Storytelling

I wake up in the middle of the night with weird ideas sometimes.  Pretty regularly, actually.  Last night I woke up thinking that while a novelist can invent a fairly detailed world, s/he rarely asks the reader to do anything other than to pay attention to the voices for a few hours, and maybe to buy the next book.  A religion, also largely composed of stories, asks for a few minutes a day, or maybe one day a week.  A politician asks for your vote once every few years, in exchange for a story that may or may not lead to any actions or results at all.

The Baron Munchausen's motto is Latin for "in falsehood, truth."  Illustration by Gustav Dore, public domain [source].

Three years in the entrepreneurial community has taught me that above all else, a company is a story.  An entrepreneur building a company might have money (itself a kind of story) to reinforce the story, or s/he might not.  At the beginning, all any company has to sell is a story, either to its customers or to its employees.  If the audience doesn't believe the story, or doesn't care about it, then nothing happens.  And a startup asks its employees to show up for at least 8 hours a day, 5 days a week, which is an almost monastic level of commitment.

So who's the greater storyteller -- the novelist, the politician, the priest, or the entrepreneur?

REFERENCES

http://strippersguide.blogspot.com/2011/05/obscurity-of-day-baron-munchausen.html

https://aeon.co/essays/so-you-want-to-invent-your-own-currency