Business
Steve Jobs once asked who the most powerful person in the world is. The answer: the one who knows how to tell stories. Because a story creates something in someone's mind, and attachment follows.
Steve Jobs walked into a meeting once and asked everyone, do you know who the most powerful person in the world is? Everyone offered an opinion. He asked again, do you know who the most powerful person in the world is? And then he answered: it is the one who knows how to tell stories. Because when we know how to tell a story, we know how to create something in someone's mind. And once we have created something in someone's mind, a bond of attachment forms between that person and us, or our business. And bonds of attachment lead to actions favorable to us or to our business.
So it is worth learning to tell stories. Preferably true ones. But then, what is reality? Reality is a sum of subjective truths, or pseudo-truths, based on each person's intuition, inspiration, imagination, and knowledge. That is what makes it interpretable. Our moral compass is what determines the valence of the interpretability of the stories we tell. And why does that valence matter? Because our product may reach and touch destinies, in one way or another, maybe ten people, maybe a hundred, a million, a billion, why not. For us to create something of real value for people, we should be careful how we tell the story. We can tell it interpreted in our favor, in others' favor, or somewhere in a balance aimed at the goal we want.
I want to dwell on the moral compass part, because storytelling is a power and powers can be misused. A story creates something real in another person's mind, and that is exactly why it carries responsibility. The same skill that lets you help someone feel comfortable making a choice that genuinely serves them also lets you manipulate someone into a choice that harms them. Reality is interpretable, and you are choosing the interpretation. Your compass is what decides whether you tell the true story in a way that serves the listener, or twist it in a way that serves only you at their expense. The craft is neutral. What you do with it is not, and because a product can touch a million lives, the stakes of that choice are not small.
And what is that goal? The sale? Is the sale the goal? Or is the buyer's experience the goal? Could it be both? It could be both, why not, because in the end the sale is our desired experience too. Stories, in general, are tied to emotion. Remember, people want to feel an emotion. When we talk with someone, people are seeking new experiences through us. When we look at something, we are seeking new experiences. The act of creating a new experience for myself requires a degree of emotion, both the one we want to feel in the experience and the one we want to give in exchange to obtain it.
There are countless manuals on how to write stories, countless copywriting books, many authors, some more popular than others. And yet the story rests on emotion. The ability of our mind to turn words into emotion, and to understand the reader's need and the type and character of the emotion they want to experience, is the only thing that might actually matter for anything we write. If we understand what kind of emotion the reader wants, and we can turn that emotion into a string of words that resonates with them and creates that emotion, it leads, again, to a pattern of attachment, which leads to actions favorable to us and our business from the reader who will, then or later, become our customer.
So how do you check that a product or service creates the emotion you want, before you invest heavily in it? There is a technique in the copywriting world of associating with the customer, this notion of getting into bed with the customer, sleeping a night in their shoes. I think it is more than that. I think it is our capacity to embody the customer. That is easier if we are a potential customer of our own product. The capacity to embody the customer, to be their mind, not to get into their mind but to be their mind, leads to understanding the emotions they have, or could have, or want, in the process that leads to a sale.
This matters especially when the product is not for us, when it is for a different market. Passion is certainly important when you create, and it helps you make better things. But the information you gather and understand can help you empathize, be the customer for a second, and understand things better. And this is done through a meditative state, a state of emotion. When I was writing marketing copy, I would stop and try to feel the emotion of the people, to attach to the collective consciousness of those who were about to become our customers. For a few minutes I would sit with myself and, based on everything I had read, not only about those people and that market but the things written by them, because it is important to read what people say, not what is written about them, and to read between the lines, I would empathize and stop for a few minutes in a meditative or, if the setting did not allow it, a contemplative state, gathering those emotions and living them for a moment without letting them affect me.
That phrase, without letting them affect you, is the hard part. You are, at the same time, judge and, for lack of a better word, judged. You are the judge because you are the original creator of the text, and you are judged because you are, at the same time, in a temporary state of being the customer. Your capacity to observe and self-analyze the feelings and emotions in that moment, the customer's feelings inside you and not your own, and to distinguish between the two, is so important, because in that moment you will understand better than twenty books could teach you what you are about to write or do in a business. It will help you more than twenty studies of that market.
Understand why this beats the twenty books and the twenty studies, because it is not mysticism, it is a real epistemic difference. A book teaches you general rules about people. A study teaches you aggregate facts about a market. But a specific human being making a specific decision is not a general rule or an aggregate fact, they are a particular mind in a particular emotional state, and the only way to reach that is to reconstruct it inside yourself. When you embody the customer well, you are running a live simulation of one real person instead of reading a summary of many. The summary is broad and shallow. The simulation is narrow and deep, and depth is what tells you what to actually write.
Now, how personal should the story be? A personal experience will always be preferred over a scientific, impersonal one. But that does not mean it is the only way to create. People are drawn to the qualities, principles, and experiences they see in others, especially those who have built a frame around themselves, a structure through which both they and others can participate in creating or perpetuating that experience. If I am passionate about travel and want to build a platform to attract others who love travel, my personal experience will help draw them in and make them want to participate in the community I am building. There, it is best for the experience to be mine, with clear examples and emotion that can be instilled in others.
But sometimes you do not have a story, and you still want to create a platform, and you want to instill certain principles. You can have a mission, a part of you that wants to do this. And people may be drawn to that part, because you created a frame, a structure through which they can express or validate themselves. People are attracted to things and places that validate them, that give them a yes. To the question, are there others who have this experience, is it just me, is this experience valid, the answer is yes, come here. So when you do not have a story of your own, you can beneficially and mutually use the stories of others, gather a handful of initial evangelists who will help you create the story. It can work in both directions.
There is one more thing worth knowing about how sales actually happen, and it changes how you tell stories entirely. Someone who runs a call center with around five hundred employees told me a conclusion they reached about convincing people to buy: often, people are already convinced. All you need to do, all they need you to do, is help them feel comfortable with the choice they are about to make, and the whole buying process happens on its own. The sale, in general, happens in a person's mind before they ever reach your site. Look at yourself when you buy something. The desire to buy already exists. You just need to validate certain opinions about what you are buying. If the desire is not strong enough, or you have not validated those opinions, you will not buy. You will move on, or postpone, because you were not answered, you were not comfortable enough. We seek comfort about what we are about to do, because we are leaving a comfort zone, and we want to be sure that what we are offered brings the comfort needed to act.
That reframes the whole job of a story. You are not manufacturing desire from nothing, which is exhausting and usually fails. You are meeting a desire that already exists and removing the discomfort standing between the person and the yes they already want to give. Selling is less like pushing and more like clearing a path. The person wants to walk down it, they are just not sure the ground is solid, and your story is what shows them it is. That is why the best stories do not feel like selling at all. They feel like reassurance, like being understood, because that is exactly what they are.
This is why a story built only on technique, without genuine feeling underneath, eventually rings hollow, and people can tell. You can study every copywriting manual, learn every structure, assemble the words in the technically correct order, and still produce something that does not move anyone, because the reader is not responding to the structure, they are responding to the emotion the structure carries. If there is no real emotion behind it, the machinery is empty, and empty machinery is felt as manipulation even when it is technically flawless. The technique matters, but it is a vessel, and a vessel with nothing in it delivers nothing, no matter how beautifully it is made.
That is what stories are actually for. Not to manufacture a desire from nothing, but to meet a desire that is already there, validate the opinions surrounding it, and make the person comfortable enough to say yes. The most powerful person tells stories because a well-told story does not push, it creates something in the mind, meets an emotion that was already waiting, and turns it into attachment and then into action. Learn to turn words into emotion, embody the customer until you can feel what they feel without drowning in it, and tell the true story in the valence that serves everyone. That is the whole craft, and it is more powerful than any budget.