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Blink 3 of 8 - The 5 AM Club
by Robin Sharma
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The Storytelling Edge summary
Shane Snow and Joe Lazauskas
How to Transform Your Business, Stop Screaming into the Void, and Make People Love You
20 mins
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Table of Contents
The Storytelling Edge
Summary of 6 key ideas
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Key idea 1 of 6
The human brain is wired to find stories more engaging and memorable than simple statements.
Many years ago, a French poet named Jacques Prévert happened to meet a blind beggar in the street. Jacques asked him how things were going. Bad, the beggar replied – he hadn’t heard a single coin land in his hat all day. Jacques, a poor writer, didn’t have cash to spare, but he offered to rewrite the sign that explained the beggar’s situation. Two weeks later, the men met again. Things had improved. Folks were generous these days, the beggar said, and his hat was always full.
So what did Jacques write on the beggar’s sign? “Spring is coming, but I won’t see it.” Why did this help make people more generous toward the beggar?
The answer is also the key message in this blink: The human brain is wired to find stories more engaging and memorable than simple statements.
Imagine a high school health class. The teacher cites statistics about drug-related deaths and concludes that drugs are dangerous. Next door, his colleague takes a different approach. She puts up a slide of a handsome teenager and introduces the class to Johnny. He was a good kid, she says, but he had problems at home and started taking drugs to make himself feel better. She then shows an image of a sickly looking man with missing teeth – it’s Johnny ten years later. Drugs, she concludes, are dangerous.
Which class is more memorable? The second one, right? Here’s why.
Neuroscientists have a saying that “Neurons that fire together, wire together.” What they mean is that when multiple parts of the brain are working together, we’re much more likely to remember due to that cognitive work.
Logical statements like “drugs are dangerous,” for example, engage just two parts of the brain – those responsible for language processing and comprehension. When we hear stories, by contrast, our brains light up like switchboards. Suddenly, we’re also processing emotions and images, imagining sensations, and using the part of the brain that’s responsible for cognitive planning.
Now think back to our high school example. In the first class, students processed abstract statements and numbers – tasks the human brain can complete without breaking a sweat but often struggles to recall. In the second class, though, students were giving their gray cells a real workout. They were busy picturing the details of Johnny’s life, wondering how his problems compared to their own, and asking themselves whether they would also take drugs if they were in his shoes.
This barrage of neurons makes the second lesson much more “sticky.” Whatever their choices, these students will likely think back to poor Johnny if they’re ever offered drugs.
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What is The Storytelling Edge about?
The Storytelling Edge (2018) is a study of communication by two content strategists who’ve taken an old Native American proverb to heart – “those who tell the stories run the world.” As Shane Snow and Joe Lazauskas assert, it doesn’t much matter if you’re an individual, a business, or a government: if you want to thrive in today’s world, you need to be able to tell your story as convincingly and fluently as possible.
Best quote from The Storytelling Edge
When we get information through stories, we engage more neurons. As a result, the story is wired into our memory much more reliably.
—Shane Snow and Joe Lazauskas
Who should read The Storytelling Edge?
- Marketing and advertising pros
- Brand managers and copywriters
- Entrepreneurs looking for new ideas
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