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What's Your Story?
In the movie Amistad, John Quincy Adams, played by Anthony Hopkins, states that winning an argument or a lawsuit boils down to just one thing: “The side with the best story wins. So, what's their story?”
- Eight-year-old Bruce Wayne witnessed his parents' brutal murder. Vowing retribution, the traumatized boy became the comic book superhero Batman. That's Wayne's story.
- The founders of Uber experienced a futile wait for a taxi on a snowy night. When no cabs drove by, they came up with the idea of ordering a private limo through an app and Uber was born. That's their story.
- After shuttling back and forth between her divorced parents' households, 17-year-old Oprah Winfrey earned a full scholarship to Tennessee State University. When she was a freshman, the local CBS affiliate offered her a job. At nineteen, Winfrey became Nashville's first African American co-anchor. Today, Winfrey is among the most admired and respected people worldwide. That's her story.
These types of tales are known as Creation Stories. They represent the most common form of myth and are found in all human cultures.
Moses crossing the Red Sea. The life of Jesus. The Buddha's awakening. The founding of the United States of America. Alexander Graham Bell saying, “Mr. Watson come here, I want you.” Steve Jobs' calligraphy courses.
All of these are creation stories.
What's Your Story?
Creation stories are cultural, religious, or traditional myths that depict the earliest beginnings of the subject. While not always accurate, a creation story typically conveys profound and universal truths.
And it's not just cultures, celebrities, corporations, or comic books that craft these stories, either. Examine the story of your life. Whether you explore the narrative of your career, religious beliefs, political views, or your family's journey, you'll discover a rich and meaningful collection of origin stories explaining how you arrived at where you are now.
My erudite friend, Ed Wasserman, even has a story about creating these stories.
Ed told me that during college, he had a professor named Charles Lindblom who wrote an article titled The Science of Muddling Through about something he called Incremental Rationality. According to Lindblom, decisions and outcomes achieved without a plan or an overarching theme tend to be quite effective because there is rationality in making decisions based on the best available information at the time.
Ed found this comforting even though it contradicted the narrative coherence and clarity most people insist on when discussing their own creation stories. That clarity is based on a script we tell ourselves in hindsight because we all want to be the hero in our own movie.
But these stories, no matter how impressive they may seem now, didn't feel that way when we were muddling through life. At the time, we were making educated guesses based on who we thought we were, who we wanted to be, and what that entailed. We were trying to make those around us happy and align our actions with what we thought we wanted. Above all, we were making decisions with only a dim, imperfect understanding of the actual consequences of our choices.
What's Your Story?
Take a moment to revisit a time when you made a decision, along with a list of the pros and cons involved. Looking back, you'll realize how little you comprehended the consequences of your choices. For example, you might have taken a job because you believed it would propel you in a specific direction, only to glance at the desk next to you and fall head over heels in love with the person sitting there. You end up marrying that person and completely altering your life. Looking at it this way, you realize that you didn't fully grasp what you were doing—you were making the best choice you could at the time.
That brings us back to Hopkins' question:
If “the side with the best story wins,” what's YOUR story?
My first job after graduating for college was with IBM. I really didn’t like my job – at times I even hated it. I didn’t feel like my talents and skills were being utilized but I kept plugging away hoping that I would get a job in the IBM education center teaching. I was also doing a little speaking on the side and thought that might be another possible career path. I had been taking evening graduate classes at Florida State University and decided that I would apply for an educational leave of absence from IBM. The leave would give me two years to finish my degree. I only needed a year so I thought I would finish the degree and then take the next year to see if I could make it on my own. IBM would be my security blanket backup in case things didn’t work out. On the day I found IBM had rejected my educational leave of absence, an issue of SUCCESS Magazine arrived in my mailbox with the cover story – “IBM Renegades: Where are they now?” The article talked about several former IBM employees who took a risk when they left IBM to start their own businesses. Inspired by these stories, I resigned from IBM to complete my graduate degree and then start my own speaking business which I have been doing ever since.
Comment *My Grampa, who was Manager of the Buckhorn Museum in San Antonio, gave me my first magic trick in the summer of 1949. I was six years old, living in Del Rio, Texas, where I was born. The trick was a Magic Coin Box, which I could show empty and then produce a real penny. Ta Da!
My dad noticed how much I liked that trick, and for Christmas that year he gave me an A.C. Gilbert Mysto Magic set. I opened that set, looked at all the mysterious things within, and said, “I’m going to be a Magician!”
That’s MY creation story.
What’s YOUR story?
Will Rogers started learning rope tricks at age 4. By adulthood he was world class, which eventually got him performing (silently) on Vaudeville stages. When both his wife Betty and famous producer, Florentz Ziegfield, knowing Will was naturally funny, encouraged him to talk while doing rope tricks his career took off. That lead to movies, syndicated newspaper columns, and radio, making Will Rogers the most famous American of the 1920s and ’30s.
As 3, 4 and 5 year old impressionable children, our best gifts every birthday and holiday were books from Bubee. Not just any books – but books with pictures and stories well beyond our capabilities at that age. Always something surprising and new. Beautiful art books (hand sketches) and geometry books with all types of diagrams – triangles, rectangles, pentagrams, sloped lines, curves. She would say – can you draw these? What else can you draw? “Look at these images of thousand year old mystery ruins. Wouldn’t it be neat to take an adventure there?” Then one day, she read us the stories of a giant man, Alexander the Great! “He was the Architect of the Middle East”. From that day on, I was going to be an Architect. Little did I know that he was a waring king and little did I know what an architect was. I had no comprehension of the consequences of that decisions – but I was on my way.