We Are Story People

The antidote to an influencer is a group.

There’s a logic that goes something like this:

It’s better to be logical than to be fuzzy with feelings and intuition.
Because everyone online has a marketing angle, we must only side with hard proofs.
Surely there’s good reason to default to skepticism, to be empirical.

Maybe this will prevent us from being fooled. It might also prevent us from being in a healthy group.

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For much of our history, we humans lived in tribe-sized groups. We were wrong about so many details of how life actually worked, scientifically-speaking. But we learned. At the very least, the tribe-sized group helped us survive. It got us here.

One characteristic of living in a tribe was a minimum plurality of examples. Daily, we didn’t just experience our coworkers and our children, we experienced multiple families and their children, the elderly, the young, the brave and the frail alike. The wisdom of old people and the recklessness of the young. We lived surrounded by models and counter-models, and that taught us how to find our way.

We also discerned as a group. We feared the con person, the stranger, the wanderer. Today’s influencer would have been seen as an outsider, and we would have boxed them in as a possible con.

Tribes that survived had discernment mechanisms.
Tribes that got decimated had a hidden vulnerability.

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All the while, not all of us were the logical, empirical type. Some of us were. Most of us, we were story people.

We’ve always used stories to teach, to pack lessons, densely into some narrative arcs. We taught with stories, we grew cohesion with stories, we developed culture with stories.

Stories are what the con person uses, and they preyed on individuals.
Groups, in response, used stories to counter the con people.
And the logical, empirical type, to get to teach their lesson to others, they needed stories too.

Please wrap what you offer into a story.
Find the right group for your story.
Become part of a healthy group.
Your story will go far.

We are story people.