CHAPTER 1

THE POWER OF NARRATIVE

How It Pulls People to Act, Innovate, and Learn

Everyone talks about the importance of story and narrative. Big brands and their marketers do. So do politicians. But they use the terms story and narrative loosely and usually interchangeably, as if they have the same meaning. I make a critical distinction between those two words—one that plays a key role in our journey from fear and pressure to opportunity and unleashed potential.

THE DISTINCTION BETWEEN STORIES AND NARRATIVES

Stories have two key attributes. First, they are self-contained. As Aristotle observed, they have a beginning, a middle, and most importantly, an end. For all their twists and turns, they resolve.

The second attribute of the stories we read (or hear or watch) is that they are not specifically about us. They can be about the storyteller. They can be about other people (or made-up characters if they are fiction), but they are not about us. We can use our imagination to place ourselves in them vicariously, imagining how it might feel to be one of their characters, but in the end, stories are about other people.

Stories are powerful because they excite our imaginations and draw out deep emotions. They can teach us in nonthreatening ways by immersing us in situations that create and resolve conflict and open up new worlds. They can provide us with deep insights into how to respond to particular challenges and opportunities. Their greatest value is that they move beyond our minds to tap into the emotions and spirit that ultimately shape our views of the world and the actions we take in it.

Narratives differ significantly on these two attributes. First, they are open ended. There is no resolution, at least not yet. Some significant opportunity or threat exists in the future, but it has not yet been determined whether the opportunity will be successfully addressed or whether the threat will be overcome. Second, the narrative is about us. It is a personal call to action, because its outcome depends upon what we do. We are not just passive observers but active participants in it.

To be clear, some narratives do resolve, but the resolution is out in the future, and the nature of the resolution is uncertain. It will depend upon the actions taken (or not taken) by those who are called to act. Suppose a narrative is focused on a potential threat: an invasion by an enemy country. That threat may become a reality if we choose not to act, it may be averted if we build strong enough defenses, or it may continue to exist indefinitely, requiring us to remain constantly vigilant.

Companies may seek to motivate action from their customers by calling attention to a big threat they face. A healthcare company might focus customers’ attention on life-threatening diseases and seek to motivate action through their fear of death. A better, more powerful type of narrative is opportunity based. Opportunity-based narratives focus instead on the ability to achieve a positive impact for yourself or for those you care about by doing something previously thought impossible. These opportunities can take many different forms. They may be business opportunities, in the sense that they generate and capture significant economic value. They may be personal opportunities, like the ability to help children grow and develop in richer ways. Or they could be social opportunities, like the ability to foster communities whose members are committed to helping each other in times of need. Whatever their context, the key is that they identify opportunities that can inspire and excite people in ways that will help them to move beyond fear and achieve more meaningful impact.

High-impact, opportunity-based narratives should focus on opportunities that will not be resolved for a significant period of time, so they can motivate and mobilize large numbers of people. One example is the opportunity to ensure that everyone in the world has access to potable water. If all the right people mobilize and work together toward its fulfillment, we may someday fully realize this opportunity, and the narrative will come to an end (at which point it will become a story). Of course, there could be progress along the way. Someone could find a creative approach that delivers water to certain villages in Bangladesh. This could then inspire local entrepreneurs to do the same for other villages, in even more cost-effective ways. The broader opportunity—bringing high-quality water to everyone—would still be unresolved, but we could now tell a story about how success was achieved in Bangladesh and use it to inspire others to take action in other parts of the world.

Threat-based narratives can be reframed as opportunity-based narratives. Take the example of the healthcare company. Rather than focusing on the danger of life-threatening diseases, the company might focus on our opportunity to live healthier lives. This could inspire us to take broader and more sustained actions to cultivate our well-being, ultimately reducing our risk—and our fear—of disease.

Some opportunities are unlikely to ever be fully realized but are noble and irresistible quests, so they provide the foundation for enduring narratives. Take the example of a narrative that focuses on the opportunity to achieve more of our potential. If you believe, as I do, that our potential as humans is limitless, then this narrative will continue to unfold indefinitely.

Narratives have played major roles throughout history. Every major religion is driven by an opportunity-based narrative. Christianity, for example, teaches that we are born in sin, but a savior came to earth to redeem us. Salvation is not guaranteed; we must first accept that savior and live by his teachings. Buddhism doesn’t involve a personal savior but offers a path to happiness through meditation and renunciation. Islam requires its followers to surrender to the will of Allah. Salvation, nirvana, and surrender are never fully achieved; their pursuit becomes a way of life. Beyond one’s personal redemption, religions offer their followers opportunities to help others by encouraging them to make the right choices. As such, they become the bases of communities.

Successful political movements are driven by narratives as well. The Marxist narrative, for example, has had tremendous impact in many parts of the world. It offers an opportunity to build a fair society in which everyone prospers. But first, workers must mobilize to overthrow capitalism. Their actions determine how the narrative will resolve.

Stories are effective because they engage us emotionally. I would argue that narratives have even more power. Throughout history, they have motivated millions of people to work and struggle against seemingly impossible odds and even to make the ultimate sacrifice. Consider the Christian martyrs or the Bolsheviks who died in the Russian Revolution, driven by the opportunity to build a socialist society. Or look at the early Jewish settlers in modern Israel, who were willing to fight and die for their promised land. The willingness to make that ultimate sacrifice is a power that few, if any, stories can inspire. What makes narratives so powerful is their explicit call to action—the message that their successful resolution depends upon what we do.

I’m not suggesting that narratives should replace stories. Narratives and stories reinforce each other in powerful ways. The story about bringing water to those villages in Bangladesh strengthens the credibility of the larger narrative about bringing water to the whole world. Individuals and companies will be more motivated to join the effort when they see that others are making progress. On the other side of the coin, a story gains more power if it can be positioned in the context of a broader narrative. What happened in Bangladesh was not just a one-off event but part of something much bigger: the yet-to-be-achieved opportunity to bring water to everyone. Narratives describe the journey and why it’s worth the effort, while stories help us to understand the steps along the way and the impact that can be achieved.

Here’s a business example. A car company crafts a narrative urging us to broaden our horizons by exploring the world, venturing into areas we have never visited. The narrative might suggest that the opportunity is to discover our passion in unexpected areas. The company then reinforces that narrative by telling stories of people who explored new areas and made discoveries that ignited a long-term passion.

Narratives without stories are too abstract, and stories without narratives can have limited impact. When I was growing up, stories were extremely important to me, but they only provided me with a temporary escape. They inspired me with hope, but they didn’t provide me with a sense of agency—a call to action that could change my life—because they were about other people. I needed a narrative that would motivate me to improve not only my own life but also the lives of others, inspiring them to join me in the same quest. It wasn’t until many years later that I found it.

In a world of mounting pressure, we have a natural tendency to become passive. Overwhelmed, we begin to lose the hope that we can make a difference. The power of narrative is that it moves us from observers to active participants. It helps persuade us that what we do matters.

Narratives help us overcome our fear-driven passivity by giving us a sense of a future that is worth striving for today. By focusing us on an inspiring opportunity, they help us avoid the risk of simply becoming reactive to whatever is going on at the moment and spreading ourselves too thinly across too many fronts.

Narratives also provide stability, and in a world of accelerating change and uncertainty, this is critical. We become disoriented and anxious when we lack something to hold onto. Perhaps this is why one of the most significant global trends over the past 50 years has been the growth of fundamentalist religions, which emphasize rules, precepts, and codes of behavior that never change.

Narratives don’t have to last an eternity (although some do have that potential). But they must pull us out of the present and persuade us that something significant lies ahead, providing us with a North Star that gives us a long-term objective, rather than an anchor that holds us back. In short, narratives have the power to do four things:

•   Focus us on the future. Narratives help us overcome our natural tendency to hide away when we are consumed by fear. By defining some compelling opportunity or threat in the future, they help us look ahead, motivating us to invest the time and effort necessary to achieve something that has not yet been achieved.

•   Focus us on action. Narratives point to actions we can take today to address the longer-term opportunity or threat, helping us to overcome the passivity that often grips us when we are driven by fear. Action then drives a powerful form of learning that is different from what we can learn by listening to a story. When we learn through action, we gain insights into what kinds of actions have the greatest impact, allowing us to evolve them in real time.

•   Focus us on others. Narratives help us overcome our fear-driven sense of isolation. They bring us together, so we can amplify our impact and learn even faster than we could on our own. The shared commitment helps build trust and a sense of deep connection that motivates us to take even bolder actions.

•   Catalyze passion. As I’ll develop further in later chapters, narratives can be catalysts for a specific form of passion, the passion of the explorer. This passion shifts our reaction to unexpected challenges from fear to hope and excitement, motivating us to overcome whatever obstacles we might encounter in pursuit of our long-term goals.

DIFFERENT LEVELS OF NARRATIVES

Narratives can be defined and pursued on multiple levels: personal, institutional, geographical, and movement based. Chapters 2 through 5 will explore each of these in greater depth, but here’s an overview:

•   Personal narratives. Although the term personal narratives may sound like stories about you, these narratives actually are designed to help you gain support from others. Instead of explaining what you have done in the past, they describe what you want to accomplish in the future, why others would want to join you, and what would motivate them to make that effort.

•   Institutional narratives. At the institutional level, narratives connect people who do not work for the institution with opportunities related to the institution’s mission. A bank might have a narrative that focuses on what we must do to ensure that our children lead even more fulfilling lives than we have. If people respond by doing more long-term financial planning, the bank could attract new customers, increase the loyalty of its current customers, and potentially expand the array of services it offers them. But the call action is not “subscribe to more of our services.” The narrative should reveal a deep understanding of what the customer needs, inspiring them to seek it out themselves.

•   Geographical narratives. Powerful narratives have emerged around cities, regions, and even countries, contributing to their success at different points in history. These geographical narratives draw people to a place and align them so they can achieve something meaningful. At the turn of the last century, Vienna had such a narrative, which was about the opportunity to move beyond the narrow focus on reason in the Enlightenment and to explore the complex motivations that shape human behavior to develop a much deeper understanding of what it means to be human. This made Vienna a magnet for talent in many different disciplines. Today Silicon Valley has a narrative about the opportunity to change the world with digital technology.

•   Movement-based narratives. Religious, political, and economic movements utilize narratives to address a significant opportunity or threat. For example, the abolitionist movement in the 19th century brought people around the world together to seek the emancipation of slaves. Movement-based narratives are largely independent of geography or seek significant change within a geography, as in the case of a liberation movement in a country ruled by a dictator.

Narratives have the greatest impact when, at a minimum, the first three levels are aligned. In contrast, if our personal narrative is not effectively aligned with the narratives of our institutional and geographical settings, we will grow frustrated and find it difficult to seize the opportunities we desire.

The story of my life has in large part been an effort to align my evolving personal narrative with both an institutional and a geographical narrative. At one point, I began to evolve a personal narrative of venturing out beyond well-established areas and exploring emerging “edges,” but at the time, I was involved in institutions that were risk averse and had narratives that encouraged people to follow well-established paths. My personal narrative didn’t achieve real impact until I ventured out to institutions and places that embraced the desire to explore the edge.

I should pause here to explain what I mean by “edge,” since I will be using this term frequently. Edges are areas that provide rich opportunities for learning in the form of the creation of new knowledge. Edges can be new domains, like new waves of technology, new generations of people coming into our economy and society, or economies around the world that are rapidly developing. Edges can also be the boundaries between existing domains, like the borders between two very different communities or the walls that separate academic disciplines, like economics and history. When we venture out onto edges, we are likely to move beyond our comfort zone, but we are also likely to learn a lot faster than if we remained in the areas we already know well.

OPPORTUNITY-BASED NARRATIVES HAVE MORE POTENTIAL THAN THREAT-BASED NARRATIVES

As noted earlier in this chapter, narratives may be either opportunity based or threat based. Which type of narrative you choose to pursue will have a significant impact on your mindset, emotions, and actions.

Threat-based narratives—those that tell you a significant threat is approaching—tend to reinforce a negative mindset and a feeling of fear. Threat-based narratives magnify our perception of risk, shorten our time horizons, cause us to fall into a zero-sum view of the world, and make it difficult for us to trust others. In sum, they exaggerate the perception of pressure and amplify all the natural human reactions we have to it. They move us to act but in very narrow and often unproductive ways.

The political environment in the United States is increasingly driven by threat-based narratives. We’re under attack, the enemy is coming to get us, we’re all about to die (or at least lose everything we hold dear) unless we move quickly to fight the enemy. The enemy differs, of course, depending on your political beliefs, but the message from both sides of the aisle is clear: we are in imminent danger. Is it any wonder that these threat-based narratives feed our fear, accelerate our loss of trust, and shrink our time horizons?

Opportunity-based narratives, in contrast, help us overcome our natural human reactions to threats and fear. Think of the “I Have a Dream” speech that Martin Luther King Jr. delivered at the Lincoln Memorial in 1963, during the March on Washington for Jobs. What made his speech so inspiring was the opportunity it described for all of us to come together and live as equals.

Because opportunity-based narratives move us to act in positive ways—to seize a future opportunity—they help minimize our feelings of fear and strengthen our feelings of hope and excitement. Opportunities in this kind of narrative tend to be ones that can be more easily achieved if others join the quest, and they expand with the number of participants. So we are no longer dealing with a zero-sum view of the world with a fixed set of resources, but with a positive-sum view of a world in which new resources can always be found and opportunities are continually expanding.

By highlighting the potential rewards available to the many, opportunity-based narratives encourage us to collaborate, leveraging each other’s capabilities so we can move faster and with greater impact than if we were acting alone. As we shift to a positive-sum view of the world, we become more willing to trust others.

One especially beneficial aspect of opportunity-based narratives is that they can pull in people we might never have met otherwise. Such serendipitous encounters can be hugely valuable in your journey. Some historians have suggested that the origin of the modern feminist movement in the United States was the serendipitous encounters between women who were drawn into the civil rights movement, who then hatched the idea of a similar movement dedicated to creating more opportunities for women.

As we will see later in the book, the Silicon Valley narrative has inspired people from all over the world to come to Silicon Valley to start businesses that leverage digital technology. One of the keys to its success is the serendipitous encounters that occur in meeting rooms and social gatherings, connecting people who otherwise would have never met. The conversations that result from these encounters often generate new ideas and approaches to the challenges entrepreneurs confront as they seek to bring new technologies to market. As one example, Sergei Brin was the student who took Larry Page on the tour of the Stanford campus when Larry was applying to graduate school there. This chance meeting led the two founders of Google to connect and come up with an idea for a company to help people more readily access the vast array of information being made available on the internet.

Opportunity-based narratives also accelerate learning and drive innovation. Look back at John F. Kennedy’s inspirational challenge to Congress and the nation in 1961 to come together around the opportunity to land a man on the moon within the decade. The unprecedented opportunity he framed brought many groups of scientists and engineers together, not just at NASA but also at universities and scientific institutions around the country.

More recently, an entrepreneur named Peter Diamandis created an opportunity-based narrative about the commercial potential of space travel. He made the opportunity much more tangible by offering a $10 million prize to the first privately financed team to build and fly a three-passenger vehicle 100 kilometers into space twice within a period of two weeks. The resulting contest motivated 26 teams from seven nations to invest more than $100 million. Eight years later, an entrepreneurial team won that prize. But the opportunity framed by the narrative was much bigger than that one prize and helped to catalyze a new multibillion-dollar industry.

As their number expands, the participants in a narrative tend to cluster into small groups and try different approaches to achieving the opportunity. Everyone gets to observe the impact of these approaches and integrate aspects of the successful ones into their own activities. By moving in parallel and continuously reflecting on what they—and others—have done, they learn much faster than any one person could on his or her own. Opportunity-based narratives thus harness the power of “pull”: they pull out more of the participants’ potential by accelerating learning.

I need to stress something here. The distinction between threat- and opportunity-based narratives is not black and white; the reality is more complex. Narratives that are primarily focused on a future threat may also make some reference to the opportunity that awaits if the threat is defeated. However, those narratives focus more on the threat because the consequences of failure are so severe. Opportunity-based narratives likewise acknowledge the challenges and obstacles. In fact, an awareness of challenges and obstacles is essential for these narratives to succeed. If there is no challenge or problem to solve, the narrative will be less likely to motivate people to act. As Kennedy said in his moonshot speech, we choose to accept the challenge not because the things we will have to do “are easy, but because they are hard.”

WHAT ABOUT METANARRATIVES OR “GRAND NARRATIVES”?

You may also have heard of another kind of narrative, called a metanarrative or “grand narrative.” These are a popular topic in the academic world. While definitions vary, metanarratives or grand narratives typically offer a comprehensive explanation of how the world works. For example, the grand narrative of the Enlightenment was that rational thought and science would inevitably improve the human condition.

Today, many grand narratives compete for our attention. The globalist grand narrative says that the more connected the world becomes, the greater the prosperity for everyone. The urbanist grand narrative declares that more and more people will come together in ever larger and more prosperous cities, and that those who don’t will be left behind.

Grand narratives are very different from the kinds of narratives I describe, as they tell us how the world inevitably works. Because of this, they tend to foster passivity. Whether for good or ill, this is how things are, they say. We can’t change that; we can only accept it and act accordingly.

WHAT ABOUT VIDEO GAMES AND VIRTUAL REALITY?

Many of my techie friends have pushed back on the distinction I make between stories and narratives. They point out that video games and, more recently, virtual-reality platforms are not self-contained. That’s true. Although some video games have an end and declare winners (and losers), others can be played endlessly with ever-increasing levels of challenge and reward. World of Warcraft is one of the best-known examples of an endless video game. Drawing us into an incredibly complex virtual world that involves warring groups on fantasy planets, it offers us the opportunity to shape the outcome of the battles that will determine who ultimately wins the war. We are most definitely not just passive observers.

The rise of simulated-reality platforms takes it to another level. With those, we are drawn into environments where, unlike video games, few rules or even guidelines define the actions we can take. Take the example of Minecraft, which has amassed over 126 million active players worldwide. There’s the challenge of staying alive in dangerous environments, but the real attraction of Minecraft is the opportunity to collaborate on creating awesome structures, including forts, schools, and supermarkets. We explore and create the environment, rather than just passively observe it.

While these games and platforms don’t meet my criteria for stories, they aren’t narratives either. They might inspire action in the real world, but that isn’t their primary objective. Their goal is to draw us out of our current environment to explore some imaginary worlds. This will be even more true as virtual-reality experiences become more broadly available. A true narrative provides a call to action now and in the real world. Perhaps we could classify video games and simulated-reality platforms as “virtual narratives”? This would acknowledge that they are different from stories and don’t meet the criteria for true narratives. But it doesn’t allay my concern that these virtual narratives can foster passivity in the real world. By providing us with such rich alternative realities, they can motivate us to withdraw from reality.

Of course, technology will continue to challenge the classic boundaries between reality and virtual reality. I’m particularly intrigued by the potential of the augmented-reality platforms that overlay virtual elements onto the world we interact with daily. The global craze for Pokémon Go in 2016, in which players attempted to “catch” the virtual creatures on street corners, restaurants, and in their own bedrooms, suggests how popular they may become. Games like that certainly motivate us to venture out into the real world in search of opportunities. But again, the opportunities are virtual rather than real. We are not motivated to change the world, but simply to use it as the context for an imaginary quest. This could, and likely will, change over time. We already have early augmented-reality tools that can be used by workers to get more information and insight about their environments. For example, there are headsets for surgeons that provide real-time information about their patients.

I can imagine a growing range of simulated-reality, virtual-reality, and augmented-reality platforms that will help participants seeking to address longer-term threats or opportunities in the real world. It’s not hard for me to imagine a narrative crafted around the opportunity to “grow” human organs in the laboratory so we no longer have to rely on donated ones. Augmented-reality devices could be very helpful in assessing the viability of organs and could help surgeons transplanting them. But such devices would be tools that support a narrative, much as online discussion forums and search tools do today, rather than representing the narrative itself.

WHAT MAKES A STRONG OPPORTUNITY-BASED NARRATIVE?

From this point on, I will focus exclusively on opportunity-based narratives; I will only mention threat-based narratives to highlight how they differ from those that focus on a big opportunity in the future.

Through working with dozens of individuals and companies to craft their narratives and crafting my own, I have found that the most powerful opportunity-based narratives have the following qualities:

•   The narrative is aligned with broader forces shaping the global landscape. If the opportunity you have framed does not align with current social and economic trends, no amount of effort will help you accomplish it. An opportunity needs to be achievable. If the forces of the world are conspiring against it, you will have a hard time mobilizing and sustaining the support you need. For example, if your narrative focuses on the opportunity to shift from fossil fuels to alternative energy sources, it will be aligned with the broader technology trends that make it feasible. If you believe the opportunity is to return to wood-burning fires as our primary source of energy, that narrative is not likely to get much traction.

•   The narrative invites open-ended participation. Powerful narratives frame opportunities for action and impact at a very high level but leave enough room for individuals or small groups to be creative. By remaining at a high level, they can evolve to accommodate changing circumstances (and will have to, since the opportunity framed by the narrative is likely to take a long time to achieve). Framing the opportunity as the development of alternative energy sources needn’t lock a company or person into a specific source, nor must it specify the technology that will be required to harness its full economic potential.

•   The narrative defines the opportunity with enough detail and context to motivate and focus participants. To justify a significant effort by participants, the opportunity needs to be credible (although not inevitable); it must have enough detail and context to ensure that participants will operate in complementary and reinforcing ways, rather than fragmenting into less effective camps. For example, various movements seeking to promote “social justice” have floundered because the opportunity is so broad and subject to so many interpretations that it has been difficult to mobilize enough people in a sustained way. Movements seeking to promote the rights of specific ethnic groups or women have had much more impact.

•   The narrative defines an opportunity that appeals to many participants. If the opportunity affects only a small group of people, it will likely have far less impact than one with a much broader appeal. Of course, context matters here. If this is a personal narrative or a narrative for a small community, the number of people drawn to the narrative may matter less than if it is a narrative for a large institution, country, or movement.

•   The opportunity amplifies other opportunities. A challenging but important principle is that, wherever possible, it is helpful to show how the opportunity that is the focus of a narrative connects with and amplifies other opportunities. If your personal narrative is focused on the opportunity to cultivate awe-inspiring gardens, it would be helpful to explore how this opportunity could support other opportunities that excite others, like helping marginalized people find productive work or helping to capture carbon from the atmosphere. This will help bring others into your cause, even if it’s only a small subset of people.

•   The narrative defines an opportunity with deep emotional appeal. A good narrative shouldn’t be simply rationally attractive. It must tap into people’s hopes, aspirations, and excitement to sustain them on their quests, given how many challenges and obstacles they are likely to meet. Remember the previous example of a bank whose institutional narrative is helping our children lead more fulfilling lives. If that narrative had been framed in purely financial terms, it would have had far less impact.

•   The narrative is realistic about challenges and obstacles. A strong narrative excites people about the opportunity while also alerting them to the risks. Yes, there’s a fine line here. You want to avoid threat-based narratives. But the message needs to be that the opportunity is not a given or predetermined. Achieving it will take effort, because the obstacles and roadblocks standing in the way of its completion are not trivial and cannot all be predicted.

•   The narrative presents positive-sum opportunities. A strong narrative creates incentives for many people to come together to address the opportunity. If we’re in a zero-sum world, where either you win or I win, it is much more difficult for us to collaborate. In contrast, if we’re in a positive-sum world, where we expand the rewards by working together, we are much more motivated to collaborate with each other—and to invite still more people to work with us.

•   The narrative provides tangible and relatively quick benefits to early participants. Powerful narratives reduce barriers to entry by delivering results to early participants, without requiring them to invest a significant amount of time and effort. For example, a narrative that focuses on the opportunity to develop alternative energy sources can focus on deploying some of the viable technologies that already exist, even though there is a long way to go before they can fully replace fossil fuels.

HOW DO YOU CRAFT A POWERFUL OPPORTUNITY-BASED NARRATIVE?

As we will explore in more detail in the chapters ahead, narratives are not words on a page. You can’t create a narrative just by writing it down. Narratives emerge from action—action that is sustained over time. They can start with inspiration, with individuals or groups acquiring some sense that a significant opportunity exists—for example, for the clients of a bank to help their children to lead more fulfilling lives—but these narratives take shape and evolve through action.

Action is also key to both credibility and learning. If we’re not taking action to help our children lead more fulfilling lives, we’ll never really understand what actions have the greatest impact. If an individual or small group sees an opportunity and does nothing beyond writing it down, they will be far less credible when inviting participants to join that narrative. They would be more successful if they put their words into action. If the key executives of that bank are not helping their own children lead more fulfilling lives, no amount of marketing is going build trust and credibility in the narrative. When participants take action, they sharpen their view of the opportunity and generate insight into how they can most quickly seize it. As others join in, the learning expands.

It is often helpful to step back and articulate the narratives, whether they were conscious or not, that got you to the point where you are today. In doing so, you may find that your call to action focuses on an opportunity that is not the most meaningful to potential participants or that it is not framed in a way that can really motivate them. By looking at the impact (or lack of it) you’ve achieved in the past, you may discover opportunities to achieve far more.

You might also benefit from reflecting on the ways you have participated in other people’s narratives in the past. Was the opportunity they were framing truly meaningful to you? Perhaps you should embrace someone else’s opportunity as your own or work to help them reframe their narrative so they can achieve even more impact. You might also reflect on whether the actions you are taking are the most impactful ones you could be doing. These reflections could be helpful for a broad range of narratives that are relevant to you: your personal narrative, an institutional narrative, and the broader geographical and movement-based narratives you are contributing to.

Here’s a piece of good news: we now have at our disposal an increasingly powerful set of digital technologies that can help us assess the impact of our existing narratives while simultaneously drawing more people to join us. To understand what marvelous tools digital technologies are, think of the great narratives of the past. To penetrate society, they had to transcend the confines of their existing communications media. Major religions often relied on core texts at the outset, and of course, proponents of the religions could spread the word through inspiring speeches. Then they evolved their approaches as the available media did: they moved into art, music, theater, and later radio, film, and video to spread the narrative. But that was just the beginning. The most successful religious leaders and teachers today leverage the full range of new technologies, like social media and instant messaging.

Moving to a business setting, imagine the resources a healthcare company could harness to communicate a narrative around the opportunity to improve consumers’ wellness. It could use printed texts and videos to provide an initial call to action, but that’s just the beginning. It could convene small groups of people interested in wellness to meet on a regular basis. These groups could then connect into larger online communities.

Digital technology allows anyone to define and communicate their narratives in rich and textured ways that supplement conventional text-based forms of communication. These methods often have much greater reach. As one example, look at the success of “Kid President” (Robby Novak), who when he was 11 years old did a YouTube video in which he shared an inspiring narrative about the opportunity for all of us to come together to create something that will make the world an amazing place. The video went viral and reached more than 30 million views. Certainly, Black Lives Matter and other contemporary political movements have found ways to engage a larger number of people by using social media and online platforms. We have the tools; we need to put them to good use as powerful new narratives emerge.

Finally, let me be clear that narratives themselves are tools. When I talk about the power of narrative, I am talking about its power as a tool. It is up to us to use them in ways that unleash that power.

BOTTOM LINE

Narratives are a powerful tool to help us on our journey beyond fear, but they must be understood and applied in a very specific way.

   Narratives are very different from stories: they are open ended, without a resolution, and have an explicit call to take action to make a resolution possible.

   Narratives that focus on opportunities in the future have the greatest potential to help us overcome our fear and motivate us to take action. Threat-based narratives tend to feed the fear and should be avoided if our intent is to move beyond fear.

   Narratives are not just words on a page. They emerge and evolve through action. The most effective narratives bring people together to pursue action together.

   Narratives can be developed at multiple levels, explored in more detail in Chapters 2 through 6.

   Strong opportunity-based narratives have certain characteristics that can be helpful to understand as we craft our own narratives.

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