Essentials of Stories that Last Forever
Peter Guber advises readers to tell stories that become Never-ending Stories. Stories so powerful and effective, they take on a perpetual life of their own. From in-progress reading Guber’s Tell to Win, Doug Lipman’s Improving Your Storytelling and Jack McGuire’s The Power of Personal Storytelling I distill and correlate some elements of a successful story.
A story’s success is directly measured by the response to the call to action at the end. That happens when the story touches the spirit of a person in their hearts. The three qualities of the spirit are: truth, awareness and joy: in no particular order.
Truth: Storytellers need to be authentic, stories need to be personal or eyewitness accounts.
Awareness: Transporting the audience through gestures, pauses, imagination, visualization, involving as many senses as possible.
Joy: If the heart is touched, emotions will be stirred - hopefully in the right direction. Although the ending may be sad or happy, the joy of transformation is beyond the duality of happy/sad. The joy of the resolution need to be distinctively there. Like a magic trick’s prestige stage when both the audience and the performer bask in the glory of a big finish.
Will you make storytelling a tool in building your digital tribe? Let me know. I am eager to hear your story.
