even generations after their deaths. We all know a few anecdotes or have a general sense of the personal brand of our greatest presidents, like Washington, Lincoln, and Teddy Roosevelt. In contemporary politics, the right story can win or lose an election, pass a piece of legislation, or end a war. In business, the right story defines any company's most valuable asset: its brand.
Stories are the base unit of reputation. Not to tell your own is to have no reputation or to cede its construction to others.
And that's where this book comes in. In it are the tools to build stories in a new way that coexists with the accelerated, complex tempo of our lives.
Our most important stories don't just live in the static pages of books any more. They are shaped and told digitally, at high speed, and emerge just a half step behind experience. They are consumed and made in small windows of time and in little sips of attention.
It is my firm belief that these conditions do not lessen our stories – but only make them richer. In fact, the rapid pace and diffusion of our stories – what I call their velocity and atomization – are making storytelling a lot more fun.
In that spirit, what you'll find in this book does not need to be consumed in order – or even in its entirety – to be useful. It's my hope that you can dip into this book at any spot for a bit of inspiration or for your next urgently needed idea.
When you need to be a storyteller any page of this book, consumed in whatever niche of time you might have, is here to help.
So let's advance to the next the page (whether digital or analog) and find not just my story but the beginning of yours, too.
1
Wisdom, Wonder, and Delight
Glamour and Grammar
The career of every revolutionary ends in glamour.
I don't mean the superficial definition of glamour, an artificial sense of beauty that props up a celebrity. I am talking about its deeper meaning, which is related to the stories we tell. The word glamour literally means a magic spell created by language. To be “beglamoured” means to be enchanted. Glamour was coined long ago as a mispronunciation of “grammar,” because writing – with its power to put lasting ideas directly into people's heads without speech – seemed like magic to those who had never seen it before.
This kind of magic is still potent. You can see it in the stories we tell about political figures, especially the ones who changed history.
The journey of Mahatma Gandhi, the revolutionary who peacefully liberated India from the British Empire in the early twentieth century, began in a deserted railway station one lonely night after he found himself kicked out of a train compartment. Even though Gandhi was a lawyer and could afford a first‐class ticket, he was excluded from riding in the carriage because of his brown skin. Starting with that moment of powerlessness, Gandhi began to transform his life and then the life of his entire nation. Over the next few decades until his death, he would build a movement that ended white, apartheid rule in India.
But Gandhi's journey didn't end with his eventual assassination. It continues through his existence as a lasting icon of progress and change. His image has been used to bolster the power of modern governments, and it's also been used to sell computers in the United States. In the 1990s, Apple featured him in one of their first “Think Different” ads.
The glamour of another revolutionary, Alexander Hamilton, is currently selling record numbers of tickets on Broadway to the musical about Hamilton's life written by Lin‐Manuel Miranda. As of this writing, Hamilton's glamour is worth about $1.9 million per week in ticket sales.
Another American revolutionary, Benjamin Franklin, recognized the power of his own glamour while he was still alive. To get attention and enhance his influence in Paris, where he was stationed as the first U.S. ambassador, he exaggerated his own persona by wearing a coonskin fur cap. Franklin had worn the cap out of necessity on the long voyage from the United States to France to keep his bald head warm. But to French high society, such a primitive piece of clothing wasn't a necessity but a charming symbol of American ruggedness.
I first learned about the glamour of revolutionaries and the power of their images at an early age. When I was a boy in Chile my parents told me to rip up my Fidel Castro poster on the day that Augusto Pinochet came to power. Castro was a communist and Pinochet was a fascist, so Pinochet hated everything Castro stood for. Even though the poster was on the wall of my bedroom in the privacy of our home, my parents told me it had to come down. So that day I learned that a piece of paper with an image and words had enough symbolic power that it could somehow be a threat to people who held real political power. To my childhood self, it seemed like magic.
I also learned that, whether in pixels or print, stories take up physical space in our lives. Once created and let loose into the world, the content that a story takes shape in becomes a conduit for influence and power.
I suppose one of the reasons I chose to pursue a career as a pollster and political strategist was to follow those conduits of influence to their origins, to figure out how the magic worked. I was always sure that hiding in the reams of data I gathered on voters, there was an overarching story about whatever country I was working in. Those who understood the story were destined for power and those who didn't were sure to lose it.
As a political consultant, I was also well served by the experiences that came from splitting my childhood between two nations. It continues to give me a knack for seeing the world around me as if for the first time, no matter how long I may have spent getting to know a particular place or set of people.
This was partly because I had so frequently been reminded that I was an outsider. As a child, and later when I travelled the world as a consultant, people always ended up asking me one form of the question: “You're not from around here, are you?” It happened so often that part of my mind expected it and prepared for it.
This ability to wipe away the familiar names of things, to always look for the hidden stories, has been a lifelong source of creativity and renewal. Two of my core beliefs about innovation are that it need not be left to chance and that it always begins the moment you see things anew – because that's the moment that we are free to start telling new stories about ourselves. What started as a habit of adjusting myself to the ever‐changing circumstances of my life has allowed me to help individuals, companies, nongovernmental organizations (NGOs), and large institutions find their own hidden stories and see themselves anew.
As the careers of Gandhi, Hamilton, and Franklin show, lasting power comes from this process of finding what I call glamour.
So you can think of this book as a guide to uncovering your unique sources of glamour. In this chapter and throughout the book, you'll find useful techniques for finding and telling new stories about yourself or your organization and what to do with those stories once you have them. It's part practical manual and, I hope, part book of spells.
The Power of Stories
Even with data‐based approaches, crafting influence, online and off, will always be an art and never a science.
No matter how much data we have about people, and no matter how cunningly we may calibrate the cues that guide them through a digital experience, what governs the final decision to buy an idea or a product will never be completely knowable. This is because people don't completely know themselves.
Consider your own life – from the most trivial objects
