points you could make about your idea. And I’d further wager that as soon as you do, you’ll fall in love with all of them. Because they’re all true!

So how could you possibly pick just one? Maybe you can sneak in two, three, hey, maybe even four points into your story. Wouldn’t four points be better than one?

No.

In the same way, your audience isn’t “everyone,” neither can your story take on every possible reason your audience might be resistant to your call to action. Doing that muddies the waters, leaving your audience confused about what your point actually is, or if you even have a point at all.

STORY TOOL

If you leave your audience confused about what your point is, they will wonder if you even have a point at all.

When it comes to story, our brain is wired to expect that there will be some useful takeaway, something that will better help us navigate the world—a point—and the story’s job is to make it. We expect that everything will lead toward that single point, ultimately supporting it—even though we’re not sure what it is until we get there. And that’s okay. Curiosity is part of what hooks us. How will this end? Where is it going? That anticipation is what keeps us riveted, but only as long as things add up. If, instead, the story zigzags around, going in several different directions to make several different disjointed points, we get lost. Really fast.

It’s like when your dithery friend Todd comes over and excitedly launches into what he thinks is a story. “You wouldn’t believe what happened at work today. My boss leapt on the desk, danced the tango, then ran out the door, slamming right into the UPS driver, who dropped a whole bunch of boxes. I was gonna help her pick ’em up, but then my roommate called to say he’d be out tonight. Which reminds me, the cat ran away, just like in that song we heard at that rave back in ’97, and, hey, wasn’t your cousin Ramon with us that night? I always liked him.” And you’re nodding and smiling, but what you’re aching to do is shake him and say, “Why are you telling me this? What is your point?”

Think of your story’s point as its compass. Sure, sometimes those other points are made in service of the point you’re building to, for instance, as Sarah and Juan move in for their first kiss, she offers him a stick of gum (and we think, Oh thank goodness. They’ll have fresh minty breath). But that’s part of the path of their ongoing story, not an auxiliary point that takes you off course. Like if Sarah had then told Juan how chewing gum helped her Uncle Sid recover from gallbladder surgery.

The good news is that by zeroing in on a single specific point—based on what will benefit your audience most, and the misbelief that keeps them from seeing it—your story will color how they feel about your entire idea.

Which brings us to one last warning: There’s a chance that what some people will feel when they hear your story is annoyed, upset, rattled. And that’s great. You’ve already thought about who your audience isn’t, and those people might not cotton to a single word you say. Which means you’ve done your job well. As Aesop so astutely noted, “Try to please all, and you please none.”

In fact, the more edgy your story—the more boldly it champions your audience without hedging, equivocating, or pulling punches—the better. Because it signals that you have their back and you have the courage of your convictions—that you, yourself, are willing to be vulnerable. You’ve taken a risk, proving that you’re not only a member of their tribe but also that you’re loyal to them. This, in turn, inspires their loyalty to you, and that triggers the most potent social media there is: word of mouth.

Finding Your Point

Now let’s find that elusive point, the one thing capable of smashing through your audience’s misbelief and opening their eyes to the benefit you’re offering them.

For example, let’s start with the cause of the mom trying to keep her teen from texting while driving. As we determined earlier, the misbelief our story has to trounce is: “If I don’t text back immediately something bad will happen for sure, as opposed to the remote possibility of a crash.”

At least, that’s how it feels.

So, what might the point be? The truth is, while it feels to him like he has to instantly text back or he’ll become a social pariah, chances are, he won’t. But you can’t blame him for feeling that way; we all tend to wonder about those times when it might matter. When, if you don’t respond quickly your friend—or your boss—will decide to ask someone else to do that really, truly fabulous thing that you’ve always wanted to do and will never have the chance to do again, unless…(right?). And sure, that might happen, probably right after you win the lottery. The question is, what trumps the almost irresistible urge to grab the phone, just to see?

Because that’s what the story has to reveal: what is more important than immediately texting back? The answer is obvious: staying alive and not killing anyone in the process. Especially since there is close to zero chance anything really bad will come of waiting until you’ve come to a full and complete stop to glance at your phone.

That’s your point, but you can’t just say it. You have to make your audience feel it.

The Emotional Point: Where Meaning Lives

We know the goal is to make your audience feel something. Emotional engagement is what gives a story its power—hell, it’s what gives everything power. But even after everything we’ve been discussing, it’s still easy to think of emotion generically.

That’s why when pondering what you want your audience to feel, it’s tempting to go for low-hanging fruit. You want them to feel love. Fear. Happiness. You want them scared out of their wits, so they’ll stop eating those damn burgers and save the planet. The problem is that unless that emotion is harnessed to the desire to make a specific change, it’ll instantly dissipate. Or worse, it will send your audience careening in the wrong direction. Terrify us about a rapidly approaching climate change Armageddon and, chances are, we’ll be left feeling helpless instead of empowered. In fact, we’ll probably be feeling so jittery that the minute we get home, we’ll take a nice long hot shower, then call in comfort food from a restaurant forty-five minutes away that arrives in Styrofoam containers. Talk about irony.

The trouble is that those big-box emotions feel so potent, so simple. They’re not. They’re simple’s impostor: simplistic.

What’s the difference between simple and simplistic?

Simple implies there are supporting layers beneath the elegant summation. “Just do it” is simple. #LikeAGirl is simple. “We’ll leave the light on for you” is simple. Because each one of these taglines taps into its target audience’s specific, complex internal narrative and tells a compelling story.

Simplistic implies there are no layers at all. Simplistic is so shallow there’s nothing to dig into. Time Warner’s tagline “Enjoy Better” is simplistic. Enjoy better what? Better than what? And, hey, define “better.” Burger King’s “Be Your Way” is simplistic, not to mention grammatically questionable. (Ironically, they ditched their far more effective tagline, “Have It Your Way,” because, as Fernando Machado, Burger King’s senior vice president of global brand management said at the time, “We want to evolve from just being the functional side of things to having a much stronger emotional appeal.” Sadly, the emotion it appealed to was confusion.) And finally, my favorite bad example, from the National Pork Board: “Pork, Be Inspired.” The only thing that inspires me to do is make jokes about how ridiculously nonsensical it sounds.

All three of those taglines are like listening to your dithery friend Todd. You want to shake them and say, “What’s the point?” No clue.

That’s why once you know the specific emotion you want to evoke in your audience, you then have to create a story that ties that emotion to your point, so the two are fused. I cannot emphasize this strongly enough. The goal is not simply to make your audience feel an emotion, in general. The goal is to make sure that emotion is what they automatically feel when they think of your point.

STORY TOOL

The goal of your story is not to make your audience feel an emotion. It is to make your audience automatically feel a specific emotion when they think of your point.

In other words, the point itself will evoke the emotion. It will mean something to your audience, and so become part of their story.

In fact, when you know the story your audience is telling themselves, your story can be just two words. You can rely on their inner narrative to fill in the blanks, because you know the emotion—the meaning, the point—they’ll read into those two words. That’s what Sarah Palin counted on back in 2009 when she said that, if enacted, the Affordable Care Act would include “death panels.” She instinctively knew that, to her followers, whose core belief was that the federal government was up to no good, those two words would trigger images of faceless bureaucrats deeming their beloved grandma—or worse, their critically ill toddler—not productive enough to merit expensive medical care. That is a vivid image that goes against what everyone holds dear: family, loyalty, and protecting those who can’t protect themselves. And so it didn’t matter that “death panels” was deemed “the lie of the year” by the fact-checking website, PolitiFact. The story stuck. No explanation necessary.

The question now is, what feeling, what emotion, is going to break through your audience’s resistance? As South Bend, Indiana, mayor Pete Buttigieg, who is gay, said of his decision to come out to his conservative constituency during an election year, “What I learned was that trust can be reciprocated and that part of how you can win and deserve to win is to know what’s worth more to you than winning.” What’s worth more to your audience than their misbelief? What’s worth more to them than what they’re doing now?

Buttigieg had the courage to be vulnerable and to reveal who he really is. And in so doing, he touched on a universal: Love. He came out, he said, because he didn’t want to go through life “not knowing what it felt like to be in love.” He wasn’t simply appealing to a general big-box emotion—he was talking about losing the experience of being in love, and thereby asking us to imagine what our lives would be like without our (real or imagined) beloved. That love, he said, was worth more to him than power. And don’t we all hope that’s true? Don’t we want people who believe that to be in power?

He won by 80 percent of the vote.

CASE STUDY: TEXTING TEENS

Sticking with those texting teens, the question is: what’s worth more emotionally to them than the sense of being in the loop that they get by texting while driving?

That was the question that Noah DeVico, a seventeen-year-old, asked himself when he decided to create a short video to persuade teens not to text while driving, his submission to CTIA Wireless Foundation’s fifth-annual “Drive Smart: No Distractions, No Excuses” teen digital short contest.

Noah knew he had to tap into his audience’s emotion, or no one would pay attention, let alone take up his call to action. So his first question was pretty basic: “Hey, what does tap into our emotion?” Note that in the beginning it wasn’t even, “What emotion should I tap into to make my point?” It was, simply: “What can I count on to stir emotion?” Thinking about it, he happened to glance out the back door and saw his family’s four dogs playing in the yard. Dogs, he thought. Dogs evoke emotion. People always root for dogs in movies, and they always cry when a dog dies. Dogs make us care; dogs matter.

It was something I’d been thinking about recently myself, while walking my own dog. My neighborhood, like so many in Los Angeles, is home to traffic. Lots and lots of traffic. At rush hour, drivers are constantly looking for shortcuts (as if) and zipping up residential streets that they didn’t even know existed before Waze (don’t get me started). One particular street on our route had become a favorite shortcut, even though there’s a stop sign on every corner. So, to fight back, on block after block, residents put up lawn signs, asking drivers to take it easy. The signs said: “Slow down! My cat lives here.” “Slow down! My dog lives here.”

I wondered: Why couldn’t these homeowners just come out and say, “Slow down! I live here”? Were they afraid to speak up and ask for what they were entitled to in the first place? Did they really have to hide behind their dogs?

Talking to Noah, the answer became blazingly clear. Yes, they did. That is, if they wanted those speeders to slow down. Because chances are, even those speeders feel protective of innocent creatures who can’t protect themselves. Creatures who, unlike those homeowners, can’t tell us what to do, as if they’re the boss of us.

Plus, dogs make us feel safe, and not just in the external, “Sic ’em girl!” way, but also internally, where it really matters. I mean, how often will your dog have to save you from attackers? Hopefully, the answer is never. But dogs save us from ourselves every day. Unlike our mean internal voice, a dog will never, ever tell us we look fat, or shame us for binge-watching Buffy the Vampire Slayer for the seventeenth time. When we’re sad, a dog never takes the other person’s side or suddenly remembers an appointment somewhere else ten minutes ago—all the things that other people are prone to do. Dogs love us for who we are, as we are, right now in the moment. And we love them right back.

The bargain is: dogs take care of us emotionally; we take care of them physically. And with that, Noah had hit on the specific emotion he wanted to tap into for his no texting video: unconditional love. The way to personify that love in his story was through a dog.

To drive his point home, his first thought was to have a texting teen hit a dog, killing it. That would be dramatic, attention getting, and painful. And maybe it would work. The vast majority of videos aimed at getting people to stop texting while driving revolve around someone—a child, a stranger, the texter herself—dying tragically. Which seems to make sense, since every year more than 330,000 accidents are caused by distracted driving, and more than 3,000 people die as a result of it, including 11 teenagers a day.

But if scary stories were enough, we wouldn’t have this problem. As Tali Sharot says in The Influential Mind, “Our brains are wired such that anticipating a reward not only triggers approach, it is more likely to elicit action altogether. The fear of a loss, on the other hand, is more likely to elicit inaction.”

Most of the anti-texting stories out there are about loss. No reward in sight. What’s more, those stories don’t ask us to help someone in trouble; they ask us not to get in trouble ourselves.

So, Noah decided, maybe there’s another way to get the point across. Especially since he knew that one thing teenagers don’t like (and in this we’re all teenagers) is to be told what to do, and scary stories tend to be pretty finger-waggy.

Instead he wanted to tell a story where a teenager struggles with the lure of texting and is given the power to choose to do the right thing. That was a smart choice on Noah’s part. According to recent studies, our desire to choose is hardwired and essential to our sense of well-being. In fact, one study published in the journal Trends in Cognitive Science in 2010 found that being given a choice “recruits neural circuitry involved in reward and motivation processing.” So if you want to motivate someone to take a specific action, be sure to give them the sense of control that comes from making the choice themselves.

STORY TOOL

If you want someone to take a specific action, let them make the choice themselves.

In Noah’s video we see a girl playing with her dog on the beach. The bond between them is palpable. But it’s getting late, so they head for the car. The dog sits in the passenger seat, and as the girl starts the car, she does what so many of us do: she reaches for her phone and sees that someone has texted her. She texts back as she pulls onto the highway, giggling when her phone dings, giggling as she reads the text, giggling as she taps out a response. It’s clear she’s focused on her phone and driving is an afterthought. Her dog is focused on her. He stares at her, but she doesn’t look up. He waits, but she keeps on texting, oblivious to the love that is staring her in the face. Then he gives the slightest huff. Not a bark, not a yip. Just a quick breath. It breaks the spell. Stopping at a stop sign, she looks up from her phone and into her dog’s eyes; he holds her gaze. Shaking her head at her own hubris, she puts her phone in the glove box and pulls back into traffic. Simple, not simplistic.

Her dog didn’t suddenly start speaking. He simply got her to focus on what she was doing. And, looking into his trusting eyes, he got her to see what she was risking. Her pet. And herself. And by extension, everyone else on the road.

With that realization, she saw the world differently, making Noah’s point. What mattered most wasn’t texting back; it was making sure she and her dog got home safely—even though she was having fun texting with her friends, even though she’d be out of the loop for, geez, at least fifteen minutes.

And make no mistake, that is a genuine sacrifice. It cost her something. It’s way too easy, when trying to influence people who see the world differently than we do, to miss how much what they’re doing now means to them. With teenagers, their social group is their whole world. There could be essential intrigues, in-jokes, and conversations that could develop in those fifteen minutes that she’d be totally not in on. (Probably not, but still.)

That’s why Noah made the decision to have her giggle while texting—he saw the importance of acknowledging that it is fun. Instead of judging her for it, he wanted to show that, yes, texting makes us feel connected, seen, part of a community. That’s a positive feeling. And there’s nothing wrong with texting.

Unless, of course, you do it while you’re driving. But here’s the thing: giving up something we enjoy to help someone else, someone we love, instantly creates an even greater feeling: that of being a good person, worthy, responsible. Tali Sharot again: “When it comes to eliciting action, immediate rewards can often be more effective than future punishment.”

Noah thus built a story that hit all the bases. Let’s deconstruct it.

THE CALL TO ACTION: Don’t text and drive.

THE MISBELIEF: The most important thing is being in the loop with your friends, lest you be left out. Digging deeper: Being liked by others is what makes you feel worthy, like the most authentic version of yourself.

THE TRUTH: The momentary pleasure of texting while driving isn’t worth the risk—basically, death—after which you’d be left out permanently. Digging deeper: The consequences of being left out are not on par with the consequences of texting while driving, and that’s what her dog’s love telegraphs.

THE POINT OF THE STORY: Taking care of your loved ones matters more than the pleasure of texting with friends. Digging deeper: Sacrificing what you want to do in order to keep your loved ones safe is what makes you feel genuinely good.

THE KEY BENEFIT: It is not that you’ll make it home safely; it’s that you’ll feel good about yourself when you get there. Digging deeper: Self-discipline and having the courage of your convictions is what makes you feel good in a lasting way.

THE DRIVING (NO PUN INTENDED) EMOTION: The girl’s love for her dog, and the dog’s belief that her desire to take care of him and herself will override her desire to text. Digging deeper: The story’s electricity—the thing that makes the audience care—is the internal struggle between what the girl wants to do versus what she knows she should do. As we’ll discuss in the next chapter, the internal struggle is where a story’s most potent layer of conflict plays out.

THE REALIZATION: If she continues texting, her own dog could end up dead. Digging deeper: A concrete, personal, immediate consequence is a far more potent motivator than a hypothetical tragedy, even if that future tragedy is far greater. Faced with nothing but a scary possibility, we tend to be like the smoker who lights up saying, “Sure, I know cigarettes will kill me, but not this one.”

THE TRANSFORMATION: The girl makes the choice, on her own, not just to put her phone down, but out of reach, in the glove box. Digging deeper: That took courage, and courage is empowering. By giving the girl agency in the moment to make the right choice, rather than showing what would happen if she didn’t, the story went from a cautionary tale to something far more powerful: a story of triumph. And isn’t that what we all want? To triumph, to be a hero, especially to our dog.

THE TAGLINE: Whose life will you risk? You are in control. Don’t text and drive.

With “you are in control,” Noah’s video did what so many similar stories don’t. It not only made the audience feel why they should change, but it also gave the power to change—to take action—to them.

But what about that mom who was trying to convince her son not to text and drive? Short of suggesting he watch videos like Noah’s—the very mention of which, as we know, would only alienate him further—what can she do? How can she convince him that his priorities are misplaced?

It’s easy. And hard. She can admit to making the same mistake—and having the same misbelief—herself. (Yeah, that’s the hard part, which is the point, and why it carries weight.)

For instance, she can tell him about the time she texted her boss back while driving because she thought it would show how diligent she was. Since she’d been driving for years, she was sure it was safe. Instead, she swerved, almost slamming into a school bus. When her pulse slowed and she could breathe again, what could have happened hit her full force—the pain she would have caused so many people, including her son. And she can go further and admit that, even so, it was still hard to stop texting, so now she puts her phone on silent, in the glove box, when she drives.

The beauty of such a story is that, because we all know how hard it is to be vulnerable, she instantly establishes credibility. Note she didn’t say a word about whether texting her boss back actually made any difference at all. Because that doesn’t matter. The point is that nothing outweighs, or even mitigates, the risk of texting while driving.

What’s more, her story, like the one Noah’s PSA told, didn’t shame her audience. Instead, both allowed their audience to experience the very possible cost of texting while driving and the power of taking action by choosing another (far less distracted) path.

That’s exactly what you’re ready to do—take action—by starting to create your actual story.

WHAT TO DO

Based on everything you’ve unearthed about your target audience, have a whack at these questions:

- What point would your story need to make to overturn your audience’s misbelief?

Don’t be afraid to start out simple. It might even sound clichéd. For Noah’s “don’t text and drive” video, it was simply: texting while driving might get you killed. It wasn’t until he started building his story that the specific situation best suited to making his point emerged. The girl texting friends, the dog cueing her into her misbelief—all that came as he developed the story. Right now, all you’re looking for is the ultimate point your story will make.

- What emotion would drive your point home for your audience?

You want to be sure you’re not just tapping into a big-box emotion, especially one that would shut your audience down rather than empower them. Terrify your audience about climate change, or what might happen if they text and drive, and they’ll rationalize why you’re wrong. Plus, no one likes to be told what to do. The question is: given your target audience, their tribe, and what they hold dear, what emotion can you evoke that will let them know that you’ve heard them and that you’re on their side?

9

THE CORE CONFLICT

“Conflict is the beginning of consciousness.”

—M. ESTHER HARDING, JUNGIAN PSYCHOANALYST

We’re always being asked to pay attention, and most of the time we don’t, especially if given a choice. After all, the things that engage us don’t ask permission. They grab us because they matter to us.

Paying attention is an apt metaphor because it costs us something biologically to do it. Being engaged makes the cost worth it because it gives us something we’re wired to desire: information we can use, especially when that information resolves a pressing conflict we can’t avoid, answering the urgent question, “Uh oh, what do I do now?”

That’s precisely why story revolves around unavoidable conflict. In fact, the evolutionary purpose of story is conflict resolution—whether it’s a conflict we’re in the midst of, or one we fear might arise in the future. So it should come as no surprise that without a core conflict, you don’t have a story. Or an audience.

And guess what? You’ve already identified your story’s core conflict: it’s the internal battle between your audience’s misbelief and the truth that will allow them to solve the problem you’ll set out for them. The riveting conflict in any story—whether a thirty-second ad, a PSA, or a novel—doesn’t revolve around a bad guy, or a dire external problem. It revolves around the internal struggle that the protagonist goes through in order to solve that external problem.

This is not to say that the external problem isn’t important; it is. But while story is spurred by external conflict—that is, a problem we can’t avoid—the core conflict, the conflict your audience comes for, is always internal.

That’s why in this chapter we’ll first define what we’re wired to expect in every story we hear, based on the specific story elements that grab us. Next we’ll dive into your story, using your audience’s misbelief to create the concrete external problem that will trigger your protagonist’s internal struggle.

Ironically, one of the things that keeps us from creating effective stories is that out here in real life, conflict, especially internal conflict, makes us feel uncomfortable. Because internal conflict implies that we don’t instantly know what to do. Admitting that we’re confused, that we’re not sure, is scary. Because one thing we are sure of is that society reads confusion as weakness. To echo what Faye said to Don on Mad Men, we’re constantly struggling with the difference between what we actually feel and what society expects us to feel. Thus, we often inadvertently withhold genuine conflict in the stories we create because, in order to persuade, we think we have to project what society deems as strong, sure, and confident. But the only way to inspire is to embrace vulnerability—because, as we’ll see, that’s what makes your audience care. It whispers, This isn’t something I usually admit. Wanna know a secret? That’s a rhetorical question. Because yes. Duh.

The truth is we all experience internal, what-the-hell-should-I-do-now? conflict every day, though we’re loath to admit it—and that’s precisely why we come to story: for a glimpse at someone else going through the internal conflict that we keep under wraps. What most of us don’t realize is that when a story grabs us, that conflict, and its resolution, becomes ours.

As we discussed earlier in the book, we crave conflict in a story precisely because it enables us to take a virtual-reality test run of scary situations we haven’t yet had to face, preparing us should they ever befall us in the future. Thus, since we innately expect a story to revolve around conflict, from the moment the story begins, we hunt for it, even when on the surface everything seems completely fine. In fact, that can make us even more tense, because we know something unexpected is about to happen, and the suspense is killing us.

Like those movies that open with an old cop waxing eloquent about how he’s going to retire tomorrow and spend the rest of his life fishing with the grandkids—today was supposed to be his last day, he says, but he volunteered to stay so his partner could have a date night with her husband. And instead of thinking, Aw, what a nice guy. I bet his grandkids are really cute, your heart is pounding because you know that in about five seconds some deranged madman is going to storm the station and blow the nice old cop to kingdom come. “Dude,” you want to scream at the screen, “don’t you know you’re about to die? Have you never seen a cop movie?” Because you intuitively understand the mechanics of story (and have seen a ton of cop movies yourself), you’re anticipating what you know is about to come—unavoidable (and in this case, deadly) external conflict.

But if the movie went on, and the old cop did a bit of paperwork, then called his grandkids and debated whether it’s easier to catch big-mouth bass or mountain trout, the importance of using a bodkin needle when tying a fly, and, hey, did you see the latest episode of Fishing with the Stars? You’d bail. Not that you wanted the old guy to die in a blaze of gunfire or anything, but if you wanted to listen to a boring conversation about fishing, you could call Uncle Ned, who’d be only too happy to explain the difference between a pheasant tail nymph and a San Juan worm for the nineteen millionth time.

The point is that at the center of every story is a core conflict that we can feel from the very first instant. That’s how we know it is a story. We also intuitively know that, as we discussed in chapter 4, the conflict has two layers.

1. AN EXTERNAL LAYER: The thing that happens, the external event, the unavoidable problem the protagonist must tackle (the plot).

2. AN INTERNAL LAYER: What that external problem causes the protagonist to struggle with, internally—the misbelief versus the truth—in order to solve it (what the story is really about).

Combined, those two layers rivet us.

The question is: What external conflict will pit your audience’s misbelief against the truth?

The goal is: To nail down the external problem that will trigger the internal conflict that brings your story to life.

The Basic Story Template

Before we begin, a few words. My career has been devoted to story, and one thing I’ve discovered is that story is story regardless of the format. The same principles apply to a two-word story, a single image, a sixty-second video, and a thousand-page saga. Each format adapts the basic template to tell a persuasive story. It reminds me of when I was a kid. I liked dresses back then, but stores never sold the flowing, Elizabethan garb I longed for (I blame that desire on Lord of the Rings, which I devoured at fourteen). So I decided to make my own clothes. I spent weeks hunkered down in fabric stores, poring over the pattern books, but nothing came close to what I was envisioning. Finally, as I was about to thumb past a very basic Simplicity dress pattern, it hit me: if I started with that basic pattern, I could modify it to suit whatever new design I dreamed up.

Story is exactly like that. All stories are built on the same basic foundation, based on the biological purpose of story, and what we’re wired to expect in every story we come across. To be clear, I am not talking about plot structure, the “hero’s journey,” or the three-act anything. Instead, we’re about to dive into the basic story template I developed based on decades of delving into stories in myriad mediums, always on the hunt for what is really hooking us when a story holds us captive. You can use this template to create your story, regardless of length or format. The template is endlessly adaptable.

First, let’s break down what a story needs to do biologically in order to catapult us into its world. Here are the three interwoven elements that, by activating the neurotransmitters we discussed in chapter 1, transport us into the world of the story.

1. STORY ELEMENT: SURPRISE. The protagonist expects one thing to happen, and something else happens instead. Familiar pattern broken; now what do I do?

BIOLOGICAL REACTION: DOPAMINE. The curiosity neurotransmitter surges, triggering our desire to find out what is going to happen next.

2. STORY ELEMENT: CONFLICT. The protagonist has no choice but to make a hard choice. Consequences will ensue, maybe bad ones.

BIOLOGICAL REACTION: CORTISOL. The stress hormone surges, and we’re tense as the suspense mounts, because…

3. STORY ELEMENT: VULNERABILITY. We empathize with the protagonist. We hope they succeed without getting clobbered.

BIOLOGICAL REACTION: OXYTOCIN. The empathy neurotransmitter surges, making us care. We’re on protagonist’s side, rooting for their success.

It’s an emotional chain reaction, each element spurring the others. Together, they’re a potent cocktail, irresistibly intoxicating. We’re empathizing with the protagonist, feeling what they feel. This is something neuroscientist Paul Zak discovered in a study gauging the effect a compelling story has on a subject’s decision to donate to a cause. “Narratives that cause us to pay attention and also involve us emotionally are the stories that move us to action,” says Zak in Cerebrum. “This shows why stories affect behavior after the story has ended: We have put ourselves into the narrative.”

Wait, you may be thinking, I understand what you’re saying about conflict. But in order to persuade, doesn’t a story have to be uplifting? After all, we have a penchant for avoiding bad news and uncomfortable info in real life. As Tali Sharot points out, “People prefer to learn of information that they think will make them feel good, and so they seek out good news over bad news…When people suspect bad news is coming, they may avoid the message—even if this ignorance can hurt them.”

Again, story to the rescue. Because once a story engages us, it can present uncomfortable facts and scary news in a way that is empowering. When it comes to moving us to action, it doesn’t matter if the story is heartwarming or heart-wrenching. Says Zak, when they “tested stories about ‘hot-button’ issues to see how people reacted to potentially disagreeable topics, [the study] confirmed that stories that sustain attention and generate emotional resonance produce post-narrative donations—even stories on difficult topics. To the brain, good stories are good stories…on topics happy or sad, as long as they get us to care about their characters.”

Wait. Who Am I Supposed to Care About?

Okay, the power of story is great in theory. But how do you create a story capable of wielding it?

Let’s break down what we already know:

- There’s one person (the protagonist, the person who will experience the conflict)

- with one unavoidable problem (the external conflict)

- that spurs one internal struggle (misbelief versus truth, the core conflict)

- leading to one “aha” moment (the protagonist’s realization, the point your story will make, resulting in the emotion you want your audience to feel)

- which allows the protagonist to solve the problem and take action (the transformation).

The key point is: the protagonist is our avatar in the story, and the person who has the power to solve the problem. Says international story coach Andy Goodman, “Large-scale, systemic change may be the ultimate goal…[But] If we cannot see and feel the changes at ground level—through the eyes of one human being—we simply cannot relate.”

While the story’s protagonist is almost always a stand-in for the target audience, like Wanda and the texting teen, sometimes the protagonist makes the audience feel like they’re the hero—that is, the real protagonist. For instance, wanting to raise awareness (and money) about the dire plight of children in Kenya who do not have access to clean water, WATERisLIFE told the story of Nkaitole, a four-year-old Kenyan boy. The two-minute video they produced gives only one fact: Due to unsafe drinking water Nkaitole has a 1 in 5 chance of dying before his fifth birthday. So they decided to help him complete his bucket list, just in case. Let that sink in: a four-year-old with a bucket list. We watch as this wide-eyed little boy does all the things we take for granted that we’ll do over the course of our lifetime. The unabashed joy on his face as he rides in a boat, plays soccer, flies in a plane, takes a bubble bath, gets a kiss on the cheek from a girl—all for the first time, and possibly the last—is heartbreaking. By the time we see his eyes light up as he spies the ocean for the first time? Well, good luck holding back your tears.

Nkaitole is the protagonist of the story we’re watching, but he can’t solve the problem he’s facing. We can. We are the implied protagonists in the story. Because we have what all real protagonists have: the power to solve the problem. And so the misbelief belongs to us, rather than to Nkaitole.

THE MISBELIEF: Drinking water is safe and plentiful, and of course a four-year-old will live a long and full life.

THE TRUTH: Because not all drinking water is safe, many four-year-olds won’t live to see five.

THE REALIZATION: We have the power to help bring safe drinking water to Kenya, and maybe save Nkaitole. (It’s worth noting that research proves that had WATERisLIFE simply told us that thousands of children wouldn’t reach the age of five without clean water, it wouldn’t have had nearly the impact of the story of one little boy.)

THE TRANSFORMATION: We’re going to donate.

So, who will be the protagonist in your story? You’ve already envisioned that one person who represents your target audience. Now it’s time for them to face an actual problem.

It’s Story Time

Let’s develop a story, step-by-step, to see how it’s done. We’ll start with a product—that new ultra-lightweight carbon-frame road bike we were talking about in chapter 6 (this page). Let’s imagine that our research has revealed that our bike would benefit our target audience in many ways. For example, it produces zero carbon emissions, as opposed to their gas guzzler, so it helps the environment. But while environmental issues matter greatly to them, we also know that studies show immediate rewards are far more motivating than the promise of a future benefit. Which means that the fact that bike riding is a great way to get in shape—something that also resonates with our target audience—is also out.

We’re looking for a benefit our audience would get right now. Could it be that the simple act of bike riding is, itself, the benefit? New York Times health and science writer Jane Brody cited this as the reason she maintains her own exercise regime: “It’s how these activities make me feel: more energized, less stressed, more productive, more engaged and, yes, happier—better able to smell the roses and cope with the inevitable frustrations of daily life.”

Rather than helping her achieve some long-term goal, regardless of how worthy that goal might be, she does it because just doing it makes her feel good in the moment. Who wouldn’t want that?

But if it were that easy, we’d all be lining up to buy bikes right now. So what is the misbelief that keeps our audience from doing it?

Maybe it’s this:

THE MISBELIEF: Although the audience believes bikes are good for the environment, their budget, and their health, they’re afraid that given how crazy busy they are, using a bike as a primary source of transportation will be too exhausting to be practical.

THE TRUTH: Bike riding gives you energy rather than saps it. The deeper truth is that having more energy makes you feel more alive and vital—better able to handle whatever life throws at you.

Okay, great, but that’s still totally conceptual. To persuade our audience, we have to solidify that truth by creating a story that will allow them to experience it. Which brings us back to the question: who will our protagonist be? We know that our target audience is urban commuters with the scratch to buy a high-end bike, and our goal is to persuade them to ride a bike to work. A list of likely candidates might look like this:

- A dad who comes home tired every day and has no energy for the kids.

- An exec whose doctor tells her she doesn’t need a pill for energy; she needs to exercise.

- A harried woman scheduled to give a key presentation at work today.

Note that when picking a protagonist, we’re focused on where their struggle lies: No energy for the kids; no energy for work; an important presentation that could go belly up. Note that they’re all vulnerable and therefore relatable. The audience would identify with each one because they, too, know how grueling work can be and the toll it takes on every other aspect of life.

How do you pick the “right” protagonist? It can feel intimidating, as if there’s only one correct answer, and thus an infinite number of really, really wrong ones. Here’s the good news: there is no one right answer. Any of these options could work, and probably a bunch more that you could come up with in five minutes of brainstorming. For your own story, pick the protagonist who feels right to you and run with it; if it doesn’t hold up in the next steps, well, there are other great candidates to choose from. If you can’t decide, write each one on a slip of paper, put ’em in a hat, close your eyes, and pick one. As with so many things, often what you choose isn’t as important as just making a damn choice and moving forward. If it’s wrong, you’ll learn something along the way that will help you choose better next time.

For my story here, I’m going to pick the woman about to give a key presentation. Let’s call her Hazel.

What Does the Protagonist Want?

All protagonists enter the story already wanting something. The story’s core conflict revolves around what it will cost them to get it, not cost in dollars and cents, but an emotional cost. Getting what they want will be your protagonist’s driving agenda. Your agenda will be to create an external problem that forces your protagonist to reevaluate their misbelief in order to get it.

STORY TOOL

All protagonists enter the story wanting something. The story’s core conflict centers on what it will cost them emotionally to get it.

We know that the misbelief we’re trying to uproot here is that using a bike as their primary source of transportation is just too exhausting to be practical, and the story’s goal is to convince Hazel—a stand-in for our audience with said misbelief—that that’s not true.

So, what might Hazel enter the story already wanting?

1. A new bike so sleek and streamlined that riding it is not at all exhausting?

2. A new job that is closer to her house, so riding a bike there wouldn’t seem so daunting?

3. A more flexible work schedule, so she can take a quick coffee nap to replenish the energy it took to pedal to work, without it going on her permanent record?

You might be thinking, That’s easy, it’s number 1. Nope. The answer is…none of the above. Even when you’ve done all the necessary digging, it can still come as a surprise that what your protagonist wants doesn’t necessarily have anything to do with your product, idea, or cause at all. But since that’s what we’re focused on—in this case, the bike—it would be easy to assume that Hazel is, too, when in fact she isn’t thinking about our bike, or any bike, at all. We’re the ones obsessed with bikes, and the ones bent on disabusing her of her misbelief. As far as she’s concerned, it’s not a misbelief. It’s a truth that she’s already accepted and never thinks about or questions at all—yet.

So what does Hazel already want that would force her to reconsider her misbelief in order to succeed? Right now all we know about Hazel is that she’s supposed to give an important presentation today, which has nothing to do with riding a bike to work. In fact, that’s probably the very last thing she’d want to do, since being alert, rested, and sharp matter so much. That means we not only have to add a bike into the mix, but it must somehow help her get what she wants.

But before we go there, let’s take a short detour into one of the ways our story template can be streamlined into a concise one-two punch once you know what your audience wants. In 2013 Subaru did exactly that, with just two words.

CASE STUDY: SUBARU

Subaru is a brand long known for safety over style, with scores of loyal customers who claim they are alive thanks to their Subaru. Subaru wanted to spread the word in a 2013 ad targeting an audience who hadn’t yet realized that, with cars as well as with people, beauty is only skin deep. What matters is who’s going to stand by you when the going gets tough.

Subaru determined that their target audience wanted something we all hope for, but that seems impossible: the knowledge that we could survive a catastrophic car crash (especially these days, with all those damn texters out there).

THE MISBELIEF: If you get into a major collision, you’re a goner.

That is what their audience expected. Their story’s goal was to break that expectation by shattering their misbelief in one fell swoop.

Here’s the 30-second spot: In the aftermath of a horrific accident, the camera moves toward the twisted wreckage of a car, usually a taboo in car commercials. Now we’re paying attention, thinking, Those poor people, no one could have survived that!

Clearly the tow truck driver on screen is thinking the same thing as he stares at the mangled hulk. We see pity in his eyes. A nearby cop notices and reacts. “They lived,” he says almost reverently. Astonished, the tow truck driver does a double take. It’s an emotional interchange that repeats twice more, first when the tow truck driver delivers the wreckage to the junkyard attendant, and again as the attendant and a co-worker stare at the misshapen corpse of a car, delivered to its final resting place. You almost expect someone to say, “That brave car gave its life so they could live!” and start sobbing. (You could even make an argument that the car itself is the protagonist, because it had the power to save the family, and it did.)

Finally, we see an ordinary family of four leaving their house, smiling, climbing into a new Subaru. The dad looks at the camera and says, “We lived. Thanks to our Subaru.”

“They lived” defies everyone’s expectations, except his. He knew. That’s why they bought a Subaru.

THE TRUTH: With the right car, you can survive. (The story’s point; the emotion it inspires is awe, relief, and trust.)

THE REALIZATION: If I buy a Subaru, it will keep me and my family safe should the worst happen. The choice is mine.

THE TRANSFORMATION: Where’s the nearest Subaru dealer?

Okay, back to our protagonist, Hazel; what does she want? In other words, what does our target audience want? They want to do well at work. But that’s conceptual, generic. There’s no conflict, no story potential there.

Our goal is to tie Hazel’s desire to a specific event, something she has agency over, thus making it concrete and actionable. Happily it’s right there in front of us: her presentation. The agenda Hazel walks into the story with is that she wants her presentation to be a raging success. Sure sounds specific; doesn’t it? But wait, there’s more. Why does she want the presentation to go well, beyond the generic, heck, who wouldn’t? Here, we can even amp up the stakes. Let’s say she wants that presentation to go well so that she gets the promotion that she, and her nemesis, Cuthbert, are up for. Thus we move from what she wants, conceptually, into the specifics of actually getting it: today’s presentation and the possible promotion are the manifestation of what she wants.

But again, what does any of that have to do with someone buying our bike? On the surface, absolutely nothing. And that’s totally fine (for now).

Hazel’s agenda is rife with the kind of potential conflict that will trigger the release of the potent emotional cocktail that rivets us. Now all we need is something to royally screw up her well-laid plan.

Pop Goes the Protagonist

Now your story’s external conflict needs to spring into action. Think of it as the hurdle that is going to force your protagonist to reevaluate what they believe is true—that is, what you have identified as their misbelief.

The question is: what external problem has the power to force your protagonist to reexamine said misbelief?

For instance, Hazel wants the presentation she’s scheduled to give this morning to lock in her promotion, so what kind of problem could she face?

- She could get to work only to discover that her nemesis had gotten in early and, having stolen the notes for her presentation, already given it.

- She could wake up with laryngitis.

- One of those Amazon drones could accidentally drop a package on her head, giving her classic movie-style amnesia.

All of those ideas would work if our sole goal was to keep Hazel from giving her presentation, but none of them work for our story. Because while they’re definitely hurdles she’d have to overcome to get what she wants, none of them force her to face her misbelief about bike riding. The tricky part is, of course, that up till now bikes don’t have anything to do with her story at all. So it’s back to the drawing board. Let’s dive into what we already know and see if we can find something to work with.

We’ve zeroed in on our audience’s fear—even though riding a bike is exhilarating, they’re afraid they’ll be exhausted once they get to work. And that’s the last thing Hazel wants. Especially today.

What we need is an unexpected situation—a sudden problem—that will force her to confront her misbelief in order to achieve her goal. And not just help her externally (getting her to work on time, refreshed, and ready to go), but internally as well (she’s feeling vital, powerful, unstoppable).

What if, taking a more benign page from Subaru’s playbook, today is the day her car ups and dies. Not in a fiery crash. But quietly, peacefully, during the night. So when she slips behind the wheel and turns the key, crickets.

Can you feel the dopamine? (Expectation broken.)

Can you feel the cortisol? (Uh oh, can she get to work on time?)

Can you feel the oxytocin? (And she worked so hard on that presentation. This isn’t fair.)

It’s something Hazel would instantly recognize as a problem. And so, it becomes our audience’s problem. They’re feeling it because she’s feeling it. Best yet, it’s a problem that our bike can solve.

But before we go further, a word of caution. Even given all the work we’ve done thus far, it’s still remarkably easy to let what we’ve learned vanish into the haze and once again leap into our version of what the audience would see as a problem.

Want a cringe-worthy example of what happens when you do just that?

CASE STUDY: DIET COKE

In 2018 Coca-Cola rolled out a new Diet Coke campaign. Because their attention was riveted on their product rather than their target audience’s take on it, they created a story that telegraphed their own fear. Fear most likely tied to the effect that recent studies might have on future sales. Studies showing how unhealthy diet soda is, linking it to cancer, heart disease, diabetes—and the ironic fact that it can actually cause users to gain weight.

The campaign’s tagline was: “Diet Coke, because I can.”

But here’s the thing: It sounds like a rallying cry, implying that someone is trying to stop us from drinking a Diet Coke in the first place, and we’ll be damned if we let them. Let me check. Nope. They’re not.

So instead of convincing us that we should drink Diet Coke, in the lady-doth-protest-too-much category, it makes us wonder if they’re trying to hide why maybe we shouldn’t.

The thirty-second video is simple. A generic, thin, pretty, millennial grabs a Diet Coke from a refrigerated case, takes a swig, and says, “Look, here’s the thing about Diet Coke, it’s delicious. It makes me feel good. Life is short…” She sounds oddly defensive. As if she’s in the middle of an argument with someone who has already pointed out that diet soda is unhealthy, and she begs to differ.

She goes on to say, “If you want to live in a yurt, yurt it up!”

Wait, so the same imaginary person who’s trying to stop us from drinking diet soda also has something against yurts? She continues her list of the things that she’s giving us permission to do: “If you want to run a marathon, I mean that sounds super-hard, but okay.” Gee, thanks.

After that I fully expected her to talk about how hard math is. Instead she says, “I mean, just do you, whatever that is.” So not only does the ad presume we’re reluctant to drink Diet Coke, live in yurts, and run marathons, it also presumes that we’re reluctant to be ourselves, so she’s giving us permission to let loose and, um, “do you”—behind closed doors, though, right?

“And if you’re in the mood for a Diet Coke, have a Diet Coke.”

The implication is clear: by having that Diet Coke we’re defying the power structure that would deny us our pleasures. Let’s storm the mini-mart!

I’m being snarky. But the ad invites it. Because Coca-Cola was so focused on their product, they turned the portrayal of their audience into parody—all they left out was a reference to avocado toast. And worse, they talked down to us.

That was not their intent, nor how they viewed the ad. Here’s Danielle Henry, group director of integrated marketing content, Coca-Cola North America, on the campaign: “We’ve stripped away the glossy marketing, and we’re just telling people how good Diet Coke really is. This Diet Coke is more authentic and more approachable than ever. We’re simplifying what we’re all about…a Diet Coke is for anyone, anytime, anywhere.”

Can you spot the problems in what she said? First, even if something is for “anyone, anytime, anywhere,” not only won’t one story win everyone over, at best it’ll be so bland no one will notice it; at worst, like the resulting ad, it will alienate just about everyone, including the critics and—checking in on social media—yep, their target audience as well. As Jo Ellison said when writing about the ad in Financial Times, “In their desperation not to offend anyone, they end up being offensively bad instead.”

Second, they were focused on the product itself, rather than their audience’s misbelief. What does: “Diet Coke is more authentic and approachable than ever” even mean? More authentic than what? Tea? Water? Regular Coke? And who ever said Diet Coke wasn’t approachable? It’s always right there, on the shelf, in the market, ready, willing and able to go home with you, no questions asked. It’s never busy, or asleep, or having a bad day. It’s the epitome of approachable.

Ironically, it left their audience with the exact opposite feeling. As one philosophical soul mused on Twitter, “The commercial made me wonder if drinking Diet Coke is in fact deeply socially shameful and I didn’t realize it.”

The one thing the spot is great at is showing you why, as you develop your own story, you must be hypervigilant. At every turn, ask yourself if you’re really seeing it from your audience’s viewpoint—using their decoder ring—rather than your own. If you start focusing on what matters to you, and why you think they might be reluctant to embrace your cause, you’re toast. Without the avocado, even.

This is important because you’re about to have a whack at it with your story, digging into what you’ve discovered about your target audience, zeroing in on a problem that they would instantly recognize.

CREATING YOUR STORY

At last! You’re putting all the research you’ve done to work and creating your own story. Give yourself time, maybe pour a nice cup of coffee, or a glass of wine, get comfortable, kick back. And brainstorm answers to the following questions:

1. Who, exactly, is my protagonist?

Chances are your protagonist will be a version of the person you’ve been envisioning as representative of your target audience. Make that person as real as you can.

2. What does my protagonist enter the story wanting, in a general sense?

This is the desire that your story will give them a chance to fulfill.

3. What, specifically, is happening—here, now, on the day the story is taking place—that can fulfill that desire for your protagonist?

For instance, if Hazel nails her presentation, beating her nemesis out of that coveted promotion, she will have achieved what she wants: success at work.

4. What external force might stand in the way of my protagonist?

Three things to keep in mind as you tackle this question are: First, you’re looking for something that threatens to stop your protagonist from getting what they want. Second, this external challenge must force your protagonist to take action. Third, in order to overcome this external challenge, your protagonist will have to reconsider their misbelief.

10

KEEP IT SPECIFIC

“Everything depends upon execution; having just a vision is no solution.”

—STEPHEN SONDHEIM

It may seem like you have your story now. You’re dying to let ’er rip. You’ve done so much work; you’re ready. It feels so right. Which most likely means one thing—you’re primed to inadvertently tumble into one of the biggest misbeliefs of all: that your story is already as specific as it needs to be. Because you’re right, you do know your story.

In general.

Just like we know Hazel’s story in general. To wit: On the morning Hazel is slated to give the biggest presentation of her career, the one that might net her a coveted promotion, her car won’t start. Her only chance to get to work before her nemesis steals her thunder is to…ride a bike! And so our product becomes the very thing that can save the day, that is, if she overcomes her misbelief. She hops on and discovers that instead of being exhausted she’s invigorated; she gives the presentation and kills it. Done.

Except…did you feel anything? Were you even paying attention? As I’m fond of saying to writers, do you want to explain it to me, or do you want to put me in the protagonist’s skin, so I can experience it for myself?

But what’s the problem, exactly? Why wasn’t that specific enough?

Because it was an objective overview of what happened, so there was no internal struggle, no hard choice to make. Hazel had nothing to overcome. No risk, no fear, no mounting stakes. She simply did the only logical, obvious thing: she got on a bike and rode to work. It was easy. A no-brainer, in fact. Which is the problem. Because, as we know, without the struggle, there’s nothing to root for, no one to empathize with, and no suspense. Plus, where the hell did she get that bike? If biking isn’t something she thinks about, why would she have one just sitting around? Kind of convenient; don’t you think? And why didn’t she just call a Lyft? Why, why, why? Uh oh.

It’s a seductive trap, the trap of summary. According to the Cambridge Dictionary a summary is: “A short, clear description that gives the main facts or ideas about something.” Which, of course, presupposes that the facts already exist and that everything in the story, from start to finish, has already happened. The above summary isn’t a summary because, as yet, there’s nothing to summarize.

STORY TOOL

Summary does not equal story.

Our goal is to transform what, at the moment, is a general notion of your story into something very, very specific. But geez, there are a ton of specifics in real life. We’re bombarded with them every second of every day. So which ones do you pick, how can you tell the nattering irrelevancies from the key details? Here’s the secret we’re about to explore: It’s not about simply capturing specifics, per se. The sky is blue. The bike is yellow. The dog might not be housebroken. It’s about zeroing in on the specifics that are relevant to your story, the specifics that give meaning to your call to action. Everything else is not only irrelevant, it is a distraction.

That’s why in this chapter we’ll zero in on how to translate general concepts into specific images that telegraph layers of meaning. Then we’ll walk through how to create the opening of your story, using the specific as your guide. We’ll explore how to personify the facts via a specific context, bringing them to life, and how to be concrete, clear, and visual, which is crucial since if we can’t see it, we can’t feel it.

How to Find, and Banish, Those Sneaky Generalities

A simple rule of thumb is that the general is a category; the specific is the thing being categorized. “Pants” is general, “paisley, high-waisted bell-bottoms edged in red and gold pompoms” is (perhaps all too) specific. It sounds so straightforward; doesn’t it? And yet the urge to use generalities is so strong that very often we don’t realize that we’ve done it at all. In fact, often the general is mistaken for the specific. The sentence “the man was happy” sounds specific. It’s a man. And he’s happy. Sure it sounds concrete, but it’s not. What man? Happy why? What is happiness, according to him? No clue. That’s why it’s general.

I’ve worked with countless writers who were heartbreakingly sure that the way to make a sentence like that specific was to simply qualify it with…another generality, “The man was happy about his career choices.” What choices? Why? And so? Why does it even matter? It conjures no image, no meaning beyond the surface statement, no reason to care. That can come as a shock. Because, like those writers, when you’re envisioning your story, you can see it, kind of. You can feel it, sort of. Because in your mind, it is specific, in a vague sense.

But when you’re actually telling the story to someone else? It’s generic, neutral, and oddly impenetrable.

International story coach Andy Goodman has a great example of the power of the specific, using a story Senator Elizabeth Warren tells about growing up in Oklahoma. In it she says, “And about the time I was in middle school, my daddy had a heart attack. And it was serious. Thought he was going to die. The church neighbors brought covered dishes. It was a scary time.”

Says Goodman, “Stories live in the specifics, the seemingly small details that help us see the world the storyteller is conjuring. Consider the difference between ‘our friends were very supportive’ and ‘the church neighbors brought covered dishes.’ Same meaning, sure, but only one immediately evokes an image.”

“Our friends were very supportive” sounds specific, doesn’t it? But when you hear about those supportive neighbors, do you picture anything? Not really. It’s a jumble of stick figures, being supportive…somehow. What are they doing to be supportive? Again, no clue. But when you envision the church neighbors, not only can you see them but also no one has to tell you they’re being supportive because what they’re actively doing—bringing covered dishes—telegraphs that, and much more.

But here’s the thing—it’s not just that we want to see the storyteller’s world. There are a million specific details in Warren’s world that she could have chosen to tell us about. The color of the walls. The type of rug. The view out the window. But she didn’t, even though they’re just as concrete and real as those covered dishes. Why didn’t she? Because those specific details had nothing whatsoever to do with the story she was telling. The covered dishes weren’t just some random detail; they helped convey her message. They told us something about Warren’s tribe. They were church going. They were not rich. They helped each other. They were a close-knit community, ready to jump into the fray when the going got rough, offering long-lasting sustenance and giving them one less thing to worry about. There are myriad emotional layers woven into that one simple image.

What’s more, the mere mention of those covered dishes might trigger a visceral memory in the listener, taking them back to a time when a parent got sick and those sorts of dishes appeared in their home—now, boom, they can feel what Warren felt, back when they were just little kids, too, and they know that, geez—that was huge.

The upshot is that the specifics must concretize your story and its meaning. Because, as Rep. Willard D. Vandiver said in 1899, “Frothy eloquence neither convinces nor satisfies me. I’m from Missouri. You’ve got to show me.” When it comes to specifics versus generalities, we humans are all Missourian.

To See It Is to Feel It

But what if you’re creating a story to convey something that each person in your target audience might have a different specific for? For instance, what if you’re running for election, and you want to tell a story about how you’ll fight for the specific thing each of your constituents holds most dear? Since each of them has a different “specific” that matters to them, won’t getting specific alienate anyone who doesn’t have that particular issue? Nope.

It’s crucial that your audience be able to envision your story, since, as neuroscientist Antonio Damasio notes in Descartes’ Error, “Thought is made largely of images.” Images don’t make us think because they’ve sparked us intellectually, images drive our emotions as well. It’s the feeling that spurs the thought, not the other way around. And so without a specific image to focus on, it’s hard to think about—let alone feel—the meaning of, well, anything. So the question is: if you focus on one specific image, how can you telegraph a message that goes beyond that one, specific image? Can it become a symbol not only for something deeper and more universal, but for other specifics as well?

Let’s dive into an example that does just that.

CASE STUDY: JAIME HARRISON, US SENATE CAMPAIGN SPOT

Part of the brilliance of Jaime Harrison’s “Dirt Road” spot is that nothing in it trumpets which political party he is affiliated with, and for our purposes, it doesn’t matter at all. Because the point of his story has absolutely nothing to do with party loyalty or putting the other side down. The point of the story is about the voters themselves and what matters to them, not politically, but in their own daily lives.

To reach voters, Harrison had to find one image, one concern, that would make each think, Yeah, me too. That’s how I feel about my issue.

The ad itself wasn’t about solving that—or any—specific issue. It was about the importance of politicians recognizing their constituents’ concerns in the first place. That’s the message he wanted to convey.

It’s a simple ad: we hear Harrison’s voice narrating a series of illustrated graphics as the text flashes across the screen. Let’s listen, deconstructing it as we go:

I went into a rural county in South Carolina. (We’re primed. Because we’re wired for story, we instinctively know something is going to happen…)

I went down an old dirt road… (We can see it: it’s the image at the center of the story. It’s not just a road; it’s an old dirt road. Sure sounds like he’s venturing off the beaten path, where things get real, real fast.)

Shotgun house and went knocking on the door… (The visual reference to a “shotgun house” lets us know that he’s an insider, a local. Full disclosure: I had to look it up. I’d never heard the term before; in my world, it’s known as a “railroad flat.”)

Old African-American man came to the door, and he says, “Son, who are you, and what do you want?” (We’re waiting for Harrison to make his pitch and wondering what the response will be. We know exactly what he wants: this man’s vote.)

I said, “Sir, I’m Jaime Harrison.”

He looked at me, and he said, “Okay. What do you want?” (Wow, it’s clear this guy is no nonsense. This is not his first rodeo, so the sooner Harrison says what he wants, the sooner he’ll send him on his way.)

I said, “Sir, this is the most consequential election…” (Uh oh, big mistake, Harrison is leading with politics, generalities, and what matters to him. He’s going to tell this man why he should vote for him. The point is, we know that Harrison is making a mistake as soon as the words are out of his mouth; we can feel it in our gut.)

And he said, “Son, let me tell you something.” (This is the moment when Harrison’s expectations are broken; now we’re on high alert. Looks like this guy is going to put him in his place and save them both the trouble of Harrison going through his spiel.)

He said, “You see that road that you drove up on?” (Again, very visual, and this man is bringing Harrison into his world. His concerns.)

I said, “Yes sir.” (The tables have turned. Now this man has taken the lead.)

He said, “What kind of road is that?”

I said, “It’s a dirt road.” (The beauty of this is that we, the audience, intuitively know that this man is about to make a point, and we’re trying to figure out what it is.)

He said, “Son, that was a dirt road when Ronald Reagan was President, when both of the Bushes were President. (Aha, he’s going to blame the Republicans; it’s their fault that it’s still a dirt road…)

It was a dirt road when Bill Clinton and Barack Obama were President. (Wait, he’s blaming Democrats, too. Where is this going?)

Son, that’s still a god damn dirt road. And until either a Democrat or a Republican paves my road, I don’t want to deal with any of you.” (Aha! It’s not about politics at all. It’s about how politicians never focus on what really matters to their constituents on a daily basis. That’s what they care about, and until they feel heard, why the hell should they listen to a politician?)

He shut his door. And I was a little hurt. (Harrison’s goal was to convince this man to vote for him, and he failed completely. And, hey, he’s admitting it, right now, to us. He’s allowing himself to be vulnerable.)

But then I started thinking about it. (Now Harrison is going a step further; he’s not being defensive, or telling us why this man was wrong, or blaming one party or the other for that man’s woes. Instead, he’s considering what the man said to him and he’s rethinking his own position.)

The most important thing to this man was his dirt road. (The dirt road is what mattered to him. It’s real. It’s not conceptual; it’s not vague; it’s not abstract. And, because of that, it’s actionable. It’s a specific problem that can be fixed.)

And he’d heard all the political speeches, and people talking about doing this and that. But nobody has still paved his road. (Harrison understood exactly what this man’s point was. And with that, the point becomes everyone’s point: That is, you make promises, but you never, ever do what matters to me. You don’t take care of the things that affect me in my life. So why should I care about what you want?)

That road is symbolic for so many things for so many of us across this state. (Harrison has now taken that one specific thing—the dirt road—and used it as a symbol for all the specific things that affect voters in his state.)

It may not be a dirt road for the people in Allendale, but it may be schools. It might not be a dirt road for the people in Bamberg; it could be their hospital. (By naming two other specifics, he’s letting voters know that he understands that different groups have different concerns, and his goal is to zero in on what, exactly, matters most to each of them, and do something about it.)

That dirt road is the hardship that so many of us are suffering with across this state. (Digging even deeper, he now ties all the specifics together, revealing the underlying problem: people are suffering because politicians no longer focus locally, on the real, concrete needs of the people they represent.)

I remember a time when senators helped the people they represented. I want to bring the spirit of helping back. We have to rebuild the trust of those people. And that’s why I’m running for the United States Senate. (Now, finally, almost as an afterthought, here’s his ask. By itself, it would have been generic, general, vague, and totally party line—without even saying which party. Instead, it’s a genuine summation of a powerful specific, transformed into a compelling universal that Harrison wants to tackle.)

THE MISBELIEF: All politicians are the same; they don’t care about what really affects us. They only care about getting elected and then staying in office.

THE TRUTH: It is possible for a politician to bust through that stereotype if they’re willing to listen to us; focus on what, specifically, does affect us; and hopefully, do something about it.

THE REALIZATION: Harrison might be such a politician. He did listen, he admitted his mistake, and he understood. His goal is to help us, and maybe he can if we elect him.

THE TRANSFORMATION: I will vote for him.

That one specific image—the old dirt road—was the linchpin.

First, literally, you could see and feel why it mattered to the man who lived in that shotgun house. It had affected him every single day since the 1980s. His message was clear: if politicians really cared about me, they’d have paved my road.

Second, symbolically, that old dirt road then became a stand-in for each voter’s very real problem, and thus a symbol for what needed to change. Politicians needed to care enough to actually do something about those problems.

Harrison harnessed that one specific image to tell a very potent story.

But what if you’re trying to convey something even more ephemeral, like a concept—say abundance, choice, or freedom? Can a single, well-placed image do that? Yes. In fact, sometimes a single, absurdly frivolous specific can itself tell a story, one that changes the course of an entire nation no less. Like, oh, I don’t know, Jell-O Pudding Pops?

As Andrew Marantz recounts in The New Yorker, in 1989, before he was president of Russia, Boris Yeltsin “met with President George H. W. Bush, toured the floor of the New York Stock Exchange, and stopped at a run-of-the-mill supermarket on the outskirts of Houston, where the abundant display of Pudding Pops affected him so strongly—‘Even the Politburo doesn’t have this choice. Not even Mr. Gorbachev!’—that he vowed to dismantle Bolshevism once and for all.”

The point is those humble little treats had a meaning for Yeltsin that had absolutely nothing to do with their deliciousness or the shockingly long list of unpronounceable six-syllable ingredients. To him, they represented all the things that the Soviet Union didn’t have. Imagine that! Big concepts brought home by a bunch of Pudding Pops. Because you can’t picture abundance, choice, or freedom, but you sure can close your eyes and see that gleaming freezer case full of box after box of frozen treats.

Specific images, regardless how mundane, have the power to be startling, and therefore memorable—the juxtaposition between the seriousness of Cold War politics and the frivolity of a Pudding Pop is so unanticipated that you can’t help but do a double take, thinking, Wait. What??

Storytellers know this. Because, let’s be honest, was it really the Pudding Pops that did it, as Marantz suggests? What Yeltsin himself said of his trip to the supermarket was, “When I saw those shelves crammed with hundreds, thousands of cans, cartons, and goods of every possible sort, for the first time I felt quite frankly sick with despair for the Soviet people. That such a potentially super-rich country as ours has been brought to a state of such poverty! It is terrible to think of it.”

Not a Pudding Pop in sight. So, why would a publication as high-brow as The New Yorker single them out as what triggered Yeltsin’s epiphany? There’s a clue in a clearly staged photograph from said shopping expedition, in which Yeltsin is staring into a frozen food compartment, his arms stretched out in mock surprise, a wide smile on his face. In addition to the Pudding Pops, the compartment is full of ice cream, orange Popsicles, and chocolate syrup. Granted, Yeltsin does seem to favor the Pudding Pops (a fact that, as you can tell by how many times I’ve repeated it here, is endlessly entertaining).

But here’s the thing: there’s also a photo, just as compelling, of Yeltsin eyeing a display of fresh green beans, mushrooms, and radishes. But the sentence, “the abundant display of garden vegetables affected him so strongly that…” clearly doesn’t pack the same emotional punch—“garden vegetables” is harder to picture and far more mundane. In framing the story for The New Yorker, Marantz knew what he was doing: the specific that makes the point is, hands down, let me say it again: Pudding Pops. Who could forget that?

In other words, it’s not just being specific; it’s picking a specific that not only telegraphs meaning but also has an element of the unexpected.

Which delivers us right back to Hazel’s story. We know, in general, what it’s about. Now, let’s make it specific, starting with where it begins.

It’s easy to assume that Hazel’s story starts with her car not starting. Because, yes, that absolutely, positively breaks a pattern, tragically upending her expectations—it sounds so promising. But if we start the story there, we have no way to communicate what is at stake for Hazel, not in general, in her life at large, but today. In order to communicate that, we have to back up.

Where Do I Even Begin?

The real question is: given the external problem we’ve settled on, how is today different from any other day for Hazel? Because that’s what will determine what’s at stake for her—and what she wants.

And yet it’s frighteningly easy to be seduced by the notion that unceremoniously shoving Hazel out of her comfort zone by prematurely sending her car to auto heaven is the perfect place to start our story. We can see it; we can feel it.

The problem is that while we know what Hazel wants, our audience doesn’t. As far as they’re concerned, Hazel’s car won’t start, and so? Yes, they’ll know that’s a bad thing, in general. But because there’s no clear, concrete consequence, there’s nothing for us to anticipate, and no real reason to care. That means that before we kill Hazel’s car, we need to let our audience know why, specifically, its untimely death is bad today. That is, not just regular old bad, but bad bad. That’s why when you’re trying to pinpoint where your story begins, there are three questions you have to answer:

- What makes this day different from any other day for my protagonist?

- What’s at stake for my protagonist because of it?

- How can I telegraph that to my audience?

What could Hazel do that would clearly signal that today is not an average day for her, cluing the audience in to the fact that she is about to give a career-making presentation?

Since our goal is to master the basics of story itself, let’s give this story the space to breathe, and imagine it as a two-minute video—although what we’re about to dig into can be adapted to any format: a story told during a presentation, a tweet, or a fund-raising letter.

So, let’s take a look at how Hazel’s morning might unfold, up to the moment she climbs into her SUV and turns the key. Notice that each turn of the screw builds on the one that came before it, upping the suspense, triggering our curiosity, building our empathy. Here goes:

- We see Hazel hurriedly getting dressed, glancing at her computer screen, quickly scrolling through her presentation. (She’s nervous—I wonder why? Side note: This is the first pattern we’re breaking. Even though the audience doesn’t know what Hazel’s usual morning is like, they know enough about how stories work to recognize that she’s nervously scrolling through what looks like a presentation; it means something’s up.)

- Hazel gets a “good luck” text from her mom, something like, “Remember to breathe. You’ve got this.” (Yikes. She’s about to be put to the test; must be that presentation I just saw her scroll through.)

- Next, to up the tension, is a text from her boss, “Head’s up, the CEO’s here. Don’t make me look bad!” (Yep, I was right. And uh oh, it’s a really big test, I bet.)

- The radio is on. There’s a traffic pile up, all lanes blocked. (I wonder how far away her office is; hope she won’t be late. The stakes are rising because this is totally out of her control.)

- She envisions the traffic: a rapid succession of angry drivers, taillights, sweat. (Uh oh, even if she gets there on time, she’s going to be frazzled. Side note: This also makes the point that, maybe, driving to work isn’t the positive it’s cracked up to be.)

- She looks at her watch. Panicked. She puts her shoes on the wrong feet, hopping into the garage. (Come on, come on, come on!)

- Inside is an SUV and, tucked into the corner, a bike. Our bike. There’s a big red bow on it. A dusty, sagging bow, signaling that it’s been there for a long time. Clearly a gift, a disappointing one. When would she ever have the time to ride a bike? (Hmmm, wonder who gave her that bike? The bow is still on it, obviously she’s never ridden it. Must be a story there.)

- She puts her key in the ignition and…nothing. (OMG, now what?!)

- Her phone chirps, another text, from her boss “how close r u?” (What will she do? She’ll never get there on time!)

Did you see how much information we packed in before her car goes belly up? It made her car’s death mean something miles beyond the otherwise generic, Damn. Now I’m going to be late to the office. In just a few short frames, we established Hazel’s goal, what she’ll have to overcome to achieve it, and what’s at stake if she doesn’t—we’ve got the audience rooting for her. It’s visual and full of specific, revealing images that show us what matters to Hazel right now, in the moment. Our version of Pudding Pops is that dusty red bow—definitely unusual, unexpected, pulling our attention to the bike.

We want to know what happens next. Will Hazel get to work on time to give her presentation?

It feels all of a piece—one smooth scene—but let’s dive a little deeper into it so we can see each layer at play. Did you notice that both the past and the future are represented, deftly woven into the present?

For instance, the past was revealed when:

- Hazel glanced at her presentation—something she’d already created and clearly put a lot into.

- When she heard that there was a traffic jam, she instantly called up memories—images from the past—envisioning the new, unexpected hurdle she’s facing.

- And when we saw the bike with the sagging ribbon in the garage, we instantly wondered, Gee. What’s up with that? It wasn’t the bike itself that did it. It was the tattered bow that let us know that there’s more there than meets the eye. And, we sense, if the storyteller is making a visual point of it, it must have story significance, thus raising the audience’s expectation: whether Hazel knows it or not, that bike is going to matter.

As for the future:

- All three texts Hazel received let us know that she was about to do something that matters: the presentation.

- Hazel looked at her watch, hurried to the garage, and put her shoes on the wrong feet, all of which telegraph the urgency, and the importance, of what she’s about to do. She’s anxious, and so are we.

These things taken together—the past and the future—are what create tension in the present. The past reveals what matters to Hazel, what she wants, and the future telegraphs what’s at stake given that desire.

You might have noticed that we didn’t get in everything that we brainstormed. There was no mention of Hazel’s nemesis, let alone the fear that he’d step in and give her presentation if she’s late. That’s okay. Maybe we’ll jettison it. Maybe we’ll find a way to work it in. Right now, either option is okay. And, hey, what is the story with the bow on the bike, and who gave it to her? Hmmm. Point being, nothing is written in stone, it’s an iterative process, and that’s totally fine.

We Got ’Em! Uh, Now What?

Once a story grabs our attention, our curiosity kicks into gear—wow, we wonder, how is the protagonist going to get out of that one? Which means the answer can’t be a slam dunk. It has to be hard won. Sure, you know what the right thing for them to do is—that’s why you’re creating this story. But the story is about how your protagonist gets there. How she fights against it, what makes her decide to take a chance, and what she learns in the process.

It’s like in a romantic comedy—going in, you know that the two people about to get married are totally wrong for each other. You know that the offbeat next-door neighbor is the protagonist’s true love, but if he realized that as quickly as you did, there’d be no story. So you settle in, knowing it will take the whole two hours for him to wake up and smell the coffee. And that’s the pleasure of it. It’s his realization and what causes it that we come for. Same with Hazel, and same with your protagonist. So now that we have set it all up, the question is: How do you build a story so that your protagonist realizes it on their own?

CREATING YOUR STORY

Take everything you’ve discovered about your protagonist and envision your story the way we did with Hazel. Then do the following:

- See if you can find your story’s beginning, a specific instance where you can telegraph what matters to the protagonist at that moment, and what’s at stake if things don’t go as expected.

- Ask yourself: What will keep your protagonist from getting what they want? Think in specific images, specific setbacks, specific actions that escalate.

- Given that setup, see if you can envision the specific moment when the protagonist comes face-to-face with a problem they can’t avoid, the way Hazel couldn’t.

You may wind up with several versions; that’s okay. At times it may be crazy frustrating, and at other times, it feels like magic. Stick with it. You’re getting so close.

11

IF, THEN, THEREFORE

“The greater the tension, the greater is the potential.”

—C. G. JUNG

You’ve got your opening—great. Now, if you want your audience to ultimately follow your call to action, you need to keep ratcheting up the tension, making them feel what Oscar Wilde did when he said, “This suspense is terrible. I hope it will last.”

Your opening established the problem that must be solved; the cause-and-effect trajectory you’ll create is how your protagonist will try to solve it. And, as we know, the solution can’t be effortless, one-step. If it were that easy, then it wouldn’t really be a problem, would it? And worse, it would completely alienate your audience. Because it would imply that what they see as a problem is no big deal as far as you’re concerned. Not a good idea.

You may be thinking that the solution is simple. For instance, in Hazel’s case, it would be: just get on the damn bike! How hard could that be? But that isn’t the point. Often, the solution, once reached, is obvious. It’s the struggle to get to the solution that’s hard, and that is what your sequence of cause and effect will tackle. Remember, your protagonist struggles with the same misbelief your audience does, and if it’s a big deal to them, it had better be a big deal to your protagonist.

It’s tricky, I know. Because one of the ironies of modern life is that although everything is geared to make our lives “easier,” we’re hardwired to crave problem solving. According to Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, distinguished professor of psychology and management at Claremont Graduate University, research shows that we’re happiest when we’re working on difficult-but-possible pursuits—once our interest is piqued, that is. Thus, once you’ve established the problem your protagonist faces, your audience will instantly begin making predictions about what they’ll do next and how the problem could be solved. This gives them an even more vested interest in your story because now they want to find out whether or not they’re right.

To be sure that your story can deliver that thrill, in this chapter we’ll explore how to make sure your story has an escalating, believable cause-and-effect trajectory; we’ll also cover a surefire method for weeding out digressions that can derail your story. By chapter’s end, you’ll have sketched out your story’s mounting tension—specifically, twist by twist—from the opening scene you just nailed down, up to the place where, as we’ll discuss in chapter 12, your protagonist’s realization—their “aha” moment—will bring it all home.

After all, there are few sentiments more satisfying than, “I knew it” thanks to the delicious emotional reward bestowed upon us when we figure something out. That’s why we love crossword puzzles, mystery podcasts, and the thrill of finally deducing the secret ingredient that makes Uncle Amit’s pumpkin pie so delectable.

It’s not just the moment of discovery; it’s the work we put into getting there that makes the reward so satisfying. The urge to figure things out is also what keeps us alive. As we know, our brain is a prediction machine dedicated to divining the (seemingly) reliable logic behind “if this, then that, oh wait, that means therefore…” Without this ability to anticipate the future, our lives would be one terrifying surprise after another.

Thankfully, if there’s one thing we know we can count on for sure, it’s causality, which, as the Scottish philosopher David Hume noted several centuries ago, “is the cement of the universe.” However, as Hume was also quick to point out, that doesn’t inherently mean that what we think caused something actually did. Or that what we therefore anticipate will happen actually will. We need only look at the most recent headlines or election results to realize that we’re often very, very wrong.

The point is whether we’re ultimately right or wrong, we are wired to constantly hunt for the causal connection between things because without it, nothing makes sense. Out here in the wild, we are at the mercy of what our experience implies; but in your story, you are the decider of what the experience will teach your protagonist (and by extension, your audience). That is, if you have created a clear, concrete, believable, cause-and-effect trajectory from start to finish.

Cause and Effect: Making It Believable

First, let’s define believability. It’s when, without having to think about it, you automatically accept that this could have caused that. When it comes to creating your story, there are two layers of believability you should be aiming for:

1. Generic physical believability (this one’s relatively easy).

2. Emotional/psychological believability, based on your protagonist’s internal logic (this one isn’t easy, and it’s why you’ve done all the work so far).

That first layer of physical believability is something we’re familiar with because it’s pretty much the same for all of us, regardless of our tribe, upbringing, or all-time favorite season (spring, right?). We believe that, in general, people have the physical ability to run, walk, and jump; we know that a person can’t flap their arms and fly. This world is bound by what is and isn’t physically possible. Gravity holds us in place, food and water keep us alive, babies don’t stay up all night worrying about the stock market. It’s that simple.

The second layer of believability, that of your protagonist’s internal logic, is far more important to get right, so that what they say and do rings emotionally and psychologically true. This is what your audience comes for, the internal why behind what the protagonist is doing—based on how their tribe sees the world. Violate that, and even if everything else is totally and completely physically possible, your audience will be thinking, Well, that sure could never happen.

In fact, this internal layer is so much more important that, if you get it right, you can break the first rule with impunity. At times, breaking it can even help make your point.

Take, for instance, E*Trade’s talking baby commercials (you saw that coming; didn’t you?). We know that while some babies are indeed precocious and advanced well beyond their months, they are not opening trading accounts on their own (especially since none of them, other than perhaps E*Trade baby himself, have any earnings to invest in the first place). So, yes, a baby giving financial advice is completely out of the realm of possibility. And yet when we witness this particular baby doing a pitch perfect impersonation of a down-to-earth twenty-eight-year-old, instead of rolling our eyes, we keep them glued to the screen.

For one thing, the spot has the element of surprise, instantly breaking a pattern—babies can’t talk, so we wonder what’s going on. But advice from a dog, a cat, or a hamster would be just as eye-catching. So, why the baby? Because once the spot grabs our attention, it visually telegraphs the notion that investing with E*Trade is so simple even a baby can do it. Which is their point. The baby actually says it, as if he were having a normal convo, one twenty-eight-year-old guy to another.

Which is why the ad was so successful: it perfectly captured the second layer of believability—that of the protagonist’s internal logic. The baby’s point of view completely aligned with their target audience’s, reflecting what experience had taught them and speaking their language.

The campaign premiered in 2008, and E*Trade was targeting aspiring self-directed investors, people who up until then may have been a wee bit leery of taking charge of their financial lives. After all, they’d heard that managing money is serious, scary business—a misbelief investment company messaging took pains to instill—and so best left in the hands of seasoned professionals. And then the recession hit, leaving said audience leerier still of entrusting their hard-earned cash to brokers who, shall we say, had not invested wisely.

The baby neatly conveyed the sentiment: “Hey, old guys, thanks but no thanks. Me and my buds have it covered.” It was irreverent, it was funny, and it made the point without a single chart, word of jargon, or any lingo whatsoever. As culture critic Elayne Rapping said, “The kid humanized the whole business of trading.”

Humanized is the key word here—and it translates to being accessible. When your protagonist sees the world through your target audience’s eyes, using their particular brand of logic, your story becomes believable—even if what actually happens in it is patently impossible. Which can actually be a fantastic strategy for incorporating that all-important element of surprise.

Mounting Tension: Let’s Do the Twist(s)

Wait a minute, you may be thinking, what do you mean “twists?” I’m not writing a novel. You may be working on a sixty-second spot, a two-paragraph story, or a single tweet. But here’s the thing: there can—and should—be twists and turns. The prime example is from the (apparently apocryphal) story wherein, during a literary bar fight, Ernest Hemingway was challenged to come up with an entire story in six words, to which he replied: “For sale. Baby shoes. Never worn.” And won. The twist packs a potent, gut-wrenching punch. However, seriously, little babies don’t tend to wear shoes all that much, so honestly, it might simply have been a bad purchase rather than a heartbreaking tale of woe.

Then there is William Shatner’s even twistier, “Failed SAT. Lost scholarship. Invented rocket.” Twistier still is master storyteller Dr. Karen Dietz’s six-word story: “Played golf. Boss won. Kept job.” Talk about a very short story that speaks volumes, makes a point, and I’m betting—unfortunately—resonates with countless browbeaten pencil pushers (that is, most of us). Notice, too, that there is a clear, believable, two-fold cause-and-effect trajectory there. One that not only tells us what happened externally but also implies what was going on beneath the surface. We know the storyteller let the boss win, and we sure know why, which, of course, is the point of the story.

So, how do you build a believable, twisty, cause-and-effect trajectory, one that taps into your audience’s expectations and, maybe, ultimately upends them? Let’s take a look at a deceptively simple sixty-second spot to see how, when you know what your audience expects, you can wow them with what they don’t.

CASE STUDY: JETTA

The spot revolves around a situation that, being human, we’re all pretty versed in: a groom anticipating his bride’s reaction when, on their wedding day, he is very, very late. First, let’s go through the spot; then let’s talk about what the creators were up to.

- We see a man; he looks jittery but dead-on determined, as if he’s just made an important decision and nothing is going to stop him. He’s driving fast down a rainy country road in the middle of nowhere, and there’s neither a house nor building in sight. He’s clearly in a hurry. (Instantly we think, Whoa, he sure looks like a young James Spader. Oh, and we also know that this is not an average day for this guy, and something big is at stake.)

- Cut to a woman in a bridal gown in a church’s bride’s room. A priest is in the background, bridesmaids are gathered around her, kneeling as they fluff her dress, her veil; she smiles down at them. Her dad sits in a chair off to the side, watching her get ready. (Ohhhh, so James is the groom, but why is he so far from civilization? Causal connection detected; problem intuited.)

- Cut to James, still driving, superfast. (He has to get there in time; we’re rooting for him. And wondering what held him up—surely he should have been there long ago.)

- The bride’s dad is watching her, but he looks a little concerned. She fiddles with her engagement ring, looking up wistfully. (Uh oh, they’re worried that James isn’t there yet. He better hurry—sure hope he has a good excuse.)

- James glances nervously at his watch, drives even faster. He’s sweating. (Why is he so late, what happened? What if he doesn’t get there in time?)

- Dad glances at his watch, too. (Why does he look so unhappy? Is it just that James is late? Maybe he thinks it’s a bad match, and this just proves it. One thing’s for sure; he doesn’t want his daughter to be hurt, and it’s starting to feel inevitable.)

- On the road up ahead a lumbering Airstream trailer forces James to slow way down; panic registers on his face. (Not now! Doesn’t it always go that way? Dumb trailer. The tension ratchets upward.)

- Dad takes his daughter’s hands; she gives him a smile, but not a big one, and looks away first. (Dad realizes she’s even more worried than he thought. If only we could tell them: James is on his way. Don’t give up!)

- James, clearly taking a big chance, punches the gas and shoots around the Airstream. (Oh, we’re so glad his car has the power to do that—for a minute it looked he might drive into oncoming traffic. He must really love her.)

- As Dad turns from his daughter, his look of worry only deepens. (So does ours.)

- James is closer now. He speeds over a long bridge, but…no, he’s still out in the country. (The clock is ticking down.)

- The bride glances out the window, turns back with a look of disappointment, then steels herself. (Maybe he’ll get there—don’t give up on him yet.)

- James finally drives into a town…just as a railroad crossing gate goes down, forcing him to stop. As an unbearably long train zooms past, he squirms, puts his head down on the steering wheel, then leans back, and screams in frustration. (Damn, he’s missing his own wedding. Oh, man, they’re going to think he didn’t show on purpose.)

- Dad, head down in resignation, closes the door to the room where the bride has been getting ready—and we’re locked out. (It’s over, and they’re going to have to tell everyone the groom isn’t there—that’s so mortifying.)

- Cut to the front of a church. The street is deserted as James drives up, leaps out of the car, and runs up the steps, through the open church door.

- The church is full. The bride—and, wait, the real groom?—stand together at the altar. James runs in just as the priest is saying “. . . speak now or forever hold your peace.” James stops short; the groom glares at him, then glances at the bride. She looks down, clearly an admission that, yes, there’s something between her and James. As James opens his mouth to speak, she looks up at him, and, eyes gleaming, draws a deep, shuddery breath, and now we know…that we’ve just watched a sixty-second version of the last act of The Graduate. Because just like Benjamin Braddock, James has saved the love of his life from marrying the wrong guy.

It’s a surprise that brings with it a deep sense of satisfaction. Just like the crowd around a magician who has miraculously pulled a rabbit out of his empty hat, instead of being angry, we’re thrilled.

And that made it memorable. But, hey, it did fool us. And we don’t like to be fooled. So why weren’t we angry?

Because the meaning we read into the cause-and-effect trajectory made just as much sense as what was actually happening. In other words, based on everything we saw, if what we expected had happened—James gets to the church and it’s empty, except for a few forlorn ribbons and couple of squashed flower petals on the floor—it would have been totally believable. The point is, while it was a surprise ending, it didn’t make fun of us for being fooled. It just showed us another way to look at what was going on. Which, of course, is exactly what your story’s goal is: to show your target audience a new way of looking at something familiar.

Okay, so it was a clever story, but what does that have to do with buying a Jetta? The fact is, we don’t even know it’s a car commercial until it’s over. We’re so busy trying to figure out if James is going to get there in time that the last thing on our mind is, “Gee, I wonder what they’re trying to sell me.” So, how is the spot communicating its real intent: buy our car?

First, on the surface, you could say that although the car wasn’t the protagonist (that was James), it was the hero. It shot safely around the Airstream, it took the turns well on the slick, wet pavement. It got him there in the nick of time. But there’s more than that.

What was the moral of the story itself? Let’s break it down.

The bride was about to marry a man who, we realize in the last few frames, didn’t take her breath away. He’s okay—tall, generically handsome. There’s nothing wrong with him, really. Clearly, he’d do. It’s just that he looks a little ordinary, bland even. Buttoned down, every close-cropped hair in place, staid. James, on the other hand, looks far more alive, far more engaged. His shirt collar is unbuttoned, his longish hair, unruly—tousled, in romance novel parlance. He’s not afraid to be vulnerable, to take a chance. After all, he could be making a massive fool of himself. But damn it, he loves her! Sigh.

Of course, if he hadn’t been the protagonist—the guy we were rooting for—and if we weren’t already primed to believe that the bride was about to Make a Big Mistake, we might have seen the way he ran in and disrupted the wedding as the height of cavalier arrogance. What a jerk.

Instead, we felt the opposite. We were thinking, Thank god, he saved her from marrying the wrong guy.

Which was the point of the story, and of the ad: What you want is within reach, if you have the courage to go after it. The tagline that then pops onto the screen, telling us what the ad is for, makes that clear: “Fasten Your Seatbelts. The Jetta VR6. Drivers Wanted.”

THE MISBELIEF: I cannot win my dream girl (okay, car). Someone else will get it. It’s out of my reach.

THE TRUTH: My dream is within my reach—if I have the courage to go for it. Now.

THE REALIZATION: Why let my dream car get away? I can get it (with reasonable monthly terms).

THE TRANSFORMATION: Maybe I should test drive a Jetta.

Looking deeper, it’s clear that the bride, too, has a misbelief, which means she could have been the protagonist—and in a way she does take action in the end. The look she gives James lets us know that, yes, she’s realized her mistake at the very last minute, when she can still do something about it. For her, this is a story about not settling for second best.

THE MISBELIEF: Even though a standard model guy (okay, car) is not my ideal, it’ll do.

THE TRUTH: There is so much more I should want out of a man and a car—the right one can take you to places you haven’t let yourself dream of going (and, in the case of the car, get you there safely and on time).

THE REALIZATION: Why settle? My ideal car, just like my ideal man, does exist—and it wants me.

THE TRANSFORMATION: Maybe I should test drive a Jetta. (I’m sure Fred will find a nice girl to settle down with, eventually.)

What emotion did the creators embed into that ad? The thrill of going for what you really want in life and having the power to make it happen—even when one obstacle after another stands in your way. And, from the bride’s point of view, the thrill of being chosen, of being valued above all others. Yes, yes, yes, I know that for her it has echoes of the moldy, sexist notion that “someday my prince will come.” Given my beliefs, I should shun the ad, instead of watching it over and over (you know, for work). But here’s the thing: wanting to be chosen is such a primal desire that it’s universal. As embarrassing as it is to admit, the ad got me where I live—before I had time to think about the other implications. And so, even more mortifying, I didn’t. That, too, is the power of story.

It’s one thing to be affected by a powerful story; it’s quite another to be able to create one. Just thinking about it is enough to make you feel a little tense. And that’s a good thing, because tension is what we’re going to talk about next.

You Can’t Be Brave Unless You’re Afraid

In a story, the protagonist solves the problem only by overcoming obstacles that even she isn’t really sure she’s up to. If she’s fearless, well, then there are no real odds no matter how bad things get for her, nothing internal for her to overcome, nothing for her to learn. In other words, you know how hard things have been for Hazel thus far? It’s time to make them even harder.

Easy to say. But how? There are all sorts of objectively dramatic things that could happen. Like a meteor falls into her backyard. An alien spaceship lands on her roof. Wait, I know, a flood—an earthquake. A volcano. With hot lava and quicksand! Yeah, none of the above. Here’s the secret: the answer always lies in your story’s backyard (and no, it’s not that meteor).

Forget big external events. The question to ask is: given the situation Hazel is in, what would she do? How would she try to solve the problem? Which really means: what would your audience do? This gives you a far smaller and way more concrete (not to mention believable) set of choices. The goal is to spitball anything and everything, regardless of how absurd. For Hazel, the list might look like this:

- Text a coworker to see if there’s any chance she can delay her presentation until the afternoon.

- See if she can do her presentation remotely, through Zoom.

- See how long it would take a Lyft to get to her.

- See if she can borrow a neighbor’s car.

- Break out that book on the power of positive thinking, to see if she can will herself to work.

- Oh, right, and then there’s the bike.

At the moment, that last one—the bike—is the absurd option (yep, even more than willing herself there). In fact, I’m betting Hazel has totally forgotten about that bike. But our audience hasn’t. They saw it as she leapt into her car, and they innately knew it was going to be relevant. In fact, the instant her car wouldn’t start, they were probably yelling, The bike, the bike! Because as Anton Chekhov said, “One must never place a loaded rifle on the stage if it isn’t going to go off. It’s wrong to make promises you don’t mean to keep.” By showing them that bike, we made our audience a promise. We primed them to expect that it will be significant, that it will matter. Otherwise, why would we have shown it to them in the first place?

With that in mind, let’s sift through what we’ve come up with in search of the most potent twists, so that each one believably triggers the next—meaning it’s not only physically and emotionally possible, but that it conforms to Hazel’s own brand of internal logic. And since we want our story to be as short as possible, let’s embrace that most effective of rules: the rule of threes. Why is it so powerful? Because as we know, the brain is programmed to search for patterns, and the smallest possible pattern is…three. Sheesh, even the ellipsis follows it.

But wait, there’s more—making it easier still.

If possible, each of our twists should raise the stakes, so that with each new development, Hazel has more to lose. This helps us pare down our list, weeding out possibilities that are basically the same. For instance, were Hazel to ask to postpone her presentation, be told no, and then ask to do it by Zoom, sure, the possibilities would be ticking down, but the stakes would remain the same. In other words, Zoom is a lateral move, and so unnecessary.

STORY TOOL

Each new twist should give your protagonist more to lose.

And finally, one last rule—and this one is pretty reliable because it’s how our brain is wired: we’re primed to try the easiest solution first. Which, admittedly, is usually to take a nice little nap and hope the problem is gone by the time we wake up. That is not an option open to Hazel. So, of all her options, the easiest is trying to get that Lyft. Given the insane traffic, it’s a long shot, but, hey, Lyft drivers are everywhere. It’s an easy solution, it won’t cost her a smidge of social standing or let anyone know she’s having a problem, and it’s immediate. Perfect.

TWIST ONE: Hazel tries to schedule a Lyft, but on the screen she sees there are no cars nearby. The wait is an hour. Traffic has gotten even worse. (Which makes the notion of trying to borrow a neighbor’s car—which would have been a lateral move anyway—moot.) Strike one.

We now have two more good choices that, as we already know, are parallel. She can text a coworker to see about rescheduling the presentation, or about switching to Zoom, so she can do it from home. Either would be okay. But I think rescheduling is better, because it means we’re still focused on Hazel having to get to work. And let’s see if we can find a way to up the stakes in the process, putting even more on the line.

TWIST TWO: Hazel texts her coworker, testing the waters—maybe she can postpone the presentation until the afternoon? The reply is instant, Can’t. CEO’s waiting, jerk Cuthbert is on his way, slated 2 do ur presentation if ur late, hurry! Strike two.

Notice how we got Hazel’s nemesis back into the story, really upping the stakes. Hazel pictures his smirking mug, gloating, especially if he nabs her promotion as a result, ratcheting up her determination. She has to get there first, but how?

The rule of threes to the rescue. At that moment, she sees the bike and realizes that, however unlikely, there is another option.

TWIST THREE: With nothing left to lose, she rips the bow off the bike, puts on the brand-new helmet hanging on the handlebars, opens the garage door, and wheels it out.

Wait a minute. We’re forgetting something important. Up to now, chances are, each of us has had a picture of Hazel in our head as we envisioned the scenario unfolding. Hazel, who thought she was about to hop into her SUV, drive to work, and wow them with her presentation. Okay. The question now is what is she wearing? I’m betting none of us had her in leggings, a jersey, and sneakers.

The point is, as you create your story, you’ll find moments of “uh oh!” You’ll smack your head, wailing, “I didn’t think of that. Now what?” While sometimes that “uh oh” means going back to the drawing board, if you’ve done your homework, chances are, it just means a revision.

STORY TOOL

Your “uh oh” moments are part of creating a great story. Sometimes they mean it’s time to go back to the drawing board; other times they just mean it’s time for revision.

So, leaping back into what we know about our audience, part of what’s holding them back might be conformity. The norm. Doing what is expected, rather than being who they really are. Maybe we can use Hazel’s clothes to help make that point.

I’m guessing most of us pictured Hazel in some version of a skirt and blouse, maybe even a blazer, wearing heels, her hair neatly tucked up. In other words, in don’t-rock-the-boat clothes. Maybe the reason she was stumbling to get into those heels is because she doesn’t usually wear them. Uh oh. How can she ride the bike in that outfit?

This is often how stories evolve. On the fly. So, how can we solve this problem? What if we throw in another detail—one that shows us that her “work uniform” isn’t who she really is—a sleek, black nylon messenger bag. The one with her workout clothes inside, for when she goes to the gym after work. (Then we can go back and tweak our scenario to show that, in the past, working out was one more thing she had to fit into her already exhausting day.)

Now when she glances at the bike, she takes a deep breath, steels herself, and pulls the barrette out of her hair, which falls free to her shoulders. Then she quickly pulls on her workout clothes (off screen, thank you very much) and rolls up her skirt and shirt, stashing them in her bag and beneath it all, this is the real Hazel. The person she’s been hiding beneath that patina of conformity. Wow!

Hazel wheels her bike out of the garage. Since we’re free to imagine anything right now, let’s imagine that Hazel lives on a hill, so she can look down and see the traffic, snaking toward the city. She glances at a tall building in the distance—her office building—and looks unsure, doubtful. Can she get there on time? Will she be exhausted? She’s ready to give it her all because, like James, she’s determined to get there. And like James, her mode of transportation is going to save the day.

Now the question is: Will she arrive at work exhausted or energized? I’m picturing her at first looking a little worried, holding back, but then she realizes she can zip through the cars, and off she goes.

For a second, let’s forget about how she’ll feel when she gets to work. There’s another potent emotion buried in this story—the utter thrill of speeding past road rage–inducing, standstill traffic. What commuter wouldn’t delight in this, especially given how maddeningly powerless we feel in that kind of traffic? And then maybe, just maybe, as Hazel gets near her office she speeds past a long line of cars, where up ahead a man is leaning out of his car window, screeching—a definite case of road rage—and as she zips past, yes, it’s Cuthbert! Her nemesis. Stuck in traffic.

And with that we’ve built a workable cause-and-effect trajectory, leading up to the moment when Hazel’s misbelief will hit the dust. But how, exactly? That’s what we’ll dive into in the next chapter.

CREATING YOUR STORY

First, go back over everything you know about your target audience, their misbelief, and how they see the world as it relates to your story and your call to action. This might seem unnecessary, but do it anyway. It is shockingly easy to accidentally drift back into the world of the general, which is presided over by our own belief system.

Okay, now, given the dark and stormy night the opening of your story has tossed your protagonist into, ask yourself: What options do they see? Make a list like we did for Hazel. Nothing is too far-fetched if it’s something that, given who the protagonist is, they might consider it.

Once you’ve got your list, see if you can pare it down, ridding yourself of options that are parallel, like Hazel’s choice of either calling a Lyft or borrowing a car. The goal is to find a series of escalating options—twists—that ultimately leave your protagonist no choice but to do the thing that, according to their misbelief, would never work. For Hazel, that was getting on the bike. When the story started, she believed that, yes, it might get her to work, but once there she’d be so exhausted that she’d never be able to give her presentation with the verve it takes to wow the powers that be and get that promotion.

Here are three questions that can help you zero in on the most effective twists:

- Does this twist, turn, or detail move my story toward my protagonist’s realization—that is, their “aha!” moment?

- Does my protagonist have to explore, and then reject, this possible solution in order for their decision at the end to make sense?

- Does each twist have an escalating impact on the problem my protagonist is dealing with right now, making it even harder to solve?

12

THERE’S NO PLACE LIKE “AHA”

“If you really want to escape the things that harass you, what you’re needing is not to be in a different place but to be a different person.”

—SENECA

The moment of realization is thrilling; isn’t it? Like when you realized that the cute guy in your 9th grade history class liked you back, or when you realized you were going to get the promotion over that brownnosing slacker in the next cubicle who spends all day surfing questionable websites, or when you realized that your parents really had gotten you a pony for your birthday (okay, you might have been wrong about that one).

What makes those realizations so intoxicating isn’t just the fact that your life is about to change; it’s that you figured it out yourself. It makes you feel smart and empowers you to take action because now you know—you feel—what the right thing to do is.

That’s exactly how your audience will feel when your protagonist’s “aha” moment shatters their misbelief, and they realize that they’ve had the power to solve the problem all along—like Dorothy realizing she’s had the ability to go home from the minute her house squished the Wicked Witch of the East.

But the realization by itself isn’t enough. What we come for is what the protagonist realized that gave her such blinding insight.

And as is often the case, The Wizard of Oz offers a perfect example. Dorothy spends the entire movie doing exactly what she’s told to do in order to solve her problem and get the hell outta Dodge. There are twists and turns, but she overcomes every external obstacle brilliantly, nabs the witch’s broom, and returns to the Emerald City triumphant. But that, it turns out, isn’t enough. When the bumbling wizard inadvertently heads back to Kansas alone, Dorothy is bereft. Who will help her get home now? That’s when Glinda the Good Witch wafts back into the picture and says, “You don’t need to be helped any longer. You’ve always had the power to go back to Kansas.” At which point, in my opinion, Glinda is lucky Dorothy didn’t haul off and sock her.

“I have?” she asks.

The Scarecrow has a more visceral reaction. “Then why didn’t you tell her before?” he demands.

Glinda’s reply is the whole reason for this book, and for your story: “Because,” she says, “she wouldn’t have believed me. She had to learn it for herself.”

It was not all the brave things Dorothy did that solved her problem; it was what the experience taught her that did.

That’s why for the protagonist’s realization to be believable, your audience has to understand the internal logic behind it. What they want to know is: Why did the protagonist decide that their misbelief was wrong? What opened their eyes to the truth? That’s what we’re hungry for, because that’s the sort of inside intel we can use in our own lives. And the way we get that info, as I’m fond of saying, is by seeing the penny drop.

It is at that very moment that your story makes its point. Your point. It’s not that there’s no place like home. It’s why.

Everything in your story has been driving toward this moment. To be sure that it gets there, in this chapter, we’ll first explore how to activate the four main elements of an “aha” moment so that your story doesn’t go opaque at the exact moment your audience has been waiting for. Then, at last, we’ll turn our sights from the story you’re creating to your own personal story, and the steely strength of being vulnerable.

The Anatomy of an “Aha” Moment

This is what your audience has been anticipating and trying to figure out from the beginning. They’re primed for it. That is the beauty of story. If you’d just flat out told them the point that you’re trusting your story to make—riding a bike restores energy rather than draining it; my candidate will bring us together; my toothpaste rules—chances are they’d argue. That is, if they were paying attention. But now they’re riveted, so not only are their defenses lowered, they’re wide open. They are, dare I say it, vulnerable. Beyond vulnerable even, unguarded. And here’s the scary thing: they don’t know it. That, too, is the power of story: it flies beneath the radar directly into our belief system, provided it speaks our language.

So, how do you bring your story home? There are four elements to an effective “aha” moment:

- It must come at the last possible minute.

- It must belong to the protagonist rather than someone else in the story.

- It must be transparent, so the audience understands the evolving logic—the inner struggle—behind it.

- It must be liberating—the protagonist is freed from the misbelief that has held them back and can now solve the problem.

Sticking with The Wizard of Oz, let’s follow the yellow brick road and take each element one by one. First, the setup:

What does Dorothy enter the story wanting? She wants to be treated fairly—that is, she wants justice. And so when Miss Gulch threatens to have Dorothy’s beloved dog, Toto, put down for no real reason—talk about unfair—Dorothy feels she has only one option: take Toto and flee.

THE MISBELIEF: When things go wrong, your best option is to run away and start over somewhere else, hopefully in that place on the other side of the rainbow where troubles just melt away. (As if, right?)

The problem is, wherever you go, there you are—meaning, like your target audience, Dorothy has brought her problem, and her belief system, right along with her. Troubles never just melt away, and ignoring them only lets them grow bigger, in the dark, unattended. The story is going to force Dorothy to test her assumption: Is running away the best option? Because in the things-go-from-bad-to-worse category, now she’s stuck in Oz, so she can’t just decide she made a mistake and slink back home. Instead, she is going to find out what her misbelief has cost her.

While Dorothy’s external goal is to go home, her real problem is that she doesn’t believe she has the power to solve her problem, so instead of standing up for what she believes in, she runs. Not because she’s weak or lacks courage, but because that’s what, up to that moment, life has taught her the right course of action is. But on the road to the Wicked Witch’s castle in the hopes of solving her external problem, by helping her new friends muster the courage to stand up to bullies and fight for what’s fair, Dorothy discovers her own inner strength, and the antidote to that misbelief.

THE TRUTH: Running away doesn’t solve anything, but if you’re willing to stand up for what you believe, you have a shot at changing things.

THE REALIZATION: What I’m looking for has always been right there in my own backyard, because there’s no place like home!

THE TRANSFORMATION: She now has the power to go home and the strength to fight for what she believes when she gets there.

Now let’s break down that “aha” moment, element by element:

1. The first element is the easiest, because it’s logistical: get the timing wrong and nothing else matters. The “aha” moment comes as close to the end of the story as possible, a split second before all would be irrevocably lost. That’s sure true of Dorothy, because even after she did everything she was supposed to, her ride took off without her, never to return. She’s at the genuine now-or-never moment, one so much more challenging than just swiping the witch’s broom. She’s exhausted every other possibility, upping the tension, forcing her to dig deeper than she thought possible. We’re on the edge of our seat, Oh no. How will she get home now?

The timing of your story’s “aha” moment is even more crucial than Dorothy’s, because once your audience sees the light, you want to give them the space to savor it. If you instead dive into something new, it’s not long before, as B. B. King lamented, the thrill is gone. The point is: you don’t want anything to divert the audience’s attention from what they’ve just discovered. This is the moment when your protagonist’s realization becomes theirs, sinking into their worldview. So that they—like your protagonist—can then take action.

Which is why…

2. The “aha” moment always belongs to the protagonist. The protagonist is your audience’s avatar in the story; the person they’re rooting for as they viscerally experience what the protagonist is experiencing. They don’t want the protagonist to be saved by someone else. They want her to do it herself; they’ve felt her pain, and now they want to experience her moment of triumph. That’s why no one can step in and solve the problem for her—not her mom, not her boss, not even Glinda the Good Witch. But it goes even deeper…

3. The “aha” moment must be transparent. Your protagonist’s realization is meaningless unless you reveal the logic that backs it up, because that’s what we came for: a clear view of the moment when your protagonist realizes why their misbelief was wrong and embraces the truth. It’s the moment when that brave soul realized that staying at Motel 6 was smart because it meant there would be money to buy the grandkids a toy; it was the moment when the teenage girl realized that “like a girl” was an insult because it meant boys thought they were better than girls; it was the moment Jaime Harrison realized that voters wouldn’t believe what any politician promised because not one of them had paved their old dirt road.

STORY TOOL

Your protagonist’s “aha” moment is meaningless unless you reveal the logic behind it.

It’s not simply that the protagonist realized that staying at Motel 6 is good, “like a girl” is bad, and voters want to have their needs met. What matters is the “because”—it’s what lets us know what those realizations mean. In other words, the “why” behind them. It’s that realization that allows the protagonist to solve the problem, which makes it…

4. Liberating! The “aha” moment sets your protagonist free from the misbelief that’s been holding them back from the get go. It’s incredibly empowering to realize that what they thought had power over them—whether an idea, a person, or a belief—does not, and with it comes the realization that the change they’re about to make is truer to their authentic self. And because your audience has identified with your protagonist, they feel it, too.

The answer Dorothy was looking for was right there in her own backyard, but she couldn’t see it. To find it she, like your audience, had to be shoved out of her normal routine, her comfort zone, in order to gain the perspective necessary to see through her misbelief. Dorothy’s “aha” moment—indeed, all “aha” moments—are perfectly summarized by Proust’s keen, if paraphrased, observation that “the only true voyage of discovery consists not in seeking new landscapes, but in having new eyes.”

Which doesn’t mean that, at the beginning, the urge to completely sidestep the problem isn’t insanely tempting. That’s why we often spend way too much time searching for an easy way out, which, of course, only makes things worse.

That’s what Hazel did. She tried to get a Lyft. It didn’t work. She still had to face the problem. She tried to postpone her presentation. It didn’t work. She still had to face the problem, which was escalating—time was running out, and worse, Cuthbert was on his way, putting even more on the line. Until she had no choice: she had to get on the damn bike. She couldn’t think about it. She couldn’t weigh options, because there were none left. There was only the bike.

Our story will force Hazel to do something she never would have attempted on a totally normal day. And back then (meaning, yesterday), the only negative consequence of arriving at work exhausted—the fear that kept her from riding her bike to the office—would have been that she needed a quick nap at lunch. Today her entire career depends on getting to work on time, energized, alert, and on top of her game.

But here’s the kicker: the story isn’t about whether Hazel gives a great presentation or gets that promotion. It’s about her having the courage to be who she really is inside, instead of who society expects her to be.

What is her “aha” moment? It’s nothing short of the realization that she has the power to commandeer her destiny. Choosing not to conform might actually help her succeed, by changing her definition of what success looks like. But she has to earn that realization.

So as we flesh out our story, adding more salient details, perhaps at first Hazel is tentative on that bike. Maybe she pulls into the flow of traffic behind a line of lumbering cars, going so slow that she might as well walk to work. Maybe, her expression says, all is lost. Hopeless, she glances to the right, and as she stares at the side of the road, it hits her: it’s narrow, but it’s wide open. Without thinking, she steers toward the shoulder, and…flies.

Faster and faster—that’s when she sees the alley to zip through, the park to ride through, the narrow streets the cars avoid. She’s found her own path. And we see it register on her face. It’s no longer about getting to work on time. It’s about enjoying the ride, the journey—the thrill of being fully present and in the moment.

When does the penny drop? If she doesn’t say anything—and as yet she hasn’t—how will we see that internal logic? Does she have to speak up? Do we need a voiceover so we know what she’s thinking? Nope. In our story, we’ve watched her thinking evolve through her changing facial expressions, going from fear (can I do this?) to outright exhilaration (yes, yes I can), and in her body language as she becomes one with the bike, our bike. Because, after all, we are selling the bike.

But what she’s realizing isn’t only that the bike will get her to work on time, refreshed and raring to go, thus solving her external problem. Her deeper realization is internal. It’s that the ride has opened the door to who she really is, and she’s sailing right through it. (Geez, now I want to go out and buy a bike.)

Which means the story might end in one of two ways:

OPTION 1: Hazel coasts up to her office building, leaps off the bike, takes off her helmet, shakes her hair out, and strides purposefully inside.

OPTION 2: Hazel rides toward the building and…speeds right by, because, really, that corporate job was never for her anyway, and the promotion would only have tied her to it. Cuthbert can have it; she’s off to bigger and better things.

Notice that in neither scenario did we find out how the presentation went, or who got the promotion. Because, really, who cares? To go further would have diluted, and ultimately overridden, the feelings we want to leave our audience with: hope, possibility, and liberation.

But which ending is better? The answer depends on the same thing that’s driven every single aspect of our story: our target audience’s worldview.

If they’re business people whose goal is to climb the corporate ladder all the way to a C-suite, then the first ending is perfect. But if the audience is made up of people who feel too confined by their desk job and are longing for a bit of freedom, then the second option would be far more inspiring. Who knows? It might even end with Hazel tossing her messenger bag—the one with her work clothes—into a nearby dumpster as she speeds toward the horizon.

So, do we have any loose ends? Just one. That big, saggy, unexplained bow on the bike. We can’t get rid of it, because it was there for two important reasons: first, so that she has our bike on hand to save the day; second, to let us know that she didn’t choose it, or any bike, and that she’s never ridden it, even once. But do we really need to explain who gave it to her, or why, not to mention the fight that might have ensued because she wasn’t thrilled at the gift, or the fact that she’s now realized that said gift giver might have had a point after all? The answer, happily, is no. There are small things you can leave unexplained (that is, get away with) in a story, if your audience can supply a believable reason themselves. This is one of those cases.

STORY TOOL

There are small things you can leave unexplained in a story if your audience can supply a believable reason themselves.

So would Hazel’s story sell bikes to our designated target audience, those urban commuters, tired of spending hours stuck in traffic every day? I think so, but I don’t know. Not because I don’t have total faith in it. But because you never know what the future will hold, or what other people might read into it, which at the moment, none of us have even thought of. Which is something that the powers that be in South Dakota should have spent a lot more time considering before they decided on their anti-drug tagline: “Meth. We’re on it.”

Thus it’s comforting to believe that there are other ways to persuade, convince, and inspire that are more reliable than story. Especially since story is not quantifiable the way data is, it’s not safe like math, it’s not surface like a simple declarative sentence. Story is scary because it evokes the thing we’ve been taught to be afraid of: emotion. And scary because to wield the power of story, we have to allow ourselves to poke around in the most frightening place of all: the unknown. Instead of giving someone the facts—which already exist, for heaven’s sake—we have to create a story. And to do that, we have to embrace vulnerability because creating a story, and then trusting that it will work, exposes us not only to the possibility of failure but also to the possibility that our story might expose things about us, which is even scarier.

As Tor Myhren, former chief creative officer at Grey New York, the shop that created the E*Trade campaign, confessed, “When we first created the baby, we had no idea if it was the dumbest thing we’d ever done or if it was genius. I was terrified.” Because up until the moment it was unveiled, that talking baby absolutely could have been the dumbest thing anyone had ever done, short of searching the whole entire house for your glasses when you’re wearing them (I’m not the only one, right?). The point is, it’s easy to say something was worth the risk once you have a positive outcome. The catch is that you have to take the risk at the point when it really could blow up in your face. That’s where grit comes in. And the grit comes first.

Grit means taking a chance with your story and standing up for what you believe in, even when it might cost you big time. Especially then. Sometimes, it can lead to success beyond your wildest dreams. Want an example?

CASE STUDY: LYNDA.COM

Lynda.com, according to the Harvard Business School Digital Initiative, was the catalyst for many of the digital innovations of its time. Its co-founder, Lynda Weinman, has been called the “mother of the internet.” In 2015 LinkedIn Learning bought Lynda.com for 1.5 billion dollars. But all that is in hindsight now.

Back in 1995, Lynda was a professor at ArtCenter College of Design in Pasadena, California, teaching a subject that was utterly new: graphic web design. Her students, who were artists, not techies, were understandably intimidated by the nascent technology, which few understood at the time. Sensing that this new technology would be the key to their future, and that presenting it in a traditional way would intimidate them even more, perhaps shutting them down entirely, Lynda approached teaching computer skills differently than everyone else. She made it easy to understand by breaking it down into clear, accessible bites, avoiding high-tech lingo and taming a subject that otherwise seemed impenetrable.

Hoping to find a textbook geared to her audience, she went to a local bookstore, but the only thing she found were manuals so dense in technical jargon it was like reading a foreign language. Filled with nothing but facts, they were written for coders and programmers, by engineers and computer scientists, people, who—like those scientists at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA)—understood the significance of the facts and assumed that everyone else did, too.

So she decided to write the book herself. Says Lynda, “I was trying to reach the audience that I taught, which was an art school audience, and I wasn’t thinking much broader than that.” That was the audience she knew inside and out, and she knew what she was good at: humanizing technical info, making it accessible to people who don’t already live and breathe it. That was the benefit she offered. It was also her passion, it was what she lived and breathed—an expression of her most authentic self.

The book she wrote was absolutely nothing like the technical manuals already available. “I wanted to write in a really friendly way,” she said, “in the first person, and to tell stories of my students, and just sort of be the kind of friendly teacher that I had created my success upon.”

She sold the book, even convincing the publisher, who up until then had published nothing but ultra-technical books in drab black and white, to use color graphics throughout, even though it would significantly raise the book’s price. It seemed like a perfect fit. “So I sent off my manuscript,” says Lynda. “It took three or four months before I got a phone call, ‘Oh we’ve edited your manuscript. We’re going to send it to you; please review it and read it for errors.’ They sent it, I started reading it, and I saw that they had taken it out of first person, and they had made it more formal, like their other books. They had completely stripped the soul out of it. It was unrecognizable as my work, and I just started crying as I was reading it.”

The publisher, who clearly knew nothing about the book’s target audience, had rewritten it so it followed their party line. They did what felt safe to them, thus telling a story that only they could hear.

Lynda had a choice to make. They were the publisher. They had the power to bring her book to market. She did not.

Heartbroken, she called a writer friend, who told her that there was probably a clause in her contract saying that if the publisher rejected her manuscript and she returned the advance she’d been given, she could get the rights back. She reread her contract, and, sure enough, the clause was there.

But to exercise it felt like failure. Lynda was not famous, she had no audience beyond the hundred or so students she taught each year at ArtCenter College of Design. She was completely vulnerable. She agonized over the weekend, and then, she says, “On Monday morning, I summoned all my courage, and I called and I said ‘I consider this a rejection of my work. I won’t put my name to it, I’m devastated by what you’ve done, I’ve been in tears all weekend, and I’d like to just let you know that I’m going to exercise that clause.’ ”

At that moment, all was lost. Except her belief in her story, her belief in what her audience needed, and her belief in the benefit she could bestow. She’d done the research. She knew.

The story could have ended right here. As far as she knew, it very well might have. And that’s the point. It was incredibly hard to take the kind of risk she did. It can be excruciating to stand up for what you believe in your heart is right. It takes grit.

Lynda’s liaison at the publishing company came through. He told her that he’d tried to explain to his department that this was a different kind of book, and that they needed to handle it differently. They hadn’t listened. Because change is hard. The editorial staff saw something that was different than what they were used to, and instead of embracing the difference, or even seeing the value in it, they assumed it was a mistake and remade it in their image. When, ironically, the whole point was that the type of book they’d published up to then would not work for this new audience.

Lynda’s liaison assured her that they’d put the manuscript back into her voice. They did, and the book, Designing Web Graphics, was published in 1996 in the format in which she’d submitted it. It took a little while to catch on. It was six months before the publisher realized that it had sold out everywhere, and that people were asking for it. To the world, however, it was an overnight sensation. Says Fast Company, “Considered by many to be the first industry book of its kind, Designing Web Graphics was instantly popular—used as a reference by readers around the world looking for a nontechnical guide to web design.”

Ultimately it sold over a million copies and was translated into more than twelve languages, making it one of the most successful books in the company’s history. It catapulted Lynda’s career, and her teaching methods, into national recognition. She went from influencing, as she put it, maybe a hundred students a year, to millions.

Lynda was the protagonist in her own story, just as you will be in yours. It’s not surprising that her “aha” moment follows the template we’ve just laid out. Why? Because story—and all the elements of story—is a mirror of human psychology, an X-ray of how we make decisions, a visceral portrait of life itself.

Lynda’s “aha” moment breaks down accordingly:

1. It came at a crucial now-or-never moment, spurred by a problem she had no choice but to deal with.

2. It forced her—and her alone—to take action in order to solve the problem.

3. She realized that because her publisher had changed her manuscript so fundamentally, it no longer spoke her target audience’s language. What’s more, they’d flattened her voice, just as those 60 Minutes producers wanted to flatten Oprah’s. They’d stripped it of what made it compelling: a passion for the human side of teaching, rife with the joy of actually reaching people, rather than simply giving them raw data. And due to that realization, Lynda made the hard call.

4. It was liberating, because it gave her back the power they’d taken from her, and it put her in control of her own message. But that didn’t make it easy. Nothing worth doing ever is.

And therein lies the irony: Having the grit to allow yourself to stand up for what you believe in—which makes you feel vulnerable—is also what gives you power. Lynda knew what her audience wanted. And she was willing to bank on the fact that she’d given it to them. Her story reveals the power of trusting yourself before there is any proof that it will turn out okay in the end. Because, in truth, it might not.

And if the publisher had given her the rights to her book back, what then? Knowing Lynda, she would have found another way to get it to her audience.

And, should you find yourself in a similar position, so will you.

CREATING YOUR STORY

To make sure your protagonist’s “aha” moment is powerful enough to inspire your audience to action, these four conditions must be met:

1. TIMING. The “aha” moment must come at the very last second, and not a moment sooner. It happens in the split second before all would be irrevocably lost.

ASK YOURSELF: Did I put my protagonist’s feet to the fire? Is the protagonist really one second away from failure before realizing how to solve the problem?

2. AGENCY. The protagonist must be the one who saves the day.

ASK YOURSELF: Does my protagonist do all the heavy lifting?

3. TRANSPARENCY. The audience needs to see the why behind the protagonist’s sudden change of heart. That is, they need to see the penny drop—it’s not just that the protagonist now sees things differently; it’s why.

ASK YOURSELF: Is my protagonist’s “aha” moment transparent? Does the audience understand the reasoning behind the sudden realization?

4. LIBERATION! The “aha” moment is what sets the protagonist free from the misbelief that has been holding them back all along.

ASK YOURSELF: Does this realization allow the protagonist to be more true to him/her/themself, more authentic?

13

AN “AHA” MOMENT OF YOUR OWN

“Ninety percent of leadership is the ability to communicate something people want.”

—DIANNE FEINSTEIN, US SENATOR

As a kid, I loved watching Rocky and Bullwinkle, and there was one running gag that stuck with me. Just as Rocky is about to introduce a new cartoon, Bullwinkle stops him, “Hey, Rocky, watch me pull a rabbit out of my hat!”

“Again?” Rocky asks, exasperated, knowing damn well he doesn’t have a choice. Bullwinkle dramatically rips off the sleeve of his tux, “Nothing up my sleeve,” he says, then, wiggling his fingers over a top hat, yells “Presto!” And proceeds to pull out a very angry rhino. Quickly shoving it back inside he says, “Ohhh, don’t know my own strength!”

Same with the power of story. Now that you know how to wield it, yes, revel in your prowess but never forget how incredibly potent and far reaching it is. Because as Peter Parker (not Voltaire) pointed out, with great power comes great responsibility.

Since story evolved specifically to help us make sense of the world, the very elements that draw us into a story—embedding that story’s reality into our own—make it maddeningly easy for falsehoods to catch fire.

We have a predilection for going after the bright shiny thing that’s caught our attention. And because falsehoods tend to be more novel than the truth—Martians have landed in New Jersey (War of the Worlds, 1938); Hillary Clinton is running a pedophilia ring out of a DC pizzeria (Pizzagate, 2016)—they get way more attention than the boring old truth. Not because we’re fickle, gullible, or easily distracted, but because when we evolved, our survival system was set on high alert. Back then, anything out of the ordinary really might have heralded imminent danger, so the stranger it was, the more primed we were to notice it. And not only to notice it—the better to make informed decisions about what to do next—but also to pass it on eagerly. After all, possessing such valuable inside info gives us a nifty boost in social status.

We passed it on through, yep, story. Because from then to now, story is the one tool we have to make sense of all incoming info.

That’s why it’s never been more imperative that we understand how story works, not only so that we can persuade and convince, but so that we can be aware of when story is being used to convince us of something that, if we thought about it, we’d run from. Because it’s quite easy to use story to hack our brain’s hardwiring and manipulate us into believing things that are false, causing us to fight against the truth as though our lives depended on it. As I write this, that dynamic is at the heart of the polarized times we find ourselves in.

The cost of our original neural wiring—the wiring that enabled us to band together in small tribes—is that it also renders us less likely to imagine, and so empathize with, what other tribes believe. Spend any time on Twitter, and you’ll see people trying to persuade the other side using facts that they think are convincing. In many cases, we don’t even want to convince or be convinced; we just want to be supported by people who already agree (full disclosure: definitely guilty). Preaching to the choir is indeed comforting, but it can also make it difficult to find consensus, compromise, and compassion, not to mention fresh insights we can use in our own lives.

So are stories dangerous? They can be, absolutely.

Does that mean that after all this, we should eschew them and turn back to good old facts? Nope, it’s not even an option. Because no matter how much info, how much data, how many facts are thrown at us, our brain is still going to translate them into story to figure out what they mean, and if we should care.

That means those who don’t learn how to harness story will fall victim to it. They’ll cede their power to others—in more ways than one. But in this book, you’ve learned that the secret to telling a persuasive story is understanding your audience. You know how to do that now, and that’s your greatest power.

STORY TOOL

Those who don’t learn to harness story will fall victim to it.

That power means you have the ability to do something insanely hard and incredibly potent—step out of your own shoes and into those of your audience. You can see the world through their eyes. And so rather than inadvertently judging them from your point of view (a default setting we all have), you can understand them from theirs. That doesn’t just help when creating a story, it allows you to both identify—and genuinely empathize with—why everyone in your life does what they do. Including yourself.

And that brings us to emotion. For me, the most important point in this book, the most liberating truth of all, is that emotion is not to be feared, overcome, or shoved aside. Emotion is who we are, and it’s to be embraced—because it’s embracing us, every minute of every day. Everything we believe, know, and understand is encoded in emotion. It drives every decision and every change we make.

That’s where story comes in. Because as we know, in order to convince anyone of anything, the question is not simply what emotion they are feeling, it’s why. And the why is learned either through experience or, vicariously, through story.

Whether purposefully or not, stories change us every day, whether we’re aware of it or not. Often, we’re not.

But some stories are nothing but fluff, right? You know, mindless entertainment. Take action movies like Delta Force, or frivolous comedies like Ghostbusters, or (delightful) romantic flicks like Dirty Dancing. They’re fun, sure, but they could never have a significant consequence out here in the real world. Like, say, helping a nation topple a ruthless dictator. Could they?

In the 1980s, Romania’s secret police didn’t think so.

It does sound absurd to think that Hollywood blockbusters could have played a role in the fall of what was believed to be the most rigidly Stalinist regime in the Soviet bloc, the 1989 Romanian Revolution that ousted Nicolae Ceaușescu’s.

If you’re as history-challenged as I am (which, I admit, would be difficult), here’s a bit of helpful background by Jonathan Crow writing in Open Culture: “Nicolae Ceaușescu’s regime was notoriously brutal and oppressive, even by Warsaw Pact standards. In his mad efforts to eradicate all foreign debt, he impoverished his people while building a massive, opulent palace for himself in the heart of Bucharest. He shut down all radio stations outside of the capital and restricted all television broadcasts to a mere two hours a day. And what was programmed was, by all accounts, pretty dull unless you’re a fan of Communist propaganda.”

And so people’s hunger for stories grew.

Until, against all odds, one man, Teodor Zamfir, began to smuggle American movies into the country and hired a woman to translate them in a secret soundproof room hidden in his house. Her name was Irina Nistor.

Zamfir then made bootleg VHS copies and distributed the films via a covert drug dealer–style network to those who had VCRs—machines that were illegal and cost as much as a car. By 1989, Nistor had singlehandedly translated more than 3,000 movies; by one estimate there were 10,000 VCRs in Romania.

Whole families, neighborhoods, crowded around grainy black-and-white TV sets from dusk till dawn watching Rocky and Rambo and The Thorn Birds and Delta Force and The Karate Kid over and over.

Here are some of them talking about how those films affected them: “It was a window into the West from which I could see what the free world was like.”

“After the film ended, the street wasn’t just a street, a rock not just a rock, they were challenges…we started to want to be heroes.”

“The seeds of freedom planted by the films grew.”

The films didn’t make an intellectual argument, or tell them about life in the West. The films didn’t give facts, figures, or data. The films gave them the specific, vicarious experience of what freedom felt like. They touched everyone.

Because here’s the thing. The secret police knew what Zamfir was doing. They watched the films themselves. Irina’s day job was translating for the government, and every evening when she left work, the secret police officer assigned to their department followed her into the elevator and said under his breath, “I heard you last night.”

The secret police, the members of the Central Committee, were just as enthralled as everyone else. Zamfir even claims to have supplied videotapes to Ceaușescu’s son.

While the regime officially censored just about everything for ideological reasons, it never seemed to occur to them that, uncensored, the films had the power to spark real change in the people who watched them—change that would lead to action. Big mistake.

Zamfir says, “During a dictatorship which had controlled everything, they lost control of something that seemed insignificant, the videotape. The videotapes set the whole communist system off balance…During the 1989 revolution, everybody was in the streets because they all knew there was a better life out there. How? From films.”

As Nistor so eloquently noted, “People need stories, no?”

We do. All of us. Stories aren’t merely for entertainment. Stories are entertaining so that we’ll pay attention to them. It’s not a choice. When a story has us under its spell, it’s hacked our brain, whether we’re aware of it or not. When the story ends, we emerge changed. And then we go out, and we change the world.

That is the power you now possess. Use it wisely.

Notes

Introduction

“WTF IS THIS NEW ‘WALK FOREVER TO THE TAXI STAND’…”: Emily Nussbaum, Twitter post, October 20, 2019, 9:35 p.m., https://twitter.com/emilynussbaum/status/1186138913133551616.

“ONLY 40 PERCENT OF PEOPLE HAVE CHECKED THE ‘ORGAN DONOR’ BOX ON THEIR DRIVER’S LICENSES…”: Andy Goodman, “Stories That Cause a Change of Heart (Literally),” Free-Range Thinking, December 2015, 1–2.

“THE QUESTION WAS: WHAT—SPECIFICALLY—WERE BRAZILIANS UTTERLY, MADLY PASSIONATE ABOUT?…”: Luca Bertocci, “Which Business Are We Really in?: The Immortal Fans Campaign,” LinkedIn, January 17, 2017, https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/which-business-we-really-luca-bertocci.

“AND SO THE ‘IMMORTAL FANS’ CAMPAIGN WAS BORN…”: Sport Club Recife: Immortal Fans, YouTube video, 3:15, May 3, 2013, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kzmGExc1pfw (accessed 6/20/20).

“SPORT RECIFE FANS WANT TO BE FANS FOREVER—NOW THEY CAN…”: Andrew Soergel, “Thousands of Brazilian Soccer Supporters Become ‘Immortal Fans’,” U.S. News and World Reports, June 3, 2014, https://www.usnews.com/news/newsgram/articles/2014/06/03/thousands-of-brazilian-soccer-supporters-become-immortal-fans.

“BY THE NEXT YEAR MORE THAN 66,000 CARDS HAD BEEN GIVEN OUT…”: Julia Carneiro, “How Thousands of Football Fans Are Helping Save Lives,” BBC News, June 1, 2014, https://www.bbc.com/news/magazine-27632527.

“BECAUSE STORY ISN’T A WAY TO ENGAGE, PERSUADE, AND INSPIRE OTHERS; IT’S THE WAY.”: Antonio Damasio, Self Comes to Mind: Constructing the Conscious Brain (New York: Pantheon, 2010), 293.

“WHAT I DISCOVERED WAS THE SCIENCE BEHIND WHY STORY IS BUILT INTO THE ARCHITECTURE OF THE BRAIN.”: Michael Gazzaniga, Human: The Science Behind What Makes Your Brain Unique (New York: Harper Perennial, 2008), 301–2.

Chapter 1

“CONSCIOUSNESS BEGINS WHEN BRAINS GAIN THE POWER…”: Antonio Damasio, The Feeling of What Happens: Body and Emotion in the Making of Consciousness (New York: Mariner Books, October 2000), 30.

“IN MY THREE MONTHS AS A SENATOR, I HAVE ALREADY SEEN…”: Cory Booker, “Cory Booker: Building on the Success of the War on Poverty: The Government’s Half-Century of Effort Has Slashed Poverty Rates. It’s Time To Strengthen and Scale up What Works,” Wall Street Journal, January 24, 2014, https://www.wsj.com/articles/cory-booker-building-on-the-success-of-the-war-on-poverty-1390608039.

“ONE DAY AT PULASKI HIGH SCHOOL IN MILWAUKEE, A FIGHT BROKE OUT…”: Paul Ryan, “Paul Ryan: A New Direction in the War on Poverty: It’s Time for a New Approach, Says Paul Ryan,” Wall Street Journal, January 24, 2014, https://www.wsj.com/articles/paul-ryan-a-new-direction-in-the-war-on-poverty-1390607947.

“THROW FACTS AT US, WE DUCK. PERSONIFY THOSE SAME FACTS IN A STORY…”: Paul J. Zak, “Why Inspiring Stories Make Us React: The Neuroscience of Narrative” Cerebrum, February 2, 2015, https://www.dana.org/article/why-inspiring-stories-make-us-react-the-neuroscience-of-narrative.

“WE ARE TWENTY-TWO TIMES MORE LIKELY TO REMEMBER SOMETHING WE LEARNED IN A STORY…”: Jennifer Aaker, “Harnessing the Power of Stories” YouTube Video, 8:36, March 13, 2013, https://womensleadership.stanford.edu/stories (accessed 6/27/2020).

“THAT NUMBER, AS I POINTED OUT IN MY FIRST BOOK, WIRED FOR STORY…”: Timothy D. Wilson, Strangers to Ourselves: Discovering the Adaptive Unconscious (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2002), 24.

“OR IF YOU HAD TO CONSCIOUSLY OVERSEE EVERY DECISION YOU MAKE EVERY DAY…”: Lisa A. Schwartz and Lucas Cuadros, “The Effects of the Environment on Decision-Making,” Journal of Financial Education 43, no. 2 (2017): 223–34, https://www.jstor.org/stable/26573523 (accessed June 20, 2020).

“ONLY ABOUT SEVENTY OF THEM REQUIRE OUR CONSCIOUS DELIBERATION.”: Sheena Iyengar, “How to Make Choosing Easier,” TedSalon NY, 2011, 00:03, https://www.ted.com/talks/sheena_iyengar_how_to_make_choosing_easier/transcript (accessed 6/20/20).

“226 ON FOOD ALONE.”: Brian Wansink and Jeffery Sobal, “Mindless Eating: The 200 Daily Food Decisions We Overlook,” Environment and Behavior, January 1, 2007, https://doi.org/10.1177/0013916506295573.

“OUR BRAIN HAS THE CAPACITY TO BE TANGENTIALLY AWARE…”: Wilson, Strangers to Ourselves, 24.

“WHEN IT COMES TO ACTUALLY FOCUSING ON THEM…”: Clara Moskowitz, “Mind’s Limit Found: 4 Things at Once” LiveScience, April 28, 2008, https://www.livescience.com/2493-mind-limit-4.html.

“YOUR BRAIN IS A MERE 2 PERCENT OF YOUR BODY WEIGHT…”: Yuval Noah Harari, Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind (New York: Harper Perennial, 2015), 9.

“NEUROSCIENCE HAS DISCOVERED THAT OUR COGNITIVE UNCONSCIOUS…”: Damasio, Self Comes to Mind, 275.

“OUR SURVIVAL IS A MISSION OUR COGNITIVE UNCONSCIOUS NEVER DEVIATES FROM…”: Gazzaniga, Human, 226.

“INSTEAD, WE BELIEVE THAT WE’RE SEEING THINGS ‘OBJECTIVELY’…”: Benjamin K. Bergen, Louder Than Words: The New Science on How the Mind Makes Meaning (New York: Basic Books, 2012), 19.

“HOW’S THE WATER?”: David Foster Wallace, “This is Water: Full-Version David Foster Wallace Commencement Speech,” YouTube Video, 22:43, May 9, 2013, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8CrOL-ydFMI (accessed 6/27/20).

“INSTEAD, THAT POWER HAS BEEN HIDING IN PLAIN SIGHT…”: Brian Boyd, On the Origin of Stories: Evolution, Cognition, and Fiction (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University, 2009), 19.

“THAT FEELING IS A SURGE OF THE NEUROTRANSMITTER DOPAMINE…”: Read Montague, Your Brain Is (Almost) Perfect: How We Make Decisions (New York: Plume, 2007), 111.

“STORY INSTANTLY ACTIVATES TWO OTHER NEUROTRANSMITTERS: CORTISOL…”: Zak, “Why Inspiring Stories Make Us React.”

“BECAUSE WITHOUT A CLOSE-KNIT SOCIAL WORLD—A TRIBE—WE WOULD STILL…”: Harari, Sapiens, 10–12.

“MOST OF US HAVE BEEN TAUGHT THAT OUR BIG BRAINS EVOLVED TO ENABLE US…”: Matthew D. Lieberman, Social: Why Our Brains Are Wired to Connect (New York: Crown, 2013), 28.

“EVOLUTION THUS FAVORED THOSE CAPABLE OF FORMING STRONG SOCIAL TIES.”: Harari, Sapiens, 10.

“WE ARE SOCIAL TO THE CORE…”: Gazzaniga, Human, 83.

“DIDN’T EXCEED 150 PEOPLE, EVEN ON HOLIDAYS.”: Robin I. M. Dunbar, Grooming, Gossip and the Evolution of Language (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1997), 77.

“IN FACT, WHILE WE’VE GIVEN GOSSIP A NEGATIVE RAP, SCIENTISTS BELIEVE IT…”: Harari, Sapiens, 22–23.

“THE SIGNIFICANCE OF SOCIAL PAIN GOES BACK TO EVOLUTION…”: Elitsa Dermendzhiyska, “Rejection Kills” Psyche: A New Magazine from Aeon, April 30, 2019, https://aeon.co/essays/health-warning-social-rejection-doesnt-only-hurt-it-kills.

Chapter 2

“EVERY DECISION IS FUNNELED THROUGH THE APPROACH-OR-WITHDRAW MODE…”: Gazzaniga, Human, 226.

“ATTENTION IS A SCARCE NEURAL RESOURCE BECAUSE IT IS METABOLICALLY COSTLY TO A BRAIN…”: Zak, “Why Inspiring Stories Make Us React.”

“EVEN WHEN YOU TRY TO PAY ATTENTION TO SOMETHING THAT FEELS TOTALLY IRRELEVANT…”: Gazzaniga, Human, 286.

“CARBON DIOXIDE WILL INCREASE, REACHING LEVELS OF 717 PPM…”: Science On a Sphere, National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, “Earth System Climate Change,” (click on link for “script”), https://sos.noaa.gov/datasets/earth-system-climate-change/ (accessed 6/26/20).

“PEOPLE TEND TO THINK THAT OTHERS KNOW AND BELIEVE WHAT THEY KNOW…”: Gazzaniga, Human, 190.

“ASSUME THAT OTHERS WILL DEFINE SITUATIONS AS WE DO.”: Elizabeth Louise Newton, “The Rocky Road from Actions to Intentions” (PhD dissertation, Stanford University, 1990), 34.

“YOUR AUDIENCE, MEANWHILE, IS NOT PRIVY TO YOUR MENTAL PERFORMANCE.”: Newton, “The Rocky Road from Actions to Intentions” 36.

“NOT BECAUSE WE’RE THICK HEADED OR ORNERY, BUT BECAUSE EONS…”: Damasio, Self Comes to Mind, 55–56.

“TURNS OUT NEARLY ALL THE MEANING WE READ INTO THINGS ISN’T BUILT INTO OUR BRAIN A PRIORI…”: Benjamin K. Bergen, Louder Than Words: The New Science of How the Mind Makes Meaning (New York: Basic Books, 2012), 19.

“THE GENERALLY ACCEPTED RULE IS PINK FOR THE BOYS, AND BLUE FOR THE GIRLS.”: Jeanne Maglaty, “When Did Girls Start Wearing Pink?” Smithsonian Magazine, April 7, 2011, https://www.smithsonianmag.com/arts-culture/when-did-girls-start-wearing-pink-1370097.

“IT WASN’T UNTIL THE 1940S AND 1950S THAT THE ‘STORY’ BEHIND THE COLORS COMPLETELY REVERSED.”: Jo B. Paoletti, Pink and Blue: Telling the Boys from the Girls in America, (Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 2012), 89.

“AS IT TURNS OUT, WHILE WE ADORE DATA…”: Tali Sharot, The Influential Mind: What the Brain Reveals About Our Power to Change Others (New York: Picador, Reprint 2018), 14–15.

“BACK WHEN NATURE REWIRED OUR BRAIN ABOUT 100,000 YEARS AGO…”: Harari, Sapiens, 20–28.

“BECAUSE THE STRATEGIC INFO THAT EXPERIENCE TAUGHT US WAS SO RELIABLE AND UNCHANGING…”: Steven Pinker, How the Mind Works (New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 1997/2009), 207.

“THERE’S ONE THING WE CAN’T CHANGE QUICKLY: OUR NEURAL WIRING.”: Harari, Sapiens, 38.

“INDIVIDUALS ARE FORCED TO CONSIDER MORE INFORMATION AND OPPORTUNITIES…”: Francis Heylighen, “Complexity and Information Overload in Society: Why Increasing Efficiency Leads to Decreasing Control,” The Information Society, 2002. https://www.researchgate.net/publication/249875564_Complexity_and_Information_Overload_in_Society_why_increasing_efficiency_leads_to_decreasing_control.

“WE’RE WIRED TO INSTANTLY RESIST THOSE FACTS—OFTEN AS IF OUR LIFE DEPENDED ON IT.”: George M. Salvich, et al, “Alleviating Social Pain: A Double-Blind, Randomized, Placebo-Controlled Trial of Forgiveness and Acetaminophen” Annals of Behavioral Medicine 53, issue 12 (December 2019): 1045–54, https://doi.org/10.1093/abm/kaz015.

“DON’T PUT OFF UNTIL TOMORROW SOMETHING YOU CAN DO THE DAY AFTER TOMORROW.”: Mark Twain, “Memoranda, The Late Benjamin Franklin,” Galaxy, July, 1870, 138.

“ANTONIO DAMASIO CALLS ‘SOCIOCULTURAL HOMEOSTASIS.’”: Damasio, Self Comes to Mind, 27.

“THE STUDY CONCLUDED THAT ‘[T]HE BRAIN’S SYSTEMS FOR EMOTION, WHICH ARE PURPOSED TOWARD…’”: Jonas T. Kaplan et al. “Neural Correlates of Maintaining One’s Political Beliefs in the Face of Counterevidence” Scientific Reports 6, Article 39589, December 2016, doi:10.1038/srep39589.

“THE BRAIN’S PRIMARY RESPONSIBILITY IS TO TAKE CARE OF THE BODY…”: Brian Resnick, “A New Brain Study Sheds Light on Why It Can be So Hard to Change Someone’s Political Beliefs,” Vox, January 23, 2017, https://www.vox.com/science-and-health/2016/12/28/14088992/brain-study-change-minds.

“ONCE OUR AMYGDALA RECOGNIZES ANYTHING AS A THREAT…”: Thierry Steimer, “The Biology of Fear- and Anxiety-Related Behaviors,” Dialogues in Clinical Neuroscience, September 2002, 4(3): 231–49, https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3181681.

“IN FACT, PRESENTING PEOPLE WITH INFORMATION THAT CONTRADICTS THEIR OPINION…”: Sharot, The Influential Mind, 7.

“THE PROBLEM IS THAT WHEN YOU HIT LISTENERS BETWEEN THE EYES…”: Chip Heath and Dan Heath, Made to Stick: Why Some Ideas Survive and Others Die (New York: Random House, 2007), 234.

“NUMEROUS FMRI STUDIES HAVE SHOWN…”: Gerry Everding, “Readers Build Vivid Mental Simulations of Narrative Stimulations, Brain Scans Suggest” Source, Washington University in St. Louis, January 26, 2009, https://source.wustl.edu/2009/01/readers-build-vivid-mental-simulations-of-narrative-situations-brain-scans-suggest.

“THUS IT’S NO SURPRISE THAT, ACCORDING TO THE STUDY, ‘THE WOMEN WHO WATCHED THE NEWS PROGRAM…’”: Ohio State University, “TV Drama Can Be More Persuasive Than News Program, Study Finds,” ScienceDaily, February 11, 2010, https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2010/02/100209144153.htm.

“SAYS EMILY MOYER-GUSÉ, CO-AUTHOR OF THE STUDY, ‘MANY OF THE WOMEN WERE…’”: Ohio State University, “TV Drama Can Be More Persuasive Than News Program, Study Finds.”

“ONE OF THE REASONS SOME PEOPLE AVOID SAFER SEX BEHAVIORS IS…”: Ohio State University, “TV Drama Can Be More Persuasive Than News Program, Study Finds.”

Chapter 3

“I’VE LEARNED THAT PEOPLE WILL FORGET WHAT YOU SAID…”: La Trisha McIntosh and La Tasha Taylor, “A Conversation with Dr. Maya Angelou,” Beautifully Said Magazine, July 4, 2012. http://bsmandmedia.com/a-conversation-with-dr-maya-angelou.

“I HAVE SAID THAT ONE HORSE WAS GOOD, THE OTHER BAD…”: Plato, Phaedrus, Trans. Benjamin Jowett, provided by The Internet Classics Archive, http://classics.mit.edu/Plato/phaedrus.html. (accessed 6/12/20).

“THERE IS ONLY ONE OPRAH WINFREY. SHE HAS ACHIEVED EXCELLENCE…”: “Oprah Winfrey Becomes Special Contributor to 60 Minutes February 2, 2017, CBS News, https://www.cbsnews.com/news/oprah-winfrey-becomes-special-contributor-to-60-minutes.

“SAYS OPRAH, ‘[IT’S] NEVER A GOOD THING WHEN I HAVE TO PRACTICE SAYING MY NAME…’”: Lacey Rose, “Oprah Talks Apple Plans, 60 Minutes Exit, ‘Leaving Neverland,’ Backlash and Mayor Pete ‘Buttabeep, Buttaboop’,” The Hollywood Reporter, April 30, 2019, https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/features/oprah-winfrey-talks-apple-plans-60-minutes-split-2020-election-1205311.

“FEELINGS AND EMOTIONS ARE CONSIDERED ELUSIVE ENTITIES, UNFIT TO SHARE THE STAGE…”: Antonio Damasio, Descartes’ Error: Emotion, Reason, and the Human Brain (New York, NY: Penguin Books, 1994), 159.

“NO SET OF CONSCIOUS IMAGES OF ANY KIND ON ANY TOPIC EVER FAILS…”: Damasio, Self Comes to Mind, 25.

“EMOTIONS DO MORE THAN ADD RICHNESS TO OUR LIVES…”: David Eagleman, The Brain: The Story of You, (New York: Vintage, Reprint Edition, 2017), 119.

“AN EMOTIONAL REACTION IS THE BODY’S WAY OF SAYING, ‘HEY, SOMETHING…”: Sharot, The Influential Mind, 40.

“EVEN IF OUR REASONING STRATEGIES WERE PERFECTLY TUNED…”: Damasio, Descartes’ Error,191.

“ELLIOT WAS A SUCCESSFUL GUY: HE HAD A GREAT JOB, A LOVING FAMILY, AND HE WAS A ROLE…”: Damasio, Descartes’ Error, 139–51.

“HE STILL TESTED IN THE NINETY-SEVENTH PERCENTILE IN INTELLIGENCE.”: Jonah Lehrer, How We Decide (Boston and New York: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2009), 14.

“HE’D GO INTO HIS OFFICE AND WONDER…”: Damasio, Descartes’ Error, 139–51.

“MEMORY DIDN’T EVOLVE TO ALLOW US TO REMINISCE ABOUT THE PAST…”: Dean D. Buonomano, Your Brain Is a Time Machine: The Neuroscience and Physics of Time (New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 2018), 10–11.

“WHETHER YOU REALIZE IT OR NOT, YOUR BRAIN IS AUTOMATICALLY ATTEMPTING TO PREDICT…”: Buonomano, Your Brain Is a Time Machine, 20.

“THE AMYGDALA WORKS IN CONJUNCTION WITH PAST STORED MEMORIES AND OTHER STRUCTURES…”: V. S. Ramachandran, The Tell-Tale Brain: A Neuroscientist’s Quest for What Makes Us Human (New York: W.W. Norton, 2011), 65.

“THAT’S WHY COUPLING EMOTION WITH INFO VASTLY IMPROVES THE CHANCE THAT…”: Monika Riegel et al, “Effect of Emotion on Memory for Words and Their Context,” Journal of Comparative Neurology, November 2015, https://www.researchgate.net/publication/283730021_Effect_of_emotion_on_memory_for_words_and_their_context.

“MEMORIES OF EMOTIONAL EVENTS HAVE A PERSISTENCE AND VIVIDNESS THAT OTHER MEMORIES…”: Elizabeth Phelps, “Human Emotion and Memory: Interactions of the Amygdala and Hippocampal Complex,” Current Opinion in Neurobiology 14 (2004): 198–202.

“HUMAN EMOTIONS ARE ROOTED IN THE PREDICTIONS OF HIGHLY FLEXIBLE BRAIN CELLS, WHICH ARE…”: Lehrer, How We Decide, 41.

“STORYTELLING PROVIDES HUMANS A POWERFUL MEANS FOR SHARING EMOTIONS WITH OTHERS…”: Lauri Nummenmaa et al, “Emotional Speech Synchronizes Brains across Listeners and Engages Large-Scale Dynamic Brain Networks,” Neuroimage 102, pt. 2 (2014): 498–509, doi: 10.1016/j.neuroimage.2014.07.063.

“SYNCHRONIZATION WAS OBSERVED NOT ONLY IN BRAIN REGIONS IMPORTANT FOR…”: Sharot, The Influential Mind, 38–39.

“EMOTIONAL LANGUAGE APPARENTLY PROVIDES A WAY FOR BRINGING MINDS TOGETHER…”: Lauri Nummenmaa, “Emotional Speech Synchronizes Brains across Listeners,” 498–509.

“THE ONLY PERSON WHO NEVER MAKES MISTAKES IS…”: Jacob A. Riis, “Theodore Roosevelt,” American Monthly Review of Reviews 22, no. 2 (August 1900): 184.

Chapter 4

“NARRATIVE IMAGINING—STORY—IS THE FUNDAMENTAL INSTRUMENT OF THOUGHT…”: Mark Turner, The Literary Mind: The Origins of Thought and Language (Oxford, England: Oxford University Press, Revised Ed: 1998), 4–5.

“YOU KNOW WHAT IT IS UNTIL SOMEONE ASKS YOU TO DEFINE IT…”: Confessions, St. Augustine of Hippo, Book 11, http://the-wanderling.com/augustine_time.html (accessed 6/20/20).

“A BEGINNING A MIDDLE AND AN END…”: Aristotle, trans. by Anthony Kenny, The Poetics (Oxford World Classics) (Oxford, England: Oxford University Press, reprint edition, 2013), 47.

“OUR BRAIN RESULTS SHOW THAT PEOPLE APPROACH NARRATIVE IN A STRONGLY CHARACTER-CENTERED…”: McMaster University, “The Art of Storytelling: Researchers Explore Why We Relate to Characters,” ScienceDaily, September 13, 2018, https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2018/09/180913113822.htm.

“SURGEON FINDS SCISSORS INSIDE OF PATIENT…”: Steven Brown et al, “Storytelling Is Intrinsically Mentalistic: A Functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging Study of Narrative Production across Modalities,” Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience 30, issue 9 (September 2018): 1298–1314. https://doi.org/10.1162/jocn_a_01294.

“THE ABILITY TO UNDERSTAND THE MENTAL STATE, OF ONESELF OR OTHERS, THAT UNDERLIES…”: Peter Fonagy et al, “The Capacity for Understanding Mental States: The Reflective Self in Parent and Child and Its Significance for Security of Attachment,” Infant Mental Health Journal 12, issue 3 (Fall 1991): 201–18. https://doi.org/10.1002/1097-0355(199123)12:3%3C201::AID-IMHJ2280120307%26gt;3.0.CO;2-7.

“WHEN WE’RE GRABBED BY A STORY, WE’RE INSTANTLY MAKING INFERENCES ABOUT…”: McMaster University, “The Art of Storytelling: Researchers Explore Why We Relate to Characters,” ScienceDaily, September 13, 2018.

“ONE OF THE BIGGEST CONTRIBUTIONS OF BRAIN IMAGING IS TO REVEAL…”: Marcel Just and Melissa Ludtke, “Watching the Human Brain Process Information,” Nieman Reports: The Nieman Foundation for Journalism at Harvard University 64, no. 2 (Summer 2010): 13–14. https://niemanreports.org/articles/watching-the-human-brain-process-information.

“THE VIDEO GARNERED 76 MILLION VIEWS GLOBALLY AFTER 3 MONTHS…”: Anna Coscia, “Always, #LikeAGirl, Changing the Meaning of Words to Make Girls Proud to Be Girls,” https://docplayer.net/86766206-Always-likeagirl-changing-the-meaning-of-words-to-make-girls-proud-to-be-girls-authored-by-anna-coscia-agency-leo-burnett-london-client-p-g.html.

“A SIXTY-SECOND VERSION OF THE VIDEO RANKED AS THE MOST POPULAR DIGITAL…”: Sara Perez, “P&G’s #LikeAGirl Ad Scored the Most Social Buzz During Super Bowl 2015,” Tech Crunch, February 1, 2015, https://techcrunch.com/2015/02/01/pgs-likeagirl-ad-scored-the-most-social-buzz-during-super-bowl-2015.

“NOBODY WILL EVER SHARE ANYTHING THAT HAS THE ALWAYS LOGO ON IT…”: Anna Coscia, “Always, #LikeAGirl, Changing the Meaning of Words to Make Girls Proud to Be Girls.”

“WE HAD ALWAYS COMMUNICATED IT IN A FUNCTIONAL WAY…”: Case Study: Always #LikeAGirl, Campaign, October 12, 2015, https://www.campaignlive.co.uk/article/case-study-always-likeagirl/1366870.

“MORE THAN HALF OF GIRLS LOSE CONFIDENCE DURING PUBERTY—A CONTRIBUTING FACTOR…”: Anna Coscia, “Always, #LikeAGirl, Changing the Meaning of Words to Make Girls Proud to Be Girls.”

“ONLY 19 PERCENT OF GIRLS AND WOMEN 16–24 HAVE A POSITIVE ASSOCIATION…”: Anna Coscia, “Always, #LikeAGirl, Changing the Meaning of Words to Make Girls Proud to Be Girls.”

“WE WANTED TO ADDRESS THE THINGS THAT CONTRIBUTE TO THE DROP OF CONFIDENCE IN GIRLS…”: Kim Kauffman, “Leo’s Cannes Contenders, ‘#LikeAGirl’,” June 21, 2015, https://leoburnett.com/articles/work/what-it-means-to-be-likeagirl.

“ANNA COSCIA OF LEO BURNETT. THE YOUNGER GIRLS, SHE SAID, ‘RAN AND FOUGHT AND HIT…’”: Anna Coscia, “Always, #LikeAGirl, Changing the Meaning of Words to Make Girls Proud to Be Girls.”

“THE GOAL WAS ‘TO TAKE VIEWERS ON AN EMOTIONAL JOURNEY’…”: Anna Coscia, “Always, #LikeAGirl, Changing the Meaning of Words to Make Girls Proud to Be Girls.”

“THAT NUMBER SKYROCKETED TO 76 PERCENT.”: Aurora University Online, “4 Successful Integrated Marketing Communications Examples,” September 13, 2018, February 21, 2017, https://online.aurora.edu/integrated-marketing-communications-examples.

“ADOBE, WHICH MONITORS THE SOCIAL BUZZ AROUND THE SUPER BOWL ADS…”: Sara Perez, “P&G’s #LikeAGirl Ad Scored the Most Social Buzz During Super Bowl 2015.”

“SHARING THE ALWAYS LOGO, TRIPLING THE BRAND’S TWITTER FOLLOWERS, AND GROWING THEIR YOUTUBE CHANNEL…”: Anna Coscia, “Always, #LikeAGirl, Changing the Meaning of Words to Make Girls Proud to Be Girls.”

Chapter 5

“THERE ARE NO FACTS, ONLY INTERPRETATIONS.”: Friedrich Nietzsche, trans. Walter Kaufmann, trans., (New York: Penguin Books; U.S. Edition, 1977), 458.

“WHEN ATTEMPTING TO CREATE IMPACT, WE FIRST AND FOREMOST CONSIDER OURSELVES.”: Sharot, The Influential Mind, 7.

“YOU CAN LOSE SIGNIFICANT PORTIONS OF PEOPLE.”: Brian Handwerk, “Pro-Environment Light Bulb Labeling Turns Off Conservatives, Study Finds” National Geographic News, May 1, 2013, https://www.nationalgeographic.com/news/energy/2013/04/130430-light-bulb-labeling.

“TAKE THE EDGE OFF THE AIRPORT’S CONSTRUCTION WOES . .”: Mary Forgione, “Jimmy Kimmel’s New Airport Greeting: ‘Welcome to LAX. We Apologize for the Construction’,” Los Angeles Times, July 31, 2019, https://www.latimes.com/travel/story/2019-07-30/kimmel-dudamel-feniger-lax-welcome-announcements.

“AND AS STUDIES REVEAL, SMILING RELEASES DOPAMINE, ENDORPHINS…”: Richard D. Lane and Lynn Nadel, Cognitive Neuroscience of Emotion, Series in Affective Science (New York: Oxford University Press, 2002), 345–70.

“AND SEROTONIN…”: Keith J. Karren et al. Mind/Body Health: The Effect of Attitudes, Emotions and Relationships (New York: Benjamin Cummings, 2010), 461.

“WHICH THEN ALLEVIATE STRESS, LOWER YOUR BLOOD PRESSURE, AND…”: Brian Luke Seaward, Managing Stress: Principles and Strategies for Health and Well-Being (Sudbury, Mass: Jones and Bartlett, 2009), 258.

“THAT OLD SAW, ‘SMILE AND THE WORLD SMILES WITH YOU’? TURNS OUT…”: Marianne Sonnby–Borgström, “Automatic Mimicry Reactions as Related to Differences in Emotional Empathy,” Scandinavian Journal of Psychology 43, issue 5: 433–43.

“RIGHT OFF THE BAT WE KNOW THAT SEVEN OUT OF TEN AMERICANS ARE WORRIED ABOUT IT…”: Anthony Leiserowitz et al, “Climate Change in the American Mind,” November 2019, Yale University and George Mason University. New Haven, CT: Yale Program on Climate Change Communication, 4. https://climatecommunication.yale.edu/publications/climate-change-in-the-american-mind-november-2019.

“(INCLUDING MORE THAN 50 PERCENT OF HOMEOWNERS)”: Andrew Hurst, “Most Americans Are Concerned About Climate Change, but That Doesn’t Mean They’re Prepared for It,” Value Penguin, October 15, 2019, https://www.valuepenguin.com/homeowners-insurance-concerned-climate-change-unprepared.

“THAT 70 PERCENT WORRY THEY’RE NOT DOING ENOUGH, 73 PERCENT SAY THEY’RE MOTIVATED TO MAKE CHANGES, BUT 51 PERCENT AREN’T SURE WHAT THEY CAN DO.”: American Psychological Association, “Majority of US Adults Believe Climate Change Is Most Important Issue Today: Nearly Half of 18–34 Year Olds Say That Stress about Climate Change Affects Their Lives,” ScienceDaily, February 7, 2020, https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2020/02/200207095418.htm.

“THE STORY I’M TELLING MYSELF ABOUT WHAT YOU’RE DOING IS…”: Brené Brown, Dare to Lead, (London, UK: Vermilion, 2018), 247

Chapter 6

“IT’S HARD NOT TO LIKE SOMEONE ONCE YOU KNOW THEIR STORY…”: Fred Rogers, The World According to Mr. Rogers (New York: Hachette, 2003).

“SEVEN IN TEN TEENS BELIEVE THAT CLIMATE CHANGE WILL CAUSE A GREAT DEAL OF HARM…”: Sarah Kaplan and Emily Guskin, “Most American Teens Are Frightened by Climate Change, Poll Finds, and About 1 in 4 Are Taking Action,” Washington Post, September 16, 2019, https://www.washingtonpost.com/science/most-american-teens-are-frightened-by-climate-change-poll-finds-and-about-1-in-4-are-taking-action/2019/09/15/1936da1c-d639-11e9-9610-fb56c5522e1c_story.html.

“MEN TEND TO DO MORE YARD WORK THAN WOMEN…”: Mary Kilpatrick, “Men’s Work or Women’s? Who Mows the Lawn at Your House?,” Cleveland.com, June 15, 2018, Updated January 30, 2019. https://www.cleveland.com/shatter/2018/06/who_mows_the_lawn_at_your_hous.html.

“MEN ARE ALSO BECOMING MORE ENGAGED IN CARING FOR THEIR KIDS THAN EVER…”: Brad Harrington et al, “The New Dad: The Career-Caregiving Conflict,” Boston College Center for Work & Family, Carroll School of Management, 2017. https://www.researchgate.net/publication/329950085_The_New_Millennial_Dad_Understanding_The_Paradox_of_Today%27s_Fathers.

“LEADING THE WAY TOWARD MORE EQUITABLE AND JUST SOLUTIONS TO CLIMATE CHANGE…”: “Gender and Climate Change: Strengthening Climate Action by Promoting Gender Equality” The International Union for Conservation of Nature, November, 2015, https://www.iucn.org/resources/issues-briefs/gender-and-climate-change.

“MOMS STILL DO 65 PERCENT OF THE CHILD-REARING AS COMPARED TO DADS…”: Darcy Lockman, “What ‘Good’ Dads Get away with,” New York Times, May 4, 2019, https://www.nytimes.com/2019/05/04/opinion/sunday/men-parenting.html.

“MOTRIN: CASE STUDY…”: “Motrin Mom Babywearing Ad,” YouTube Video, 0:50, November 16, 2008, (accessed 6/20/20).

“AS ONE WOMAN TWEETED, ‘I THINK THEY WERE TRYING TO BE EDGY AND EVEN PISSED OFF MY HUSBAND.‘”: “Motrin Ad Makes Moms Mad” November 16, 2008, YouTube Video, 2:38, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LhR-y1N6R8Q. (accessed 6/20/20).

“ACCORDING TO FORBES ‘WOMEN DRIVE SEVENTY TO EIGHTY PERCENT…’”: Krystle M. Dais, “20 Facts and Figures to Know When Marketing to Women,” Forbes, May 13, 2019, https://www.forbes.com/sites/forbescontentmarketing/2019/05/13/20-facts-and-figures-to-know-when-marketing-to-women/#2cfc27eb1297. (accessed 8/2/20).

Chapter 7

“IT ISN’T THE MOUNTAINS AHEAD TO CLIMB THAT WEAR YOU OUT; IT’S THE PEBBLE…”: Bryan Burwell, “Tossing Off Pebble Costs the Cardinals Mountain of the Bucks” St. Louis Post-Dispatch, November 23, 2003 as per The Quote Investigator, https://quoteinvestigator.com/2013/06/23/sand-in-shoe.

“MANY ECONOMISTS BELIEVE—THAT PEOPLE DO NOT ACT AGAINST THEIR ECONOMIC SELF-INTEREST…”: Daniel Kahneman, Thinking Fast and Slow, (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2013), 307.

“WE STRUGGLE WITH THE DIFFERENCE BETWEEN FITTING IN AND BELONGING…”: Brené Brown, The Gifts of Imperfection: Let Go of Who You Think You’re Supposed to Be and Embrace Who You Are, (Center City, MN: Hazelden Publishing, 2010), 25.

“IN ORDER TO HAVE ANY CHANCE OF SUCCEEDING, WE WOULD…”: Jane Praeger, Strategic Communications: Student Project, Columbia University School of Continuing Education, 2009.

“THEIR NEW TAGLINE WAS SIMPLY ‘ADD AN EGG’.”: Drew Boyd, “A Creativity Lesson From Betty Crocker: Subtracting an Essential Element Creates Unexpected Value” Psychology Today, January 19, 2014, https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/inside-the-box/201401/creativity-lesson-betty-crocker.

“YOU KNOW, IF IT’S LATE AT NIGHT, I’LL STAY AT A MOTEL 6…”: Stan Richards, “Motel 6, Tom Bodett and the Ad Campaign That Put Us on the Map: The Story of the Richards Group’s Defining Work,” Muse by Clio, May 7, 2019, https://musebycl.io/clio60/motel-6-tom-bodett-and-folksy-campaign-put-us-map.

“IN AN INTERVIEW IN AD AGE IN 2007 HE SUMMED IT UP THUSLY…”: Kimberly D. Williams, “Actually, Motel 6 Doesn’t Leave the Light on for You: Longtime Spokesman Tom Bodett Talks to Ad Age about Other Perks You Won’t Get,” Ad Age, August 30, 2007, https://adage.com/article/news/motel-6-leave-light/120172.

“ONE OF THE OTHER BIG REASONS TEENS GIVE FOR TEXTING WHILE DRIVING IS…”: Mary Madden and Amanda Lenhart, “Teens and Distracted Driving: Major Findings,” Pew Research Center: Internet and Technology, November 16, 2009, https://www.pewresearch.org/internet/2009/11/16/teens-and-distracted-driving-major-findings.

Chapter 8

“THE HUMAN MIND IS A STORY PROCESSOR, NOT A LOGIC PROCESSOR…”: Jonathan Haidt, The Righteous Mind: Why Good People Are Divided by Politics and Religion (New York, NY: Vintage, reprint edition, 2013), 328.

“LEGEND HAS IT THAT A SINGLE SKETCH, A SENTENCE OR TWO, GAVE US SOUTHWEST AIRLINES…”: Tim Walker, “The Big Ideas That Started on a Napkin—from Reaganomics to Shark Week,” The Guardian, April 10, 2017, https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/shortcuts/2017/apr/10/napkin-ideas-mri-reaganomics-shark-week.

“THE END OF OUR EXPLORING IS TO RETURN TO WHERE WE BEGAN AND TO SEE IT FOR THE FIRST TIME.”: T. S. Eliot, Four Quartets (Boston: Mariner Books, 1968), 59.

“CASE STUDY: EXTRA GUM…”: “Extra Gum: Can’t Help Falling in Love Feat,” Haley Reinhart, YouTube Video, 1:57, October 14, 2015, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NemtQx0m0Ss.

“EARNED MORE THAN SEVEN MILLION YOUTUBE VIEWS AND MORE THAN 78 MILLION FACEBOOK VIEWS…”: (no author listed) “Make Me Cry: The Story Behind Wrigley Gum & Haley Reinhart’s Unforgettable ‘Sarah & Juan’ Ad,” Billboard, October 21, 2015, https://www.billboard.com/articles/videos/popular/6737465/wrigley-gum-haley-reinhart-cant-help-falling-in-love.

“CHEWING GUM SUPPRESSES APPETITE, RELIEVES STRESS, BOOSTS YOUR MEMORY, HELPS PROTECT YOUR TEETH, HELPS YOU…”: Helen West, “Chewing Gum: Good or Bad,” Healthline, October 27, 2016, https://www.healthline.com/nutrition/chewing-gum-good-or-bad.

“WE WANT TO EVOLVE FROM JUST BEING THE FUNCTIONAL SIDE OF THINGS TO…”: Associated Press, “Burger King Ditches ‘Have It Your Way’ Slogan,” Fox News, May 20, 2014, updated November 22, 2016, https://www.foxnews.com/food-drink/burger-king-ditches-have-it-your-way-slogan.

“DEATH PANELS” WAS DEEMED BY POLITIFACT “THE LIE OF THE YEAR.”: Angie Drobnic Holan, “PolitiFact’s Lie of the Year: ‘Death Panels’,” Politifact, December 18, 2009, https://www.politifact.com/article/2009/dec/18/politifact-lie-year-death-panels.

“WHAT I LEARNED WAS THAT TRUST CAN BE RECIPROCATED AND THAT PART OF HOW YOU CAN WIN…”: Felicia Sonmez, Cleve R. Wootson, Jr., and Matt Viser, “Democrats Argue over Health Care and Other Core Issues—and the Direction of the Party” Washington Post, September 12, 2019, https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2019/09/12/september-democratic-debate-abc-univision-houston.

“EVERY YEAR MORE THAN 330,000 ACCIDENTS ARE CAUSED BY DISTRACTED DRIVING…”: Luke Ameen, “The 25 Scariest Texting and Driving Accident Statistics,” ICEBIKE, (No pub date given), https://www.icebike.org/texting-and-driving.

“OUR BRAINS ARE WIRED SUCH THAT ANTICIPATING A REWARD NOT ONLY TRIGGERS APPROACH…”: Sharot, The Influential Mind, 64.

“IF YOU WANT TO MOTIVATE SOMEONE TO TAKE A SPECIFIC ACTION, BE SURE TO GIVE…”: Lauren A. Leotti et al, “Born to Choose: The Origins and Value of the Need to Control” Trends in Cognitive Sciences 14, issue 10 (October 1, 2010), doi:10.1016/j.tics.2010.08.001.

“IN NOAH’S VIDEO, WE SEE A GIRL PLAYING WITH HER DOG ON THE BEACH…”: Noah DeVico, “Drive Smart Scholarship Entry 2019,” YouTube Video, 0:59, December 19, 2018, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iPOOmuXSN2I (accessed 6/26/20).

“WHEN IT COMES TO ELICITING ACTION, IMMEDIATE REWARDS CAN OFTEN…”: Sharot, The Influential Mind, 60.

“ONE STUDY PUBLISHED IN THE JOURNAL TRENDS IN COGNITIVE SCIENCE IN 2010 FOUND…”: Lauren A. Leotti, “Born to Choose,” 457-63.

Chapter 9

“CONFLICT IS THE BEGINNING OF CONSCIOUSNESS”: M. Esther Harding, The I and the Not-I: A Study in the Development of Consciousness, (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press; First Princeton/Bollingen Printing edition, 1974), 82.

“PAYING ATTENTION IS AN APT METAPHOR, BECAUSE IT COSTS US SOMETHING BIOLOGICALLY TO…”: Daniel J. Levitin, The Organized Mind: Thinking Straight in the Age of Information Overload, (New York: Dutton, reprint edition, 2015), 98.

“NARRATIVES THAT CAUSE US TO PAY ATTENTION AND ALSO INVOLVE US EMOTIONALLY…”: Zak, “Why Inspiring Stories Make Us React.”

“PEOPLE PREFER TO LEARN OF INFORMATION THAT THEY THINK WILL MAKE THEM FEEL GOOD, AND…”: Sharot, The Influential Mind, 117.

“TESTED STORIES ABOUT ‘HOT-BUTTON’ ISSUES TO SEE HOW PEOPLE REACTED TO POTENTIALLY…”: Zak, “Why Inspiring Stories Make Us React.”

“LARGE-SCALE, SYSTEMIC CHANGE MAY BE THE ULTIMATE GOAL…”: Andy Goodman, “The Vision Story and the F-Word” Free-Range Thinking, May 2019.

“WATERISLIFE TOLD THE STORY”: “4-Year-Old’s Bucket List—Water Is Life,” YouTube Video, 2:11, August 1, 2013, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XYf82F3CHYo (accessed 6/26/20).

“IT WOULDN’T HAVE HAD NEARLY THE IMPACT OF THE STORY OF ONE LITTLE BOY.”: Andy Goodman, “Stories or Data: Which Makes a Stronger Case? And What Happens When You Use Both? A 2007 Study Offers Some Surprising Answers,” Free-Range Thinking, December 2009.

“CASE STUDY: SUBARU”: “Subaru They Lived,” YouTube Video, 0:32, February 12, 2014, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DC9ItosKkak (accessed 6/20/20).

“IT’S HOW THESE ACTIVITIES MAKE ME FEEL: MORE ENERGIZED, LESS STRESSED…”: Jane E. Brody, “Changing Our Tune on Exercise,” New York Times, August 27, 2012, https://well.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/08/27/changing-our-tune-on-exercise.

“THE THIRTY-SECOND VIDEO IS SIMPLE…”: Diet Coke/Gillian Jacobs, YouTube Video, 0:30, February 2, 2018, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kEpuN7tRFRU (accessed 6/26/20).

“WE’VE STRIPPED AWAY THE GLOSSY MARKETING, AND WE’RE JUST TELLING PEOPLE HOW GOOD…”: The Coca-Cola Company, “Diet Coke Launches Campaign to Support Rebrand in North America—‘Because I Can’,” January 25, 2018, https://www.coca-colacompany.com/news/diet-coke-launches-campaign-to-support-rebrand.

“IN THEIR DESPERATION NOT TO OFFEND ANYONE, THEY END UP BEING…”: Jo Ellison, “How Diet Coke Opened a Can of Correctness—and Went Flat,” Financial Times, April 3, 2018, .

“ONE PHILOSOPHICAL SOUL MUSED ON TWITTER, “THE COMMERCIAL MADE ME WONDER…”: Todd in the Shadows, @ShadowTodd, Twitter post, September 23, 2018, 5:43 PM, https://twitter.com/search?q=Coke%20is%20in%20fact%20deeply%20socially%20shameful%26src=typed_query.

Chapter 10

“EVERYTHING DEPENDS UPON EXECUTION; HAVING JUST A VISION IS NO SOLUTION.”: Stephen Sondheim, Sunday in the Park with George (Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield, Applause Libretto Series, 2000), 147.

“SHE SAYS, ‘AND ABOUT THE TIME I WAS IN MIDDLE SCHOOL, MY DADDY…’”: CNN, “Elizabeth Warren just had her best moment of the 2020 campaign,” March 19, 2019, https://lite.cnn.com/en/article/h_dc8f1d06a0f8fb7944d573782921bacb

“STORIES LIVE IN THE SPECIFICS, THE SEEMINGLY SMALL DETAILS THAT HELP US SEE THE WORLD…”: Andy Goodman, “So Much Story, So Few Words,” Free-Range Thinking, June 2019.

“FROTHY ELOQUENCE NEITHER CONVINCES NOR SATISFIES…”: Office of the Secretary of the State of Missouri, “Missouri History: Why Is Missouri Called the ‘Show Me’ State?” https://www.sos.mo.gov/archives/history/slogan.asp (accessed 6/26/20).

“‘THOUGHT IS MADE LARGELY OF IMAGES.’ IMAGES DON’T MAKE US THINK…”: Damasio, Descartes’ Error, 106.

“DIRT ROAD”: Jaime Harrison, Twitter post, November 4, 2019, https://twitter.com/harrisonjaime/status/1191464056500166656?lang=en.

“AS ANDREW MARANTZ RECOUNTS IN THE NEW YORKER, IN 1989, BEFORE HE WAS PRESIDENT OF RUSSIA, BORIS…”: Andrew Marantz, “Silicon Valley’s Crisis of Conscious: Where Big Tech Goes to Ask Deep Questions, New Yorker, August 19, 2019, https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2019/08/26/silicon-valleys-crisis-of-conscience.

“WHEN I SAW THOSE SHELVES CRAMMED WITH HUNDREDS, THOUSANDS OF CANS…”: Boris Yeltsin, Against the Grain: An Autobiography (New York, NY: Summit Books, 1990), 255.

Chapter 11

“THE GREATER THE TENSION, THE GREATER IS THE POTENTIAL.”: C.G. Jung, Alchemical Studies (Collected Works of C.G. Jung Vol. 13) trans. Gerhard Adler, and R.F. C. Hull (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press; reprint edition, 1983), 154.

“THIS SUSPENSE IS TERRIBLE. I HOPE IT WILL LAST.”: Oscar Wilde, The Importance of Being Earnest, (Mineola, NY: Dover Publications, 1990), 52.

“RESEARCH SHOWS THAT WE’RE HAPPIEST WHEN WE’RE WORKING ON DIFFICULT-BUT-POSSIBLE…”: Paul A. O’Keefe, “Liking Work Really Matters,” New York Times, September 5, 2014, https://www.nytimes.com/2014/09/07/opinion/sunday/go-with-the-flow.html.

“DAVID HUME NOTED SEVERAL CENTURIES AGO, ‘IS THE CEMENT OF THE UNIVERSE.’”: John P. Wright, The Skeptical Realism of David Hume (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1983), 209.

“TAKE, FOR INSTANCE, E*TRADE’S TALKING BABY COMMERCIALS…”: “E*Trade Superbowl Commercial with Baby,” YouTube Video, 0:37, February 3, 2008, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X4GZfvXx9Js (accessed 6/20/20).

“THE CAMPAIGN PREMIERED IN 2008, AND E*TRADE WAS TARGETING ASPIRING SELF-DIRECTED…”: Elena Malykhina, “E-Trade’s ‘Talking Baby’ Returns for Super Bowl,” Adweek, January 23, 2009, https://www.adweek.com/brand-marketing/e-trades-talking-baby-returns-super-bowl-105144.

“THE KID HUMANIZED THE WHOLE BUSINESS OF TRADING.”: Bruce Horovitz, “Will the E-Trade Baby Keep on Talking?” USA Today, June 28, 2013, June 30, 2013, https://www.usatoday.com/story/money/business/2013/06/28/etrade-baby-grey-new-york-super-bowl-advertising/2472711.

“FOR SALE. BABY SHOES. NEVER WORN.”: David Haglund, “Did Hemingway Really Write His Famous Six-Word Story? Slate, January 31, 2013, https://slate.com/culture/2013/01/for-sale-baby-shoes-never-worn-hemingway-probably-did-not-write-the-famous-six-word-story.html.

“FAILED SAT. LOST SCHOLARSHIP. INVENTED ROCKET.”: Wired staff, “Very Short Stories,” Wired Magazine, November 1, 2006, https://www.wired.com/2006/11/very-short-stories/.

“PLAYED GOLF. BOSS WON. KEPT JOB.”: Paul Smith, “Not Sure You’re Doing This Right” (Response to the Hemingway 6-Word Challenge) (Comment section, second comment), October 14, 2014, https://leadwithastory.com/not-sure-youre-doing-this-right-response-to-the-hemingway-6-word-challenge.

“CASE STUDY: JETTA”: Volkswagen “Big Day” Commercial, YouTube Video, 1:10, December 20, 2007, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lSEnzs8AocY (accessed 6/20/20).

“ONE MUST NEVER PLACE A LOADED RIFLE ON THE STAGE IF IT ISN’T GOING TO GO OFF…”: Anton Chekhov, letter to Aleksandr Semenovich Lazarev (pseudonym of A. S. Gruzinsky), November 1, 1889, Polnoe Sobranie Sochinenii I Pisem V Tridsati Tomakh, Pis´Ma, Vol. 3 (Moscow, 1976), 273.

“WHICH IS PRESIDED OVER BY OUR OWN BELIEF SYSTEM…”: Gazzaniga, Human, 270–73.

Chapter 12

“IF YOU REALLY WANT TO ESCAPE THE THINGS THAT HARASS YOU…”: Seneca, trans. Robin Campbell, Letters from a Stoic (New York: Penguin Books Limited, 2004).

“THE REAL TRUE VOYAGE OF DISCOVERY CONSISTS NOT IN SEEKING NEW LANDSCAPES…”: Marcel Proust, Remembrance of Things Past, trans. C. K. Scott-Montcrieff (New York: Random House, 1934), 559.

“WHEN WE FIRST CREATED THE BABY, WE HAD NO IDEA IF IT WAS THE DUMBEST THING…”: “E*Trade Babies” by Grey New York, Classic Advertising from the Adbrands Archive, 2008, Adbrands.net, https://www.adbrands.net/classics-etrade.htm.

“CASE STUDY: LYNDA.COM”: “Lynda.com and the Making of the Mother of the Internet” Harvard Business School Digital Initiative, February 2, 2017, https://digital.hbs.edu/platform-digit/submission/lynda-com-and-the-making-of-the-mother-of-the-internet (accessed 6/26/20).

“ITS CO-FOUNDER, LYNDA WEINMAN, HAS BEEN CALLED THE ‘MOTHER OF THE INTERNET’”: Chloe Sorvino, “A Q&A with Mother of the Internet Lynda Weinman, Co-Founder of Lynda.com,” Forbes, June 5, 2016, https://www.forbes.com/sites/chloesorvino/2016/06/05/a-qa-with-mother-of-the-internet-lynda-weinman-cofounder-of-lynda-com/#5eee73bb4038.

“IN 2015 LINKEDIN LEARNING BOUGHT LYNDA.COM FOR 1.5 BILLION DOLLARS.”: Jane Porter, “From Near Failure to a $1.5 Billion Sale: The Epic Story of Lynda.com,” Fast Company, April 27, 2015, https://www.fastcompany.com/3045404/from-near-failure-to-a-15-billion-sale-the-epic-story-of-lyndacom.

“BACK IN 1995, LYNDA WAS A PROFESSOR AT ART CENTER COLLEGE OF DESIGN…”: Lynda Weinman, conversation with the author, December 6, 2019.

“CONSIDERED BY MANY TO BE THE FIRST INDUSTRY BOOK OF ITS KIND, DESIGNING WEB GRAPHICS WAS INSTANTLY POPULAR…”: Jane Porter, “From Near Failure to a $1.5 Billion Sale: The Epic Story of Lynda.com.”

Chapter 13

“NINETY PERCENT OF LEADERSHIP IS THE ABILITY TO COMMUNICATE SOMETHING PEOPLE WANT.”: Jordan Bonfante, “Dianne Feinstein: Charm Is Only Half Her Story,” Time Magazine, Monday, June 18, 1990, http://content.time.com/time/subscriber/article/0,33009,970385-2,00.html.

“POSSESSING SUCH VALUABLE INSIDE INFO GIVES US A NIFTY BOOST IN SOCIAL STATUS.”: Soroush Vosoughi et al, “The Spread of True and False News Online,” Science 359, no. 6380 (March 9, 2018): 1146–51, https://science.sciencemag.org/content/359/6380/1146.

“NICOLAE CEAUȘESCU’S REGIME WAS NOTORIOUSLY BRUTAL AND OPPRESSIVE…”: Jonathan Crow, “The Curious Story of How Bootlegged Hollywood Movies Helped Defeat Communism in Romania,” Open Culture, February 26, 2014, http://www.openculture.com/2014/02/how-bootlegged-american-movies-helped-defeat-communism.html.

“TEODOR ZAMFIR, BEGAN TO SMUGGLE AMERICAN MOVIES INTO THE COUNTRY…”: Chuck Norris vs Communism, directed by Ilinca Calugareanu, A RatPac Documentary Films/Impact Partners/HBO Romania/WDR presentation in collaboration with Arte of a Vernon Films production in association with Passion Pictures, 2015.

“PEOPLE NEED STORIES, NO?”: Chuck Norris vs Communism, directed by Ilinca Calugareanu.

FOR VIOLET

whose story began in the strangest of times

and in memory of

NOAH DEVICO

whose story was cut way too short

Acknowledgments

I owe an immense debt of gratitude to so many people without who I’d still be thinking about writing this book, you know, tomorrow, or when I’m rested, or when Mercury is out of retrograde. In other words, a week from never. Instead, it’s done, thanks to the wisdom, encouragement, and insight of a cadre of embarrassingly generous souls.

First, thanks to Carrie D. Clarke, who sat next to me at dinner during a writers’ conference in Albuquerque three years ago, leaned over, and suggested I write this book, and whose encouragement, feedback, and wisdom helped immeasurably when I started writing.

Thank you to Mark Rovner for suggesting the title years ago when I was trying to come up with a title for a talk I was giving to a group of scientists about how crucial story is to getting your point across. Without missing a beat he said, call it Story or Die.

Thanks to story guru Andy Goodman, who suggested I use the story of Sport Club Recife to open the book.

Heartfelt thanks to my dear friend, Lynda Weinman, for her unfailing support and for generously sharing her story.

Thanks to Noah DeVico, for diving wholeheartedly into the story behind his don’t text and drive video, answering every question I had with infectious gusto.

Thanks to Jane Praeger, for long conversations about the real-world power of story.

Thanks to Jason Benlevi, for deep, strategic insight when it comes to storytelling in the corporate world, and even more for being my friend since we were ten; love always.

Writing is a lonely business, and I would have been totally lost without the support, encouragement, and general all around good cheer of an amazing group of friends and writers, including Kirsten Coon, Scott Wilbanks, Sharon Baker, Rebecca Pekron, Michelle Tellez, PJ Arnn, Cynthia Anderson, Amit Chatwani, Michelle Fiordaliso, Joan McCabe, Caroline Leavitt, Sara Cron, Jim DeVico, Ally Cron-DeVico, Nick Cron-DeVico, Eden Sher, Jeff Kindley, Louise Kindley, Mona Friedman, Francis Phipps, and Stephanie Grimac.

Special thanks to Colin Kindley, Julia Bauman, Chris Nelson, three exceptionally gracious writers who read an early draft and gave me astute feedback at the very moment it was most needed.

Hearty thanks to Nathan Fox, director of the MFA in Visual Arts Program at the School of Visual Arts, for the hours we spent dishing about story. I will always deeply love the way you gleefully told students that I didn’t like the word creative because it’s so damn conceptual; what does it mean, really?

Thanks to Daisy Cron-Kindley, whose love of stories—especially about bad doctor, the secret dastardly antics of the cat in the hat, and the horrors of fluff—keeps me on my toes and makes all the work worthwhile.

Endless undying thanks to my daughter, Annie, a spellbinding storyteller herself, who read draft after draft (even the early, embarrassing ones), and always found the kindest way to point out the biggest glitches. To my son, Peter, who has shaped and sharpened my ideas more than anyone else: thank you for your brilliant insights, many of which, I admit, I have shamelessly stolen.

As always, deep heartfelt thanks to Jennie Nash, who with laser focus helped me get to the point, over and over. Endless gratitude to freelance editor Susan DeFreitas, who not only saw the big picture I was after, but with searing clarity helped me ease it onto the page.

One of the most terrifying things that can happen in the publishing process is losing your editor. This book was championed and acquired by my long-time editor at Ten Speed Press, the whipsmart Lisa Westmoreland, who shepherded my first two books into the world. But just before I turned in the final manuscript, she wrote to say she’d decided to stay home with her new baby, and I was getting a new editor. My stomach fell. It meant a stranger was inheriting my book, someone with their own projects, who suddenly had to make time for a book they had not acquired, and work with a writer they did not know. That couldn’t be good.

Oh, but it was. Because that editor turned out to be the inimitable Matt Inman. Matt’s insanely insightful feedback made all the difference. He understood exactly what I wanted the book to be, and with grace, grit, sage wisdom, and a wicked sense of humor, helped me get there. Plus, we both love Dirty Dancing; who could ask for more?

All that’s well and good, but none of it would have been possible without my flat out brilliant agent, Laurie Abkemeier, who once again made this process so much easier than I dared dream: profound everlasting thanks and downright awe.

And finally, thanks to my lifelong best friend, Don Halpern. We started arguing the day we met; here’s hoping we never stop. Lastly, undying thanks and boundless gratitude to my stalwart husband, Stuart Demar, who was my anchor throughout the writing of this book and always had dinner ready on time—it’s finally finished, now we can let our hair down.

About the Author

Lisa Cron is a story coach, speaker, and the author of Wired for Story and Story Genius. She has previously worked as a literary agent, a television producer, and a story consultant for Warner Brothers and The William Morris Agency, among others, and currently advises writers, nonprofits, educators, and journalists on the art and craft of story. Cron has also served on the faculty of the School of Visual Arts MFA program in visual narrative and, since 2006, has taught in the UCLA Extension Writers’ Program. She lives in Santa Monica, California, with her husband, two perpetually shedding cats, and a delightfully distracting little dog.

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