Best Story Wins

Stories are always more powerful than statistics.

T he best story wins.

Not the best idea, or the right idea, or the most rational idea. Just
whoever tells a story that catches people’s attention and gets them to nod
their heads is the one who tends to be rewarded.
Great ideas explained poorly can go nowhere, while old or wrong ideas
told compellingly can ignite a revolution. Morgan Freeman can narrate a
grocery list and bring people to tears, while an inarticulate scientist might
cure a disease and go unnoticed.
There is too much information in the world for everyone to calmly sift
through the data, looking for the most rational, most correct answer.
People are busy and emotional, and a good story is always more powerful
and persuasive than ice-cold statistics.
If you have the right answer, you may or may not get ahead.
If you have the wrong answer but you’re a good storyteller, you’ll
probably get ahead (for a while).
If you have the right answer and you’re a good storyteller, you’ll almost
certainly get ahead.
That’s always been true, always will be true, and it shows up in so
many areas of history.

—
Martin Luther King Jr.’s famous speech at the Lincoln Memorial on
August 28, 1963, did not go according to plan.
King’s advisor and speechwriter, Clarence Jones, drafted a full speech
for King to deliver, based on, he recalled, a “summary of ideas we had
talked about.”
The first few minutes of King’s speech followed the script. Video
shows him constantly looking down at his notes, reading verbatim. “Go
back to Georgia, go back to Louisiana, go back to the slums and ghettos of
our northern cities, knowing that somehow this situation can and will be
changed.”
Just then, around halfway through the speech, gospel singer Mahalia
Jackson—who was standing to King’s left, maybe ten feet away—shouts
out, “Tell ’em about the dream, Martin! Tell ’em about the dream!”
Jones recalled: “[King] looks over at her in real time, then he takes the
text of the written speech and he slides it to the left side of the lectern. He
grabs the lectern and looks out on more than 250,000 people.”
There’s then a six-second pause before King looks up at the sky and
says:

I have a dream. It is a dream deeply rooted in the American

dream.
I have a dream that one day this nation will rise up and live
out the true meaning of its creed: “We hold these truths to be
self-evident, that all men are created equal.”
I have a dream that my four little children will one day live
in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their
skin but by the content of their character.
I have a dream today!

The rest was history.

Jones said, “That portion of the speech which is most celebrated in this
country and around the world is not the speech that he planned to give.”
It wasn’t what King prepared. It wasn’t what he and his speechwriter
assumed would be the best material for that day.
 But it was one of the best stories ever told, evoking emotion and
connecting the dots in millions of people’s heads in a way that changed
history.
Good stories tend to do that. They have extraordinary ability to inspire
and evoke positive emotions, bringing insight and attention to topics that
people tend to ignore when they’ve previously been presented with
nothing but facts.
Mark Twain was perhaps the best storyteller of modern times. When
editing his writing, he would read aloud to his wife and kids. When a
passage caused them to look bored, he would cut it. When their eyes
widened, when they sat forward or furrowed their brow, he knew he was
onto something, and he doubled down.
Even within a good story, a powerful phrase or sentence can do most of
the work. There is a saying that people don’t remember books; they
remember sentences.

—
C. R. Hallpike is an anthropologist who once wrote a review of a young
author’s new book on the history of humans. The review states:

It would be fair to say that whenever his facts are broadly

correct they are not new, and whenever he tries to strike out on
his own he often gets things wrong, sometimes seriously [It
is not] a contribution to knowledge.

Two things are notable here.

One is that the author, Yuval Noah Harari, has sold over twenty-eight
million books, making him one of the bestselling contemporary authors in
any field, and his book Sapiens—which Hallpike was reviewing—is the
most successful anthropology book of all time.
The other is that Harari doesn’t seem to disagree with Hallpike’s
assessment.
Harari once said about writing Sapiens:
 I thought, “This is so banal!” . . . There is absolutely nothing
there that is new. I’m not an archeologist. I’m not a
primatologist. I mean, I did zero new research. . . . It was really
reading the kind of common knowledge and just presenting it in
a new way.

What Sapiens does have is excellent writing. Beautiful writing. The

stories are captivating, the flow is effortless. Harari took what was already
known and wrote it better than anyone had done before. The result was
fame greater than anyone before him could imagine. Best story wins.
It’s nothing to be ashamed of, because so many successes work this
way.
The Civil War is probably the most well-documented period in
American history. There are thousands of books analyzing every
conceivable angle, chronicling every possible detail. But in 1990 Ken
Burns’s The Civil War documentary became an instant phenomenon, with
forty million viewers and winning forty major television and film awards.
As many Americans watched Ken Burns’s The Civil War in 1990 as
watched the Super Bowl that year.
And all Burns did—not to minimize it, because it’s such a feat—is take
130-year-old existing information and weave it into a (very) good story.
Burns once described perhaps the most important part of his storytelling
process—the music that accompanies images in his documentaries:

I went into old hymnals and old song books and I had
someone plunk them out on the piano. And whenever
something hit me I’d go, “That one!” And then we’d go into a
studio with a session musician and probably do thirty different
recordings.

Burns says that when writing a documentary script he will literally

extend a sentence so that it lines up with a certain beat in the background
music; he will cut a sentence to do the same. “Music is God,” he says. “It’s
not just the icing on the cake. It’s the fudge, baked right in there.”
 Now imagine you’re a world-class historian who has spent decades
uncovering new and groundbreaking information about an important topic.
How much time do you spend thinking about whether a specific sentence
of what you’ve discovered will match the beat of a song? Probably none.
Ken Burns does. And that is why he’s a household name.
Author Bill Bryson is the same. His books fly off the shelves, which
can drive the little-known academics who uncovered the things he writes
about crazy. One of his books—The Body: A Guide for Occupants—is
basically an anatomy textbook. It has no new information, no discoveries.
But it’s so well written—he tells such a good story—that it became an
instant New York Times bestseller and The Washington Post’s Book of the
Year.
There are so many examples of this.
Charles Darwin was not the first to discover evolution; he just wrote the
first and most compelling book about it.
Professor John Burr Williams had more profound insight on the topic of
valuing stocks than Benjamin Graham. But Graham knew how to write a
good paragraph, so he became the legend and sold millions of books.
Andrew Carnegie said he was as proud of his charm and ability to
befriend people as he was of his business acumen. Elon Musk is as skilled
at getting investors to believe a vision as he is at engineering.
Everyone knows the story of the sinking of the Titanic, which claimed
fifteen hundred lives.
But almost no one ever mentions a word about the 1948 sinking of the
Chinese ferryboat SS Kiangya, which claimed nearly four thousand lives.
Or the 1987 sinking of the ferryboat MV Dona Paz, which killed 4,345
people.
Or the capsizing of the MV Le Joola, which claimed 1,863 lives off the
coast of Gambia in 2002.
Perhaps the Titanic sticks out because of its story potential: the famous
and wealthy passengers, the firsthand accounts from survivors, and, of
course, the eventual blockbuster movie.
The influence of a good story drives you crazy if you assume the world
is swayed by facts and objectivity—if you assume the best idea or the
largest numbers or the correct answer wins. There’s a devoted group of
Harari critics obsessed with showing how unoriginal his work is; Musk is
viewed with the same mix of confusion and contempt.
In a perfect world, the importance of information wouldn’t rely on its
author’s eloquence. But we live in a world where people are bored,
impatient, emotional, and need complicated things distilled into easy-to-
grasp scenes.
If you look, I think you’ll find that wherever information is exchanged
—wherever there are products, companies, careers, politics, knowledge,
education, and culture—the best story wins.
Stephen Hawking once noted of his bestselling physics books:
“Someone told me that each equation I included in the book would halve
the sales.” Readers don’t want a lecture; they want a memorable story.
Winston Churchill was, by most accounts, a mediocre politician. But he
was a master storyteller and orator, a savant at getting people’s attention
through motivation and provoking emotion—which is what made all the
difference during his time in office.
Or take the stock market. The valuation of every company is simply a
number from today multiplied by a story about tomorrow. Some
companies are incredibly good at telling stories, and during some eras
investors become captivated by the wildest ideas of what the future might
bring. If you’re trying to figure out where something is going next, you
have to understand more than its technical possibilities. You have to
understand the stories everyone tells themselves about those possibilities,
because it’s such a big part of the forecasting equation.
Perhaps no one has mastered the art of storytelling better than
comedians. They are the best thought leaders because they understand how
the world works, but they want to make you laugh rather than make
themselves feel smart. They take insights from psychology, sociology,
politics, and every other dry field and squeeze out amazing stories. That’s
why they can sell out arenas while an academic researcher who discovers a
great insight about social behavior can go unnoticed.
Mark Twain said, “Humor is a way to show you’re smart without
bragging.”

—
A few things about good stories worth remembering:

When a topic is complex, stories are like leverage.

Leverage squeezes the full potential out of something with less effort.
Stories leverage ideas in the same way that debt leverages assets.
Trying to explain something like physics is hard if you’re deadlifting
facts and formulas. But if you can explain things like how fire works with
a story about balls rolling down hills and running into one another—that’s
what physicist Richard Feynman, an astounding storyteller, used to do—
you can explain something complex in seconds, without much effort.
Stories do more than persuade others. They can help you just as much.
Part of what made Albert Einstein so talented was his imagination and
ability to distill complexity into a simple scene in his head. When he was
sixteen he started imagining what it would be like to ride on a beam of
light, holding on to the sides like a flying carpet and thinking through how
it would travel and bend. Soon after, he began imagining what your body
would feel like if you were in an enclosed elevator riding through space.
He contemplated gravity by imagining bowling balls and billiard balls
competing for space on a trampoline surface. He could process a textbook
of information with the effort of a daydream.
Ken Burns once said, “The common stories are one plus one equals
two. We get it, they make sense. But the good stories are about one plus
one equals three.” That’s leverage.

The most persuasive stories are about what you want to believe is true,
or are an extension of what you’ve experienced firsthand.

Poet Ralph Hodgson put this well when he said, “Some things have to be
believed to be seen.” Poor evidence can be a very compelling story if that
story scratches an itch someone wants to go away, or gives context to a
belief they want to be true.
Stories get diverse people to focus attention on a single point.

Steven Spielberg noted this:

The most amazing thing for me is that every single person

who sees a movie . . . brings a whole set of unique experiences.
Now, through careful manipulation and good storytelling, you
can get everybody to clap at the same time, to laugh at the same
time, and to be afraid at the same time.

Mark Twain once said he knew he was a successful author when Kaiser
Wilhelm II said he’d read every Twain book, and later that day a porter at
his hotel said the same. “Great books are wine,” Twain said, “but my
books are water. But everybody drinks water.” He found the universal
emotions that influence everyone, regardless of who they were or where
they were from, and got them to nod their heads in the same direction. It’s
nearly magic.
Guiding people’s attention to a single point is one of the most powerful
life skills.

Good stories create so much hidden opportunity among things you

assume can’t be improved.

How many great ideas have already been discovered but could grow one
hundred times or more if someone explained them better?
How many products have found only a fraction of their potential market
because the companies that made them are so bad at describing them to
customers?
So, so many.
Visa founder Dee Hock once said, “New ways of looking at things
create much greater innovation than new ways of doing them.”
You’ll get discouraged if you think every new book has to be about an
original idea, or that every new company has to sell a brand-new
invention. There is so much more opportunity if you see the world like
Yuval Noah Harari—that it’s not what you say or what you do, but how
you say it and how you present it.

Some of the most important questions to ask yourself are: Who has
the right answer, but I ignore because they’re inarticulate? And what
do I believe is true but is actually just good marketing?

They are uncomfortable questions and difficult to answer. But if you’re

honest with yourself you’ll see how many people, and how many beliefs,
fall into these buckets. And then you’ll see the truth—that the best story
wins.

—
Next I’ll share another timeless truth: It has to do with war, fitness, stock
markets, and other crazy things that cannot be measured.