May the best story win

The law of gravity wasn’t Newton’s most notable contribution to science. Inventing calculus, was far more foundational and impactful. Yet, calculus didn’t spark as much public imagination, as did the idea of gravity. Hidden inside this observation is a fundamental truth about how our world works.

An apple falling on Isaac Newton’s head, sparking the idea of gravity is well known in folklore. While the truth maybe dramatised (the apple didn’t fall on his head), the falling of an apple did spark Newton’s imagination, making him ask himself – how did it fall vertically to the ground. It is from this inspiration that he went on to infer the law of gravity (with some mathematics). The reason it didn’t captivate as much was due to this fact – There simply wasn’t a compelling story accompanying the idea of calculus.

Story is a reimagined experience narrated with enough detail and feeling to cause your listeners’ imaginations to experience it as real

-Annette Simmons in Whoever Tells the Best Story Wins/ [1]

Great ideas are stories that spark our imagination.

We see the world & imagine the future through stories

It is unusual, even startling, when two iconic & powerful people from the same tribe feud in public. Especially when the feud is about their vision for the future. In late 2021, the people involved were a famed entrepreneur – Jack Dorsey, (founder of Twitter, Square) and a talismanic investor Marc Andreessen, also the creator of the first web browser (Netscape). Their bone of contention was the currently popular narrative around, cryptocurrencies and “Web3” (referring to the evolving emerging blockchain technology & its applications).

Today’s compelling narrative for web3 technology today is “decentralising power”. A technology designed to taking power away from powerful organisations, banks & even corrupt governments and give it back to the community. Imagine a technology that promises alternatives to a country’s legal tender; topple corrupt authorities; free us (from the supposed tyranny) of banks; protect people’s privacy both – from corporations stealthily selling their data and from authoritarian government surveillance. While both Dorsey and Andreessen see todays world of web3 through this lens, they diverge to polar opposites, articulated through with completely different narratives.

Jack Dorsey envisions a puritan currency (Bitcoin) that is globally dominant, unsullied by associations with dubiously made alternatives, true to the original narrative formed by the technology’s anonymous founder Satoshi Nakomoto.

Jack is a Silicon Valley billionaire, but he says stuff like, ‘I’m not here to make money. I’m here to fix money,’ […] You want to make a quick buck, you get involved in all these other cryptocurrencies. You want to fix something that’s wrong with the world, you work with Bitcoin.’

Alex Gladstein, a privacy advocate whom Dorsey chose as his interviewer at the Bitcoin 2021 conference/ [2]

Andreessen, for instance, see the future from the other end of the spectrum – Blockchain is nothing more than a technology. It should be applied across a wide spectrum of ideas to build businesses. By funding funding a lion’s share those ideas in their nascency, he, through his firm (a16z), will own a dominant share of the future. Similar to how the likes of Facebook, Google, Apple own today’s web.

If crypto turned out to be a security, Andreessen, through his venture firm, was going to be its J.P. Morgan. If it was about electricity, he would be its Thomas Edison. If it was about entertainment, he would be its Michael Ovitz. And if it happened to be about votes, he was going to be its Lyndon Johnson.[…] crypto could be all four. The Information [2]

There is a third narrative that’s worth paying attention to. Challengers [web3 fanatics] focus all their energies towards bringing down the system, highlighting all its flaws. As history has shown, once they bring the house down, they don’t to fully construct the alternative. At best it will be a differently flawed one.

When a billionaire says, ‘I’m going to change a country’s monetary system,’ you see that crypto colonialism is a real thing…The problem with a16z is they indulge in all the Web3 ideology of emancipation and getting rid of intermediaries and big banks, but that’s not what they’re doing.” ,

Jacob Silverman, co-author of “Easy Money” [2]

I’m very skeptical of both of these guys […] Jack tweets things like ‘Hyperinflation is coming to the US’, that’s plain ignorance. They want to take the government and replace it with what—a16z? They’re not content with privatising healthcare and our nation’s defence? Just because they made a ton of money, they can tell us how to run our society? They’re going to tell us how to help African societies? [4]

While the future of the technology and its impact of the world may yet take along time to unravel. The narrative of its potential & the future are stories we tell ourselves.

The stories we tell ourselves have a very real impact on the actions we take today.

What shocks, pains or baffles uncover powerful narratives

Dan Ariely’s is a well known professor of economics at the Duke university. He also wears a half beard. Here’s how he describes his story [5]:

“I was injured many years ago when I was in my late teens. About 70% of my body was covered in third-degree burns & scars, including one side of my face. I was in hospital for about three years and for years after that, I shaved. Then when I was 50, I went on a month-long hike. I went on a month-long hike and during that month it was just me and a friend and I didn’t shave. At the end of it, I looked something like this, although I didn’t plan on keeping it.
But then, I started getting emails from people who thanked me for this half beard, who said that they always feel embarrassed and shy about their injuries. They don’t show them as much, and all of a sudden, they saw me emphasise my injury so strongly. They thought it gave them extra strength to be out and about.
And then something else happened, which is that it helped me accept my own scars and injuries. This is who I am. I have this marks of history, of my own history, on my body and that’s just who I am and it helped me accept it. “

The ability to re-craft a narrative is a super power

In June 2021, Apple Inc launched a direct, frontal attack on the most dominant digital business model of the last two decades. In June 2021 Apple announced that it would curtail applications on its platform from surreptitiously tracking & collecting user’s private data.

Facebook, one of the firms that appeared most vulnerable, attempted to create a different narrative. The company published two full-page print ads in three of the largest newspapers in the US, accusing Apple of being anti-small business, and a threat to “free internet”. Digital publications also broadcasted the story, although with some skepticism. While Facebook’s narrative seemed superfluous and inauthentic, such narratives are not uncommon and are often impactful.

Apple’s response to it underlines the super power of re-crafting the narrative. Tim Cook, Apple’s CEO in a tweet simply said:

We believe users should have the choice over the data that is being collected about them and how it’s used. Facebook can continue to track users across apps and websites as before,[… we only] require that they ask for your permission first.

Tim Cook

Take a guess on which narrative won.

How we get swayed by stories

Which of these two stories appeals to you more?

A) ‘The latch clicked. The sleeping dog woke up’
B) ‘The lacth clicked. The sleeping dog woke up and noticing that it’s master was home, yelped with joy.’

Most people will retain the second story more easily. Here, the two events don’t just take place successively; they are emotionally linked. Story A is factual, but story B has ‘meaning’.

As new events occur in the world, it doesn’t contain any intrinsic form of understanding. We build the meaning into them. When you stimulate human emotions with a story, you point those emotions in a certain direction. You control attention. A vivid story pulls people’s attention so powerfully, that very few can think quickly enough to override that pull.

When you control attention, you control conclusions.

Subjective is NOT the opposite of objective.

If you use story as a tool in a room full of critical thinkers, it is not uncommon to face skepticism. This is for good reason – some of us have been trained to tread with caution on subjective information. There are two ways to expand on this perspective.

First, we realise that subjective storytelling has a different purpose to objective reasoning – to connect the dots, find patterns & infer meaning. Whenever this is enough information and established models to analyse it, storytelling builds over objective reasoning. It does not and should not replace it.

…stories “fulfill a profound human need to grasp the patterns of living—not merely as an intellectual exercise, but within a very personal, emotional experience.”
Robert McKee

Second, however vivid it maybe be, it is important to hold on to a story lightly, especially in the face of disconfirming evidence. That’s how we let it evolve and transform. We allow for a better story, with a new meaning to emerge. The stories of Enron, WorldCom and Theranos form cautionary tales of how meaning changed as new facts emerged, even among the “objective” lot. The question is, could have have happened earlier.

Finally, the storyteller leans back from the design of events he or she has created and asks, “Do I believe this? Is it neither an exaggeration nor a soft-soaping of the struggle? Is this an honest telling, though heaven may fall?”

/- Storytelling That Moves People/ [9]

Stories drive action

While meaning is more powerful than facts, it is also subjective. When people fear the meaning of your facts they’ll attempt to distort, discredit, or ignore them. Likewise, if they like the meaning they embrace, use, even embellish your facts.

Stories that people tell themselves about what objective facts mean to them drives their actions.

References

[1] Whoever Tells the Best Story Wins, Book by Annette Simmons
[2] Jack Dorsey, Marc Andreessen and the Makings of a Crypto Holy War — The Information
[3] Newton’s apple: The real story | New Scientist
[5] Dan Ariely’s Beard — The Accident That Left Him With Half
[6] Tim Cook’s Response to Facebook’s Attack Is the Best Example of Emotional Intelligence I’ve Ever Seen | Inc.com
[7] The Art of Thinking Clearly: Dobelli, Rolf
[8] Story: Style, Structure, Substance, and the Principles of Screenwriting
[9] Storytelling That Moves People