Excerpt
Story or Die
Introduction"Those who tell the stories rule the world."—Hopi Proverb
As the plane touched down at LaGuardia Airport, I breathed a sigh of relief. Weather had delayed my flight, but we’d made up time in the air and so, thankfully, I’d get into midtown Manhattan in time to make the meeting it had taken months to set up.
But instead of taxiing to the gate, we came to a dead stop in what looked like the middle of the airfield. My anxiety rose as we deplaned down a rickety metal staircase, and, with airport vehicles whisking by scarily close, headed toward a terminal in the distance. Once inside, I sprinted out of the airport and stopped short. LaGuardia, I realized, was in the midst of a massive reconstruction. It was a madhouse. I was searching frantically for a taxi stand, a bus stop, anything, when another weary traveler tapped me on the shoulder and pointed to a very long line. All ground transportation was miles away; the line was for a shuttle bus that would take us there—wherever
there was.
It took more than forty minutes. I was going to miss my meeting for sure.
But that wasn’t what made the experience unbearable. After all, airports need to grow, construction is necessary, and often delays can’t be avoided. I get that.
What made it excruciating was the recording that played over and over as the shuttle bus slowly navigated the rubble. A perky male voice apologized for the delay, and then went on to tell us the inconvenience was well worth it, because of how amazing, elegant, and streamlined the new terminal would be. He extolled the enhanced floor-to-ceiling views of Flushing Bay, the sleek modern construction, how many upscale eateries travelers would soon have to choose from, how spacious it would be, how very relaxing.
The implication was clear: surely we’d feel that our discomfort was a small price to pay because they were building something dazzling. They were wrong.
Because that announcement communicated something altogether different.
What it made abundantly clear to us was that they didn’t care a whit about how we felt at that moment. It was obvious they hadn’t given a thought as to how the delay might actually be affecting us—the connections we might be missing, the exhaustion, the frustration. We were irrelevant. It was all about them and their project.
They were sure that if they gave us the facts as they saw them—about how fabulous the airport was going to be—we’d feel what they felt: that the elegance of the new terminal was more important than our inconvenience. Clearly, those who wrote the script had never been subjected to our experience.
If they had, they would have told a different story: one that focused on what
we needed, instead of what
they needed. They needed to inconvenience us. We needed to feel heard about the toll their inconvenience took on us. For us, it was all cost and no benefit. And it felt like they were rubbing our noses in it.
Or, as Pulitzer Prize–winning media critic Emily Nussbaum recently tweeted: “Wtf is this new ‘walk forever to the taxi stand—and then take a BUS to the taxi’ thing going on at LaGuardia?? Signed, Bus Full of Growling People . . . An ultra-cheery voiceover is now explaining this terrible system & bragging about how great the redesign will be. Everyone’s eyes are filled with murder.”
Exactly.
The takeaway is no one hears you unless
they feel heard. Unless what you’re saying is part of how they see the world, what they care about, and how they see themselves. Otherwise the only thing you’re convincing them of is that you don’t know the first thing about them.
As we’ll see, facts alone do not persuade us—not because we’re stubborn, irrational, or dumb, but because facts are generic, general, and up for interpretation.
Story—the self-narrative that we use to make sense of the world around us—is that interpretation. Story puts facts in context so we can understand their significance and what they
mean to us.
Ever since we added language to our tried-and-true communication system of grunting, hand gestures, and evocative facial expressions (insert image of eyebrow-waggling Neanderthal here), every story that ever got through to anyone, convincing them of something they didn’t already believe, did it by connecting to
their experience. Story was the key to our survival, and every savvy storyteller knew that—how else could they have convinced their tribe that it’s better to harness fire than to run from it?
That’s why when it comes to convincing your audience of anything, the story you create has to tap into their story, so they feel why the fact, the product, the cause, matters to them. Do that and you can change more than minds; you can change lives. Even save them.
That’s exactly what happened in Brazil in 2013. The problem was dire, the kind that makes an airport delay seem like—okay, I’ll admit it—the minor inconvenience it was. In Brazil, people were dying needlessly: the country was facing a growing shortage of organ donors, and the waiting list was impossibly long.
It’s a worldwide problem. In the United States, only 40 percent of people have checked the “organ donor” box on their driver’s license—even though it helps people in need, even though it saves lives, and geez, even though you’ll be dead anyway, so what difference does it make?
You would think checking the box would be a no-brainer. It’s not.
First of all, it’s surprisingly hard to accept the notion that, yes, someday you will die. I remember once in college when a philosophy professor said in passing, “Everyone dies,” and I found myself thinking,
Yeah, everyone but me. Easy thought when you’re nineteen, and everything seems so gloriously hypothetical. Even death.
But accepting that in the long run we’re all goners doesn’t lead directly to checking that box, either. For one thing, it’s unsettling to contemplate your heart being surgically cut out of your chest, put on ice, and whisked away to . . . oh look, a squirrel!
That thought might lead to even darker speculation, like, what if the doctor knows you’re an organ donor and so doesn’t try all that hard to save you? Hey, what if the doctor’s own mother needs a heart, and you aren’t sick at all, and this was just a ruse because your heart will fit perfectly into her chest?
Who wants to take that risk?
In other words, there are myriad deep-rooted barriers to talking about the problem, let alone solving it.
In Brazil, increasing the pool of donors was even more difficult because there is no box to check on your driver’s license and then quickly forget about. Organ donation has to be authorized by the grieving family who, overwhelmed, hurting, and with no idea what their loved one would have wanted anyway, often refuse.
The nationwide shortage of organ donors meant that thousands of people died when they could have been saved, and thousands more were severely impacted. It wasn’t for lack of trying. Earnest awareness campaigns had laid out the facts and figures in perfectly scripted logic-based appeals to civic duty. Didn’t work. For one thing, campaigns like that can feel an awful lot like shaming. After all, even the most rational, objective pitch to change your behavior still tacitly implies you’re doing something wrong in the first place. Why else would you need to change? Plus, who wants to be told what they should be doing? People don’t change because you tell them to. You gotta wanna.
So how do you get people to voluntarily change their behavior?
Story or die. In this case, literally.
