 everyone has a lot of familiar faces around here so I'm just gonna start off with looking for this so I basically got introduced to the power story when I was six years old and so I lived in a normal house with my parents we had a garage and in this garage we had a huge gaping hole in the ceiling no one really knows how it got there we're pretty sure no we're pretty sure the guy before us put it there by accident but anyway it was it was always a source of like interest for all my friends so all my friends were what I come over and be like oh what's in this hole the only way to kind of persuade them that this hole wasn't something that they should be looking in was to convince them or tell a story that there were scorpions in the hole I'm not sure if it was because I was such a good storyteller or kids are idiots but it stopped people going a hole the problem though then was that the kids would tell their friends and then our friends would tell their friends and then sooner soon enough everyone in the school wanted to see your scorpions so yeah be careful with stories because if they go wrong you've really got a big deal that you can't stop so just to introduce what kind of we do or what kind of I do is copywriting so for copywriting to work you have to engage people and the only way you're engaging people is with your writing so it's kind of a science because you have to look at how your words are going to affect people and how how they react and test things so if if something works sometimes you don't really know why but things do work and things don't work and you just have to kind of go with what you're doing and test and test until you've got something perfect so we have a lot of persuasive techniques to do this to engage people and to kind of persuade them to like you it's the thing that we do you can't see it here but there's lots of other writing on it the main point is the best way we can do this is with stories everything else is a persuasive technique is kind of a posh tactic so you're trying to influence them by saying oh we're the best and you need to buy this but if you pull a user pool tactic basically you're you can imagine it as you're a magnet and you're trying to draw people towards you with your stories so when they start coming towards you on their own being because they've heard about the things themselves it's much more powerful because people are then kind of persuading themselves they've already made their idea up about you and you just have to kind of finish it off then so what are stories stories are basically descriptions of events so stories consist of a character a conflict and then a resolution this is a basic story so you can make a story about anything it kind of the power of the story is that you can kind of simulate an experience for someone so someone who's never done that thing before you can put it into context for them and so they can understand why someone did something that way and the emotions that kind of ran through them to make them think how they think so what's upon the time 400,000 years ago was about the time when people were starting to gather around campfires to cook their food and with this a culture emerged where people would explain their experiences of the day the saber-toothed tiger that they fought off the mammoth that they didn't quite catch because they're huge and who wants to eat a mammoth so these kind of stories then ingrained in us because it's been such a long time that people were doing this for it it came a part of the culture and people realize this like people who wrote the religions they made sure that every single every single religion that you'll see they have a big story book with it they don't have a book just telling you don't kill people they have a book telling a story of what are the consequences of this person killing this person and how will that react how will that come on to you what's interesting though is because of stories stories were basically the greatest part greatest thing for getting your information out because people would understand it and then they'd keep it going they'd tell their next generation they tell their friends and this was the power of the stories again so because of this we have a big science called geomythology so geomythology is basically the study of old stories that relate to earthly events so a tidal wave an island got sunk by a tidal wave or volcanoes you know where fire filled the air because of this there's a Aboriginal tribe in Australia and they reviewed interviewed sorry one of these elders and they interviewed him about some of his old stories in the area so he told of this smoke cloud coming in one day and people from the from the village would go into this smoke cloud and get burned alive people whoa that's a it's a crazy story why is this it turns out that in this exact area about 7,000 years ago there was a volcano which spewed out a hot ash cloud and this would have killed people on site as soon as they touched it they would have burned and because of stories this eyewitness account was then able to be retained for people to remember for 7,000 years which is incredible so what stories are and what they are not this is what's happened now so we kind of are in a state of information overload so people have too much to think about and so all the information is just getting thrown on to the fire people don't really know what to do with it so if a decent story you can put those facts and that information into a context which people would then be able to react with and understand and then use themselves so they can you can put your information in a form that actually people understand and you can fight your arguments from both sides you're not looking like you're trying to say it from one side and influence someone you're kind of just saying how it is and people then infer their own meaning from it and convince themselves so stories to make them good or make them interesting for people to then share you need to have unexpectedness so you have to get their attention in first place what copyrighting does a lot of the time and what people are kind of using too much is this process called interrupt so people are just interrupting someone one time with say you can do it really well if you just use someone's name if you've ever heard your name being called out you'll stop immediately look it's not for me carry on with your day but this kind of interrupt advertising agencies and everyone they're using it so much now that you kind of becoming more and more numb to this so it's okay to use unexpectedness we have to follow it up then concreteness so you need to make the story tangible so this to do this you kind of need people to really be able to feel it to taste and smell to understand what this information is so a good example is to give something that people understand in their context so for instance this bag of popcorn contains the same fat content as a Big Mac meal an English breakfast and a steak dinner all together now you can understand how much fat is in that popcorn you probably won't have popcorn next time you go to the cinema right credibility so you can do this with people that are already authority figures so you could do this with a doctor or with someone who's already proven themselves this is kind of why books like Tim Ferriss is on the shoulders of Titans works because people want to know about the people who have done it before because it's already credible because you already seen that they've done it this way so then their story is more relevant to you because you like well this is a good story but the thing with credibility is it needs details so to have details you need people to be able to compare the information for themselves and the only way to do this is to give them a way that they can understand so if you said three billion people suffer from poverty in the world most people can't put this in context they don't understand three billion people so you can't test that yourself you can't say whether that's a credible fact or not you just kind of let it go it's not really interesting for you if you said one in three people suffer from poverty in the world then you can start summing that up you can test this yourself and if it comes out one in three people oh yeah she is poor then you can start thinking okay the rest of the story has got credibility and it'll take off more so emotional is getting people yeah actually passion isn't something that's emotional passion you can have as much passion as you want but if someone doesn't actually feel the emotion for your topic then they're probably gonna lose that topic if you can engage them with some sort of well this is from the New York Times of things that got shared so the most the ones that got shared the most with anxiety anger and awe and practical value so people would share this stuff but people don't share sadness people don't want to share the emotion of things that make them sad so if you're writing something make sure you're not making it too sad because people don't want to share that people don't even want to hear about it usually and simplicity so if you're gonna write a story or a parable make it about one clear thing with one clear point people will then be able to latch on to that when they want to make their point so yeah this is an example of the WWF campaign with a story emotional unexpected it's it's got everything here then from this because of how humans can comprehend and make inference seven words let you know that story don't let this be my last selfie that's a story because you've got even in seven words you understand what that's saying you're saying okay I'm a lion my conflict is that I'm endangered I'm probably gonna die my resolution would be help us with sending your tweets to this so I'm not talking about huge epic stories to write a huge epic story you have to kind of think about Joseph Campbell's The Hero's Journey this works because you're always keeping people in suspense you're always giving them like an emotional roller coaster which they'll follow through so this is a good formula if you want to write a huge epic novel but really an epic novel is never gonna have as much impact as say just a small story so how would you do it you choose what your story is gonna be about so say you are a CEO and everyone's saying okay we need to move first we need to move first we need to get our technology at the forefront of this but you as a CEO you don't want to you you want to stay back a little bit you want to see what other people are doing so everyone's telling you come on the early birds catching the worm they're all doing it you'd have to think okay what can I come up against that so you choose what your story was going to be about and that was not being the first mover then you choose some interesting components for it so you'd have maybe a character in there you'd have a conflict and then you try and pick the resolution that you want and then you put it all together so to do this you could do the second mouse gets the cheese so from just that you can make a story so you can say okay the fat mouse was the second in to get the cheese and you'd like what's this mean well it means the first mouse got the mouse trap and died so you want to be the second mouse and from that people understand the context of it all okay so stories you should have would be you're going to tell them again and again is a story of who you are so you want to tell people in your own terms who you are and the best way to do this is with a story so this is why kind of Steve Jobs and Bill Gates and Walt Disney they're probably not that nice in real life but because of the stories you've heard you kind of build rapport with them before you've even met them because of who they are and they've made their story fictional because if you realize what they've actually done to some of the work then you want to say why you're here so what do you bring to this meeting you'll have this over and over like you'll have to meet new people all the time and so if you haven't had a chance to say who you are then you have to say why you are and then you can have another story which are your values in action so this kind of explains why you are why you are so if you have these three stories and you've made them yourself you can literally be prepared for any kind of situations so I want to leave you with one last point which is a story I'd like you to imagine the truth is a girl so truth is a girl and she's on in the winter of St. Petersburg and it's cold and she's naked you know she's got nothing to hide she's not shamed she's just naked but cold and alone no one in the village will let her into their houses because she's naked people don't like to see this people it makes people uncomfortable so a parable this guy parable he picks her up he takes her back to his house and he puts a cloth of story around her he says now try again go out into the world so she goes out but this time everyone in the houses lets her in invites her to eat with them around her to around their tables and this is why stories are so powerful thank you questions answered the truth is you will always kind of exaggerate the details to get the point across and that's the joy of the story because you're not really lying to someone you're just telling it in a way that makes it better for you but yeah it's it's a tricky one you can't really tell a story that is a lie because you need certain elements of truth for people to pick off on because if you don't have any kind of truth and I say it's raining upwards or you I know you miss you meet Mr. Tom this and he invites you to this snowy area you need something that kind of puts them into that area first so CS Lewis did it with like the wardrobe so if you can get them out of reality then actually there's no boundaries to your stories you can literally lie your way for it but you do have to have some truth in that otherwise people just won't give it any credibility and they won't share it yeah so you really have to distill it with kind of make it as simple as possible it is difficult but there's only three points that you really need for a story which is the character and a conflict and then a resolution so if you just have a character in a conflict which would be yourself and this is the point and then you just you can basically make people not make but let people simulate their own experience from what you're saying so if you've if you've ever been in a situation and you think oh if someone else was in this exact situation and I could convince them this way then the best way to do it is just to tell them a story of your situation and how it made you feel and how you came about and solved it yeah right yeah so just yeah because yeah this is the joy of the story like you can really let people simulate their own experience so they can be there and they're not there but they'll have the same kind of feeling that you had and same thoughts that you had so yeah and then there was actually scorpions there no it was just what I wanted to say is once it had started and once it had already like taken off and people grabbed onto this story you can't stop it like you can say oh it's a lie but people still they believe these stories and they'll keep going with them as long as they can and this is the problem if they hear a lie so because they'll grab onto this lie and they'll keep every single fact that you're throwing at them they'll use that fact in their own story they're not gonna it's it's really hard to stop them believing what they think they know right thank you I think probably in the Middle Ages they were more practical stories so they weren't so well they still exaggerated so they still had dragons and they still had things that didn't exist as a way to kind of explain away these phenomena that they didn't really understand and that's why kind of these geomorphology things worked and they got stored because people would explain things so the sky was on fire what does this mean like people could never really understand that but then it's the story not the story but as our science progressed and we understood what happened back then then we can realize oh it was on fire because it was a huge volcano spewing ash everywhere so yeah it was always just back in the Middle Ages I guess they just used stories the same as we kind of do today although not for the purpose of influencing or selling they kind of used it just to teach and survive around here thank you