(my fabulous bookshelves)
Can stories save a life? As a pre-teen, I kicked my heels for hours a day in special classes for ‘slow’ kids who couldn’t read. Today, kindly neurodiversity experts probably run those sessions. But in the 1980s, we had a battle-axe with pince-nez perched on her bulbous nose and a long wooden ruler for our knuckles if the ‘slow ones gave her any trouble.’
Aged 12, I was still functionally illiterate. But I could shoplift, hitchhike and smoke weed. Whatever future I had, it wasn’t the one I now enjoy.
Following a ‘makes-a-good-anecdote-but-hurt-at-the-time’ accident, I landed up strapped to pulleys in traction at hospital for months. Do you remember how boring the 80s were? No mobiles, no in-room TV, no games and a few out-of-date Reader’s Digests?
Finally, out of sheer desperation, I picked up a book and taught myself to read.
The first three books I chose were by Asimov, Tolkien…and Jackie Collins – quite a heady mix. In the years following, I read like a starved man eats; with fury. I didn’t know it, but those stories interrupted my fate, they changed me into someone who wants to change the world (with a penchant for red stilettoes).
Everyone can name a story that changed their life.
The TV shows and movies, faith parables, memories shared by their grandpa, age-inappropriate books read under covers with a flashlight, school plays, historical legends, or even computer-game backstory that sparked who they are.
We are made of stories.
We’re 22 times more likely to remember a story than any other communication. They weave through our neurology – we are hard-wired to enjoy telling and hearing them. Society is so story-saturated it can be near impossible to see where reality starts and the story ends – or if they are different things at all. Arguably, stories are so all-pervasive and all-persuasive over humanity we should be named ‘homo-narrativa’, the story-telling ape.
Stories have changed the world in so many ways.
When, in the midst of the Civil War, Abraham Lincoln met Harriet Beecher Stowe, he famously said, “So, you’re the little woman who wrote the book that made this great war”. That wasn’t hyperbole; Uncle Tom’s Cabin was the best-selling novel of the entire 19th century, providing a story and character scaffolding for abolition movements.
Adolf Hitler often spoke of his Rienzi epiphany, the book that changed his destiny. He claimed reading a novel about a heroic Roman tribune called Rienzi was “where it all began”.
Story has changed everything, so many times before.
That power is unmatched for one simple reason - humans believe stories. Specifically, we believe anecdotes over evidence. Just for a moment, reflect on that. Even with all our post-Enlightenment critical thinking, compulsory education, science so advanced we can stare into the black hole of another galaxy…
In a fight between a story and a fact, the story will win.
The mess we’re in today it’s going to be easy to get out of. But we have one tool that has been hugely underestimated.
The power of compelling stories to navigate the world we need to build. That’s why we’re here. Let’s find the stories that can change everything.
This newsletter is all about those stories. About storytellers as navigators of the future.
I hope you join us.