There is a story I like to tell in all my workshops. It’s the moment that Steve Jobs was shown the very first prototype for what would eventually become the iPod.
Most of the time when I bring up Steve Jobs and storytelling, people reference his over the top product unveilings, the brand positioning of Apple, or his Harvard commencement speech.
This is a different story altogether, and instructive to how storytelling works in our culture and on our psyche in general.
Read on…
If you’re old enough to remember, the iPod was a HUGE deal when it came out. It could hold your entire music collection on one *relatively* small device that was about the size of a wallet.
Prior to the iPod, the best way to listen to music was on compact discs, and you had to always carry around a big vinyl folder of CDs to flip through for whatever you wanted to listen to next.
The CDs constantly got damaged or scratched, the skipped if you knocked the CD player too hard, and making a playlist (or “mixtape,” as we called it back then) required the greater part of an evening, if not a whole weekend.
The iPod changed everything; for the consumer, for how we listen to music, for the artists, and also Apple itself. Prior to the release of the iPod, Apple was struggling as a company. IBM dominated the personal computer market. Microsoft was king when it came to software. Apple was a very distant 2nd, 3rd, or 4th in all categories of the personal computing world, and was just barely holding on.
So the iPod was a big deal. And this presentation to show Steve Jobs the first prototype was a key step in the process.
All the Vice Presidents and department heads were there. Product design. Software. Marketing, and Supply Chain all had a stake. They had all spent many late nights leading up to this meeting perfecting the prototype and working on their presentation to show how well things were coming along.
The prototype itself was placed on a custom-designed pedestal in the middle of the board room table, shiny and new, ready for its unveiling.
On the morning of the meeting, all the Vice President and department heads were gathered in the conference room. The prototype was charged and ready to go. They all sat and waited anxiously for the big boss to enter the room.
When Steve Jobs did arrive, he strode in quickly. He was wearing his characteristic turtleneck and glasses. As usual, he looked like he hadn’t shaved in a couple of days.
Before anybody could get started with their presentations, he grabbed the prototype from the pedestal and started messing around with it.
He turned it on. He rubbed his thumb around on the wheel (remember the wheel!) to change the display. He clicked through and played the beginning of a couple of songs and listened via the earbuds that were set out for him.
After a couple of tense minutes with everybody in the room breathlessly waiting to see what he would say, he seemed to weigh the device in his hands, cracked a smile as if regarded it with some approval, but then went over to a fish tank in the corner of the conference room and dropped the iPod in the water.
Everybody in the room was shocked and aghast. What had he done? Did he think it was waterproof? What was he trying to prove?
When the iPod settled to the bottom of the fish tank, three little bubbles of air came out and floated to the surface.
Steve Jobs pointed at those bubbles and said, “it’s too big.”
Then he left the room.
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When I tell this story at the workshops I host, I like to ask a couple of questions.
Question 1: What do we know about this man, Steve Jobs, based on the story I just told?
People will respond back with a lot of ideas, the most typical being “he’s a man of few words,” “he knows what he wants,” “he knows how to motivate his team,” “he’s a jerk,” and “he doesn’t respect his team,” among a handful of other responses.
Interestingly enough, I’ve told this story and asked this question to many different groups of people and have gotten very similar responses. In many ways, I think this shows how effective storytelling can be at communicating consistent information.
Question 2: How well will you remember this story?
I then like to ask the group, “suppose tomorrow morning, you’re getting ready to leave for work. You’re on your way out to the car with your coffee and bag, and I pop out of the bushes and yell, ‘Quick! Tell me five personality traits of Steve Jobs!’ Do you think you could remember five of the traits that we listed just now?”
A couple of people nod ‘yes.’ Some acknowledge they could probably remember three or four.
But then I ask them if they think they would be able to repeat this story back to me tomorrow morning, a week from now, or even a year from now, and all heads nod in agreement, ‘yes.’
Questions 3: What images did this story create in your head?
I then like to ask if anybody could describe to me what they imagined the board room looking like in the story. Was it a dark-colored room with an oaken table with plush high back chairs? Or maybe bright with a wall of windows and Herman Miller chairs? Or even all white and glossy like the Apple stores?
Most people did create a picture in their heads of what the board room looked like even though I offered very little details other than it had a fish tank.
It might not seem like a big deal because we create these pictures in our head so naturally, but in actuality, the fact that I was able to get you to conjure up a scene in your head is pretty powerful stuff.
Question 4: From where did you picture the action taking place?
I also ask what was the point of view from which they pictured this story in their head.
Were they sitting at the table? A fly on the wall? Or floating above the scene like an out of body experience?
Most put themselves at the table, in the direct action of the events of the story.
Again, this is pretty astounding if you think about it.
It’s something we do so naturally that we hardly even notice it, but it’s pretty powerful that such a simple story can inspire a person to paint a picture in their head and place themselves directly in the action.
Question 5: Did you get an emotional reaction from the story?
Every time I tell this story, there’s inevitably a handful of people that audibly gasp at the key moment when Steve Jobs drops the iPod in the fish tank. I’ll ask if any of those folks want to identify themselves and share why they had that reaction.
Their answers range from “it’s such a mean thing to do to everybody that worked so hard,” to “he’s going to hurt the fish!”
The important aspect of all these answers though is that the listener had an emotional response. An emotional response to a story that happened more than 15 years ago and has no bearing on their current life now.
Why did it inspire a response?
This is how storytelling works. We get invested in the stories even when they have nothing to do with us. Think of all the movies you’ve watched where you cheered for the good guy and hated the bad guy even though the story was complete fiction. It’s a natural aspect of the human mind to have an emotional reaction to stories.
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These are all elements of how powerful storytelling can be. They can cause you to paint a picture in your head, position yourself in the action, relate to the characters, and even have an emotional response to a situation that has nothing to do with you at all. These are all very subtle but real aspects of how storytelling works on our minds.
There’s one more set of questions that I always like to ask, and here they are:
Was that story true? Did it actually happen? Had I not dropped this hint that it didn’t happen, would you have left here today assuming it was true?
That’s the last tricky and powerful thing about storytelling. It tends to imply truth. Even if we know they’re untrue, they’ll tend to lodge themselves in our minds as if they were facts.
In a public figure like Steve Jobs, it might validate our preconceived notions, but it’s also important to consider how you communicate stories, and how stories are communicated to you. Are you falling for a plausible but untrue story? Chances are, probably yes. It happens to all of us all the time.
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If you want to learn more about effective storytelling, download my Storytelling Primer below and see if you can use the framework to deconstruct how I structured the story above. There were actually some pretty important and subtle elements that help make it work that are worth understanding for yourself.
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