Storytelling is intrinsic to human existence. It’s so much a part of us that we sometimes forget or take for granted how omnipresent and fundamental it is to our reality.
Almost all of our entertainment is storytelling. This includes TV, movies, books, documentaries, and even much of our news media.
Almost all of our major religions are built on stories too. Christianity, Hinduism, Islam, and Judaism all have stories at their core. Older religions and those with fewer devotees revolve around storytelling too. Most forms of religion and mysticism have stories to explain the origins of humans, the earth, plants and animals, and even the sun, moon, and stars.
We also communicate with each other in stories. We spend much of our time telling each other about our history, our experiences, our day-to-day encounters, the things that happened to us even 10-15 minutes ago.
The most interesting aspect of the fundamental power storytelling has on human hearts and minds is the way it colors our worldview. Our paradigms around right & wrong or good & evil oftentimes stem from a duality enforced by our religious stories.
Financial systems such as capitalism and socialism have their own stories too.
If we believe in the system of capitalism we believe that by giving markets freedom to operate with minimal restrictions, the quasi-supernatural “invisible hand” will guide commerce in directions that will do the most good for the most people. Sound familiar?
If we believe in socialism, we believe that people and organizations should be taxed according to their income and that it’s imperative for a governing entity to set up a myriad of social services to ensure the greater good of all people.
These are both stories though. These are imagined outcomes from a set of conditions.
Could either story be empirically proven to be true? It’s not like we can create economies in vacuums.
Even if a story above could be proven, do you think it would change anybody’s minds? Our stories are so powerful that we would often find fault with the way the proof was found, just to avoid having to alter our story.
These are stories that we’ve adopted, almost as if they were religions unto themselves.
Another set of stories that can have a strange power over us appears in the form of maxims, ideals, and sayings we share.
“Work hard and good things will happen.”
“Money can’t buy happiness.”
“Nice guys finish last.”
These are all sayings that imply a series of events, a cause and effect, an outcome, and a lesson. These are all stories.
Stories have been around since the beginning of human memory. It was the cognitive tool our ancient ancestors used to make sense of things they couldn’t understand.
They made up stories to explain the moon and the stars, the changing seasons, their relationships to plants and animals, where they came from, and where they would go when they die.
Every culture in the world has an origin myth. Every culture in the world has their own story about where the moon, sun, and stars came from.
Even science is itself a story. That story states that the sun, stars, and galaxy came into existence from the conflation of gases and particles floating through space that coalesce together.
These all originally came from a moment called “the Big Bang.”
Rather than attributing the emergence of the universe to the will of a divine entity, science attributes its creation to an explosion and set of reactions on an unfathomable scale.
The story of science backs itself up with the most up-to-date observations and evidence it can find, but it’s still a story. There’s nothing to say that future generations won’t look back at our scientific estimations and see them as speculative, the same way we might observe ancient mythology.
Storytelling is everywhere. Learning how to identify and craft a great story is a crucial skill for this world, but also one that can unlock a world of understanding.
Sharing your message in the context of a story will help you connect in a way that gets to the heart of what it is to be human.
* * *
Storytelling is a fascinating aspect of how we perceive the world and exist as humans. If you’d like to learn more, download the Storytelling Primer below and start learning more about storytelling today.