Story-tellers

As part of a leadership workshop, we had an interesting exercise in one of the sessions, wherein the trainer gave the 100 member group a simple word (RUN) and asked each one of us to write as many words that come immediately to our mind in 60 seconds. While it wouldn’t be surprise to some of you but as a group we had 500+ words that came out of the exercise (ranging from Speed, movies, millennials, marathon, fitness, up-hill, elope,…to so many unique ones) and there wasn’t even 1 word that was commonly thought by all.

The point that I used to think and resonated well in that session was that every day, every hour, every min, every second and every nano-second, we are a story teller whose brain is nothing but a meaning making machine. Our brain is like a factory with complex machines that are constantly producing innumerable meanings of facts and stories that we are seeing around.

My simple formula of us as human beings is - Fact ∞ (as a function of) Mindset = Story

In the above exercise, we were all given a simple fact (a word RUN) and we all applied our mindsets / experiences / past / perspectives / attitude...and many more things to come up 500+ stories in less than a minute. Imagine when for such a simple word, there can be so many stories, then how knowingly n unknowingly we apply the same equation with our colleagues, peers, seniors, juniors, family, friends, and even strangers innumerable times in a day.

A few strong statements and please don’t take it personally –

My story is that 99.9999999999% of the things that we say in a day are stories and we assume them as facts. Our strongest of opinions about other people {e.g., ye to aisa hi hai J}, situations, circumstances, are nothing but a story and then we get caught in the trap of ‘My story is better, more convincing, fact based or credible than yours’ ….and whosoever wins the argument, we accept his/her story as a fact.

As I said, don’t take it otherwise and if related to our day to day lives, to me even God is a story, Universe is a story, Relationships are a story, the fact that ‘the font size of this email is black’ is a story. We consider these as facts because some people at some point of time agreed on something, it didn’t get further challenged and got universally accepted to be called a fact…

To make it more real from our day to day lives:

Corporate visions are a story...

Feedbacks are a story, Ratings are a story...

I love you is a story, I hate you is a story...

Relationship is a story, Expectations are a story... :)

I am not here to win the battle of Fact n Story but at least getting present to the realization that we are all story tellers at the end of the day coming from different perspectives, walks of life and often believe in our story so strongly that we misunderstand it a fact. So it’s all about whenever next you are speaking to anyone (personal or professional), realize that we are discussing two different stories and not facts.

To me life is all of us being Painters in this world, having so many brushes and colors around and we all are drawing different paintings. The only mistake we often make is consider us in a painting competition and get into the stories of good, better, best, ranking, ratings, grades and so many other traps.

It’s like the theory of ‘Connecting Dots’ by Steve Jobs that we all have countless dots around us and it’s up to what do we want to make out of them – Positive, Negative, Motivating, Demotivating, Neutral, Comparisons, Rejections, or any other story

My entire blog is story and it’s there to be thrashed, mocked, accepted, rejected, appreciated, or even ignored by the stories you may choose to make.

But the point is to realize that we all are meaning making machines churning out stories every moment since we have a very powerful tool called WORDs and the software of the brain is to keep producing meanings.

So if we are in the business of stories 24*7, 365 days a year, it up to you make your stories a Super hit, Blockbuster, and be remembered for a lifetime just like some of our all-time movies like Titanic :)