Storytelling.
This has become a very popular concept.
It's become a buzzword.
Something that we hear a lot.
And rightfully so.
I talk about this a lot and I want to clarify why
I believe that storytelling...
Is the most powerful force that
will drive and shape our future.
and the number one reason is because
it has always been the most powerful force
that drives and shapes our future.
It's the narrative. The idea...
That we're buying into.
And this is really important to stress here.
And that is...
"The future."
it's not something that's out there...
that's set in stone
that we're gonna one day arrive at.
But the future is just an idea.
That's it because by the time it becomes concrete,
by the time become something that...
we can put our hands on...
it's the present.
So first and foremost we have to understand...
That the future is just an idea.
It's a story.
And when you recognize that then you can start to say:
"well what kind of story are
we actually creating?"
And this is what influences and creates our future
more than anything else.
One of my...
favorite examples of this
is the story of Robert Rosenthal
who was a Harvard psychologist.
And in 1966 he met with elementary school teachers
and he told them that he had a new assessment,
a new methodology that could predict which
students were gonna have a high level of
achievement and which were not.
And of course I'm paraphrasing
so some of the facts here may be a little wrong but the
overarching idea around the story is the same.
And that is that he told these
teachers he needed to sit down and
interview all the students.
And they said, "sure."
Absolutely go ahead and do it."
and he sat down with each student asked him
a series of questions and when he was done with that
he came back to the teachers
and he presented his findings to them
and he showed that roughly 20 percent or so
of the students that he had interviewed
had a high potential for achievement
over the rest.
And the rest he said, "these are going to be
average to below average.
So the deal was that he would come back in a year...
and they would determine whether or not
his methodology worked or not.
And so, sure enough,
he comes back in a year.
The teachers are blown away.
They tell him that, "you were spot on."
"Your methodology works. You're exactly right."
"These students that you had selected...
they all were the highest achieving in the class."
"Whereas everybody else was below average."
Well, what was more astonishing to them
is when he revealed that
these students...
Were actually just selected at random.
There was no methodology that would
distinguish one from the other when it
came to achievement.
He selected them at random because
his real experiment was to show that
the story he was telling...
If the teachers bought into this...
that they would create that.
He was showing the power of narrative...
Our beliefs and our ideas.
Essentially, he told them a story
they believed it.
They created it.
This is why it's so key...
for us to know, to be conscious of the stories
that are guiding and influencing our lives today.
Because we're being bombarded with them
every single day.
We have to be engaged with the story.
Otherwise we have to just suck it up
and deal with the role that we've been given...
The direction that the story goes in...
and hope that it works out in our favor.
But there's that other way.
And that's the way where you wake up and you realize
and you start to ask the question:
"Is this the story that I want for my future?"
