Stories

Let me tell you a story.

There’s this woodcutter who wants to clear the land around his cabin. He goes out at dawn the first day and works until sunset. He’s exhausted, but he’s cut down 57 trees! Proud of himself, he goes to bed and sleeps the sleep of the dead. The next day, inspired by his work the day before, he goes out and works twice as hard. However, by nightfall he’s only cut down 41 trees. Disheartened but not beaten, he vows the next day to be back up to 57 – or more. At dawn, he girds himself and heads out. He works even harder than his second day but by dusk he’s only cut down 29 trees. 

            Now despondent, he heads back to his humble cabin to eat his humble meal of gruel, which he can only look at. Where did he go wrong? The more work he puts in, the less he gets done!

            His wife, darling that she is, notices his complete loss of enthusiasm and gently asks what’s up. He tells her the story of the last few days – how every time he puts more effort in to the task, his results diminish.

            “Harold,” she says to him, for ‘twas his name. “Did you take the time to sharpen your axe?”

Now, it would be far more efficient for me simply to tell you that the human adult needs 7-8 hours of sleep per day or that recreation is an important factor in productivity. Efficient, perhaps. But would you remember it as well?

            We tend to forget, especially in a world where we demand our devices (and perhaps our employees) to be as efficient as possible, that efficiency is not the default mode for human beings. Facts are fine, but stories – by far the less efficient method of getting information across – are what we thrive on.

But why take that fact at face value? Let me tell you another story.

I was living  a few thousand kilometres away from the 8.0 magnitude earthquake that hit Sichuan, China in 2008. It was devastating to that area, but barely felt where I was. Still, the heartbreaking stories that came out after the rescue attempt began put everyone in a kind of there-but-for-fortune-go-I mood.

One night, around ten or eleven o’clock, I got a phone call from a young Chinese woman I knew. She was terrified.

           “People in my dorm are saying there’s another earthquake coming and that it’s coming to this city!”

            I was flabbergasted. How could a 21^st-century university student, by now at least partially-versed in how earthquakes work thanks to the 24-hour media coverage of the Sichuan quake, believe A) earthquakes can be predicted and 2) they travel from one place to another?!

            Yes, I could have spouted facts about the nature of tectonic plates and seismic activity to show her that she didn’t have anything to worry about. (And, knowing me, I probably did just that. Well, really, what would you have done?) But would that have changed her mind? No. She’d believe the stories. The stories will always be more real to her – more immediate – than any number of facts.

This is what Nassim Nicholas Taleb, in his seminal work The Black Swan, calls the narrative fallacy. We attach far more import to stories than we do to mere facts. If we’re flying to New York and sitting beside someone who’s telling us about his brother-in-law who was mugged and killed in Central Park, leaving his children fatherless and his wife a shell of a woman, we’re going to think twice about visiting Central Park. No amount crime statistics will shake that niggling feeling at the back of the brain created by that story.

And yet, advertising, an industry that spends hundreds of billions of dollars for the slightest fraction of an edge over a competitor, still (mostly) spouts facts at us. In world where people constantly change and embellish their personal stories in the form of status updates and tweets, advertisers drone on about how so-and-so car is the most fuel efficient in its class or how such-and-such has an improved flavour. Or worse. One car ad takes that preachy, I-know-more-than-you-ever-will tone of stating facts, and takes out any kind of factual information!

“It’s everything fun . . . dialled up.”

What does that say about anything?! Who exactly are you trying to sell to?!

For those of you unfamiliar with the Heritage Minutes in Canada, they were (are) 60-second short films depicting some great (or, more often, not-so-great-but-at-least-notable) moment in Canadian history. They do not list facts. They do not give opinions. They do not tell. They do present a story. And, more importantly, they do cause one to remember them. How many commercials from 20 years ago can you remember? Me, neither. But, I can remember a huge swath of Heritage minutes.

Prairie dogs can list facts. Only humans can tell stories.

I once worked with a woman who called herself a ‘professional storyteller.’ I have no idea what she meant by this (as soon I heard that kind of pretension I tended to avoid her), but how is that any different from what every single one of us does every day? We are all telling our own story – to our friends, our co-workers, our employers and, most importantly, to ourselves. I’m not talking about status updates and tweets this time (although those are related) – I’m talking about the inner monologue we tell ourselves, rewriting our past, shaping our present and creating  our sense of self every single day.

Professional storyteller? Bah! We all are. And those who tell the best stories get remembered.