A Tourist is backpacking through the Highlands of Scotland and he stops at a pub to get a drink.
The only people in there are the bartender and an old man, nursing a beer.
He orders a pint, and they sit in silence for a while.
Suddenly, the old man turns to him and goes:
‘You see this bar? I built this bar with my bare hands; I found the finest wood in
the county and gave it more love and care than my own child, but do they call me McGregor
the Bar Builder? No.
He points out of the window.
‘You see that stone wall out there? I built that stone wall with my bare hands, found
every stone and placed them just so, through the rain and the cold, but do they call me
McGregor the Stonewall Builder? No.
He points out of the other window.
‘You see that pier on the lake out there?
I built that pier with my bare hands, drove the pilings against the tide in the sand,
plank by plank, but do they call me McGregor the Pier-Builder? No.
But you f*ck one goat…
Storytelling is joke-telling.
It’s knowing your punchline, your ending; knowing that everything you are saying from
the first sentence to the last is leading to a singular goal, and ideally confirming
some truth that deepens our understanding of who we are as human beings.
We all love stories; we are born for them.
Stories affirm who we are.
We all want affirmations that our lives have meaning, and nothing gives greater affirmation
than when we connect through stories.
Stories can cross the barriers of time. Past, present, and future and allow us to experience
the similarities between ourselves and others, real or imagined.
The children’s TV host Mr. Rogers always carried in his wallet a quote from a social
worker that says, frankly, that there isn’t anyone that you couldn’t learn to love once
you have heard their story.
The way I like to interpret that is through probably the greatest story commandment:
‘Make me care.’ Please, emotionally, intellectually, aesthetically. Just make me care.
We all know what it is like to not care.
You have gone through hundreds of TV channels switching through channel after channel before
you actually stop on one; it might be halfway over, but something catches you.
You are drawn in and you care.
That is not by chance.
That is by design.
Andrew Stanton is one of the most famous storytellers in Hollywood.
His movies, Toy Story, Finding Nemo, and Wall-E, to name but a few, have become blockbusters
and have probably revolutionized the way we view and perceive animated character films.
Their incredible narrative is not based on luck, nor was it a momentary inspiration.
Andrew Stanton, while writing these stories, knew exactly where to focus on and how to
make them successful. In his own words, he actually knew how to care.
Like Andrew Stanton, I did not decide to start
this video with a recount of his story by chance.
I wanted to actually find a concrete way to introduce you to the power of storytelling.
For I hold the conviction that storytelling is a skill every single one of us ought to
understand and eventually to cultivate.
I will try to illuminate the essence of a great story by narrating a modified excerpt
from the short story “Scheherazade” by the great novelist Haruki Murakami:
When I was young, I loved listening to my grandfather tell me stories.
I didn’t know whether his stories were true, invented, or partly true and partly invented.
I had no way of knowing.
Reality and supposition, observation and pure fancy seemed jumbled together in his narratives.
I, therefore, enjoyed them as a child might, without ever asking too many questionings.
What possible difference could it make to me, after all, if they were lies or truth,
or a complicated patchwork of the two?
Whatever the case, my grandfather had a gift for storytelling that touched me in my heart.
No matter what sort of story it was, he managed to make it special.
His voice, his timing and his pacing were all flawless.
Enthralled, I was able to forget the reality that surrounded me, if only for a moment.
Like a blackboard wiped with a damp cloth, my worries were erased, as were unpleasant memories.
At this point in my life, this kind of forgetting was what I desired more than anything else.
The essence of a great story is its ability not only to make you care, as Andrew Stanton
stated, but also to make you forget; forget your worries, your problems, even your pain.
The story helps you enter a new, magical world that is extremely appealing.
The person who helps you achieve such a thing automatically becomes extremely appealing too.
So, why is this actually happening?
What kind of process occurs in our brains that can help us experience all of the feelings
evoked by a great story? Let’s say you are in a meeting room and
you have to attend a PowerPoint presentation by one of your colleagues.
During this process, two parts of your brain, the Broca’s area, and the Wernicke’s area
are activated. These are the language-processing areas, which
help us decode words and determine meaning. Other than that, they don’t do anything.
Therefore, when this process takes place alone, it is almost impossible for our brains to
feel engaged with the speaker, and we consequently lose interest.
When we are being told a story, however, things change dramatically.
Not only are the language processing parts in our brain activated, but so is any other
area of our brain that we would use to experience the events of the story.
In essence, you are not just listening to a story, you are making yourself part of it.
Uri Hasson, Associate Professor of Psychology at Princeton University, in one of his papers, states:
“When we narrate stories that have had a
huge impact in our lives, we can pass the feeling we have experienced to other people too."
During a research study, when the narrator
spoke English, the volunteers understood her story, and their brains synchronized.
When she had activity in her insula, an emotional brain region, the listeners did too.
When her frontal cortex lit up, so did theirs. By simply telling a story, the woman could
plant ideas, thoughts, and emotions into the listeners’ brains.
So, anything you have experienced, you can help others experience the same thing, or
at least activate the same brain areas in them that were activated during your experience.
Storytelling is an essential part of communication. It is the most effective way to learn, digest
information, become energized, be influenced, and get carried away.
Although it seems quite challenging to master the art of storytelling, when you manage to
understand the main principles of a great story, you are in a position to deconstruct
them and build a system off of them. My storytelling system is called S.E.E.U.
and it is inspired by Andrew Stanton’s TED talk, as well as countless interesting stories
I have heard and read. The main pillars of the system are as follows:
Stick to a central theme. Evoke wonder.
Embrace change. Use personal experience.
As Andrew Stanton states: All well-drawn characters within a story have a spine.
This is their inner motor. A dominant, unconscious goal that they are
striving towards. An itch that they cannot scratch.
Michael Corleone, for instance, in The Godfather, was driven by a constant underlying theme,
which was to please his father. It consumed his entire life, and was visible
throughout the movie. When you are telling a story, whether you
want to draw on details from your personal experiences or from somewhere else, try to
be congruent with your theme. Is your story about existential angst?
Is your story about the struggle of being human?
Is it about the depth of your emotional or intellectual world?
Whatever your theme and its emotional underpinning make sure that it prevails throughout the story.
This is what keeps people engaged and helps
them resonate with your emotional world.
And that’s what I think the magic ingredient is.
The secret sauce. Is “can you evoke wonder?”
Wonder is honest, completely innocent and it cannot be artificially evoked.
For me there is no greater ability than the gift of another human giving you that feeling.
To hold them still for just a brief moment in their day and have them surrender to wonder.
When it’s tapped the affirmation of being alive reaches you almost to a cellular level.
And when an artist does that to another artist it’s like you are compelled to pass it on.
It’s like a dormant command that’s suddenly activated in you.
Like a call to the devil’s tower. Do onto others what’s been done to you.
The best stories infuse wonder.
Let me repeat his words so you can realize the profundity of what he just said.
Managing to hold your audience still for just
a brief moment in their day and have them surrender to wonder is a skill that, when
performed correctly, can reach you to an almost cellular level.
A great example of a person who manages to evoke wonder in his speeches is Dr. Jordan
Peterson. Here is a small clip that signifies that:
Beauty is so valuable and we're so afraid of it.
And I think we're afraid of it because it does. It's a pathway. It's not the only pathway
to the divine. I mean, there's lot there's pathways to the
divine love is one of them, I suppose, but beauty, especially for people who have an
affinity for beauty, it's, it's like music. It's one of those things that you can't argue
against. Right? You can't even understand it just hits you.
It shows you, well, it shows you the ideal. That's one way of thinking about it.
It also shows you, I think it's like a vision of the potential future.
It's something like that as well. That if we just got our act together and beautified
things, that that's the place that we can inhabit and that would ennoble us.
And that's why Jerusalem the heavenly city is paved with gemstones.
You know, they're crystalling, they emit light and yeah, it's the proper dwelling place for
an enlightened consciousness. Beauty is the proper dwelling place for an
enlightened consciousness. And we, we ignore it at our spiritual and
economic peril. It's like, it's obvious that beauty, there's almost nothing more valuable
than beauty. He has this incredible ability to talk about
big ideas and attempt to answer life-defining questions, just by choosing topics that can
speak to our unconscious mind and help us feel immediately engaged.
Wonder is strongly associated with themes that are not commonly experienced in our everyday
lives, or with situations that flirt with the idea of the extraordinary and are difficult
to achieve. Whenever you want to spice up your story with
wonder, try to think of events where the protagonist exceeded the expectations of his or her surroundings
and accomplished something beautiful and extraordinary.
So, we are all learning all the time.
and that’s why change is fundamental in story. If things go static, stories die, because
life is never static. In 1998 I had finished writing “Toy Story”
and “A bug’s life” and I was completely hooked on screenwriting. So, I wanted to become
much better at it and learn anything I could. So I researched everything I possibly could
and I finally came across this fantastic quote by a British playwright, William Archer:
Drama is anticipation mingled with uncertainty. It’s an incredibly insightful definition.
When you are telling a story, have you constructed anticipation?
In the short term, have you made me want to know what will happen next?
More importantly, have you made me want to know how it will all conclude in the long
term? Have you constructed honest conflicts with
truth that creates doubt in what the outcome might be?
An example would be in “Finding Nemo,” in the short tension you are always worried,
would Dory’s short-term memory make her forget whatever she was being told by Marlin?
But under that was this global tension of will we ever find Nemo in this huge vast ocean?
Change and anticipation is what makes us crave for more.
Andrew Stanton knows that pretty well and at some point he makes this excellent comment:
Make the audience work for their meal. Give them just enough, so that they want to find
out more. Humans are born problem solvers.
We are compelled to deduce and to deduct because this is what real life actually looks like.
It is this well-organized absence of information that will draw us in.
Give your audience a 2+2 in a story. Never give them a 4.
The elements you provide and the order you place them in is crucial to whether you will
succeed or fail in engaging with your audience.
Use what you know.
Draw from it. This doesn’t always mean in terms of plot
or facts, it means capturing the truth from your experiencing, expressing values you personally
feel, deep down your core. Personal stories help us to speak from our
hearts. Once we do so, the listener immediately identifies
value in our story and can easily relate to it.
As discussed earlier, people want you to make them care, or sometimes even forget.
That is why personal experiences are important. They are the most effective way to make yourself
relatable and help others become lost in your narrative.
The best storytellers look to their own memories and life experiences for ways to illustrate
the message. What events in your life make you believe
in the idea that you are sharing?
The whole world is built on stories.
Religions, political parties, companies, and various social groups are using storytelling
to promote their ideas.
As Yuval Noah Harari wrote in Sapiens:
“Humans think in stories, and we try to make sense of the world by telling stories.”
I don’t know which stories are the best, but there is one thing I know for sure.
If you are not capable of writing your own story, other people will write it for you.
Hi guys, hope you enjoyed today’s video.
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cool please so that more people can discover it.
If you want to watch more videos from my channel, you can check out this one and this one.
Take care, see you soon, Adrian out.