See a photo of Larry his bio, Part 1 of this Q&A, a Part 2Part 3.

Q&A with Larry, Questions 6 and 7

Q: Can you describe some highlights of SMITH’s evolution since 2006? What aspect of its growth makes you most proud?

A: When I launched the site in 2006, the idea was really as a web magazine with a user-generated component, and by the end of the first year it evolved into a storytelling community. The role of the editors became to feature (or curate) some of the content, as well as launch the occasional top-down, editor-driven projects (such as our webcomics). If I walked into the concept of SMITH, and its tagline, “Everyone has a story,” thinking like an editor embracing the web, now I’m clearly a guy who runs a community who happens to have some editorial expertise. Which is a long way of saying: I didn’t set out to be a community builder, but I love it. And the launch of the Six-Word Memoir project was a massive community-building catalyst.

Week after week, people got in touch with us directly about how much the form meant to them, and how they’ve used it for their own projects and purposed. A woman named Abby sent us Six-Word Memoirs from her teen patients at a psychiatric hospital in Forest Park, IL. Jolene, a nurse in Oakland, CA, wrote to tell us this story about a patient with Leukemia:

“I was taking care of this 21 yr old guy who has had Leukemia since he’s been 8 yrs old. He’s pretty debilitated, is wasting away right now—a very sad case. I brought in your book and asked him to come up w/ his own 6-word memoir. He thought about it for about 2 minutes (mind you before that I could barely get him to engage w/ me, he was extremely depressed as you can imagine). He then just blurted out: ‘Fat man eats pie then farts.’ It’s a metaphor for life you see, we indulge ourselves then we die.”

This summer we just launched a Six-Word Memoir project with the youth suicide org, TWLOHA.org. (I blogged about how that came about.]. The hope is that after we launch the projects online, later we will make Six-Word Memoir books, by and for their communities. In my in-box right now is a note from someone from a site called Babyheart.org about partnering on a six-word memoirs project about kids with CHD (congenital heart disease). And, of course, from kindergarten to grad school, teachers around the world find six-word memoir to be an excellent writing prompt. All these offshoots and outgrowths and collaborations feel good. It feels like we’re living up to one of SMITH Mag’s core beliefs: to make and facilitate better media, not simply more media.

Q: If you could share just one piece of advice or wisdom about story/storytelling/narrative with readers, what would it be?

A: Don’t be afraid to start. From there, I offer four words of wisdom that is a part of my philosophy about “just starting”: write drunk, editor sober. Whether you’re writing a letter, a report for work, or the story of your life, in six words or 60,000, put the words down. Don’t obsess over them, just effusively spill them down onto the page. Then edit. And when you think you’re finished cut another 10 percent of the text.

Entry by Kathy Hansen. Learn more.

See a photo of Larry his bio, Part 1 of this Q&A, and Part 2.

Q&A with Larry, Questions 4 and 5

Q: What indications did you have that SMITH would succeed? Did you conduct significant research? How do you measure its success?

A: I don’t conduct nearly enough research or analytics, though I know that a typical reader is a smart, New Yorker reader, NPR listener who is often a teacher or a librarian. Most of what I know about how people feel about the site comes via email or at live events. When a young woman comes up to me after an event and says, “I just wanted to say thank you for SMITH, it helped me start writing again,” that will fuel me for a while, even on those days when get frustrated that it’s too much work.

Q: What’s your favorite story about a transformation that came about through a story or storytelling act?

A: I’m not sure there’s one favorite, but in terms of what I do at SMITH, time and time again we hear that people’s Six-Word Memoir were the words that spurred them on to write a longer story. Robin Templeton, whose Six-Word Memoir, “After Harvard, had baby with crackhead” (the first entry of our first book, pictured above), is working on her full-length memoir based on the story of her life she told in six words. In email letters and @smithmag twitter shoutouts, and readings across the country, we hear about families who do Six-Word Memoirs at reunions, couples that invite all the guests to write six words on the bride and groom. So this short, short story form has become a powerful catalyst and connector.

Entry by Kathy Hansen. Learn more.

The deadline for the survey to co-create Michael Margolis’s Reinvention Summit (which I wrote about yesterday) has been extended until Friday, October 1 at midnight EDT.

The Back Stage Interactive Forum in which survey respondents are eligible to participate has been rescheduled for Monday, October 4 at 7pm EDT / 4pm PDT.

Entry by Kathy Hansen. Learn more.

See a photo of Larry his bio, and Part 1 of this Q&A.

Q&A with Larry, Questions 2 and 3:

Q: How did you initially become involved with story/storytelling/narrative? What attracted you to this field? What do you love about it?

A: Since as long as I can remember it’s always been about stories for me — writing stories, reading stories, telling stories, retelling stories. At some point in high school I joined the school paper, got the journalism bug, and never looked back — or learned to do anything else.

Then as I moved along in my career, from waiter to freelance writer, freelance writer to editor, moving from smaller, scrappy spots (such as Dave Eggers’ Might Magazine and Randall Lane’s P.O.V.) to bigger publications (ESPN Magazine, Men’s Journal), the pieces I was most excited about reading, writing and editing, clipping and saving (I have an insane box of ripped out articles), talking about with friends, were the most personal stories. Not that this is unusual — who doesn’t love personal stories? — but personal stories are a true passion bordering on addiction.

When I launched SMITH Magazine on January 6, 2006 (National Smith Day), the idea was to create a new kind of web magazine around this old idea that great storytelling is at the core of the most soulful, lasting media. The content would be largely user-generated, then curated by people who edit for a living. It would be a new blend of the professional and the amateur, fueled by our populist, participatory mission: Everyone has a story. Now, four years later, we’ve got something much better: an online storytelling community.

Q: What people or entities (such as Web sites, blogs, books, organizations, conferences, etc.) have been most influential to you in your story work and why?

A: All the usual storytelling giants inspire me — Ira Glass, Anna Deavere Smith, Dave Eggers, Mary Karr, the late Spalding Gray, and Studs Terkel. And then there’s everything else, coming at us all the time: the lyrics of Lucinda Williams; what writer David Grann does when he tells a long, complicated story in The City of Lost Z, in The New Yorker; a blog post from a Twitter link from someone random.

You mention conferences and it’s so true; there’s so much good storytelling go one at conferences — I recently tweeted that “live speaking events are the new film festivals” and I believe it. I’ve never been to TED, but love the videos (as we all do…). Two conferences I have personally attended in the last year were just fascinating information wrapped around terrific storytelling. The five-minute talks at Ignite are a force of nature (I did one, the Six-Word Memoir project.) The presentations at the GEL Conference (Good Experience Live) are dynamite, from the story [embedded below] of a guy named Sal Khan who created the biggest YouTube school (by accident) to a woman who curates the Museum of Bad Art. And I’m headed to do a presentation at PopTech this fall which, which is a dream come true for a guy (or geek) who loves the culture of technology.

On a more personal level, the codename for the prototype [of SMITH Magazine] was Smitty, after my grandfather, a great storyteller in his day. Smitty came “SMITH” (all caps) as Smith is not only someone who works to create something (a blacksmith or a wordsmith) but is the most popular last name in America. SMITH represents us all, person-to-person, story-to-story. And SMITH is infused by something I witnessed with my grandfather: he loved to tell stories; he rarely did until he was asked. So that was an important lesson for me: everyone has a story, but often they aren’t asked, or made to feel their story is important.

Entry by Kathy Hansen. Learn more.

The always-innovative Michael Margolis is planning a unique virtual event in November. The Reinvention Summit is billed as the World’s First Virtual Conference on Storytelling and takes place November 11-22.

Here’s a snippet from Michael’s description:

Imagine 20-25 of the world’s leading minds and speakers guiding you on the process of reinvention from a narrative perspective. There will be presentations, interviews, and panel discussions designed to support your journey into a bigger story. Plus virtual conference features to deepen your learning, help you network and make valuable connections with fellow participants.

He’s got some terrific speakers lined up.

Another innovative aspect of the event is Michael’s intent to crowdsource the design and planning of the event. Here’s what he writes in his invitation for folks to complete a survey about the Reinvention Summit (Note that tomorrow, Sept. 29, is the deadline for the survey.):

We want you to help us design and shape it from the ground up. In addition to just “feedback”, we want to crowdsource the summit with your content, wisdom, ideas, materials, and most importantly, create a platform to share your own reinvention story.

Help us reinvent the genre of virtual conferences. Take seven minutes to complete the following survey, and help us better understand your relationship to reinvention and to storytelling. And don’t forget to provide us your email address at the bottom, so we can thank you and invite you into what’s next.

Go to the survey.

Complete your survey by Wednesday, September 29, 2010, and you’re invited to join us for a live Telecall Forum that afternoon (Wed, Sept 29) at 3pm ET/12pm PT. In this session, we’ll give you a Back Stage Pass into the Reinvention Summit design process, and invite your real-time feedback and collaboration. It’s all part of our effort to “open-source” storytelling and initiate a global cohort.

The summit will soon have its own Web site.

Entry by Kathy Hansen. Learn more.

I am completely thrilled to present a Q&A with Larry Smith, not only because he is a luminary in the story world, thanks to his innovative SMITH Magazine, but also because of a personal connection. Although we have not met, we did attend the same high school. This Q&A with Larry will appear over the next five days.

Bio: [From the SMITH Mag site]: SMITH founding editor Larry Smithhas whirled around the media landscape for the past 15 years. He most recently was the articles editor of Men’s Journal, has been the executive editor of Yahoo! Internet Life, senior editor at ESPN The Magazine, a founding editor of P.O.V., and editor-in-chief of its sister publication, Egg, as well as an editor of Might magazine. While living in San Francisco, he was managing editor of the wire/syndication service AlterNet, and currently serves on the board of its umbrella organization, the Independent Media Institute. His writing has appeared in The New York Times, Popular Science, Men’s Health, Salon, Slate, and other places. He has contributed personal essays to the anthologies Maybe Baby and Modern Love.

He has spoken on the power of personal storytelling, and how to engage an audience, in schools across America, as well as at foundations and nonprofits, and companies such as ESPN and Google. He most recently spoke at Ignite NYC, on the story of the Six-Word Memoir project. He teaches the class, “What’s Your Story: How to Deliver an Authentic Elevator Pitch,” at The Hired Guns Academy.

Q&A with Larry Smith, Question 1:

Q: You and I attended the same high school (albeit 15 years apart) and had the same Latin teacher. You’ve already noted in correspondence with me that Latin class with David Rhody probably influenced your storytelling interests. Can you elaborate? Were there other aspects of Moorestown High School that were influential?

A: I’ve written and edited all my life, almost to the point of being boringly single-minded and directed, and that has a lot to do with having great teachers early on. My third and also fourth grade teacher, who then went by Lynn Bechdel (whose cousin, Alison Bechdel, author of the acclaimed graphic novel, Fun Home, has an illustrated memoir in our new Six-Word Memoir book), always encouraged her students to think differently, weirdly, and above all, to follow your passion.

The high school Latin teacher we share, David Rhody, is one of the best storytellers I’ve ever met, and, as I’m sure you remember we read some of the greatest stories ever told in his class. Seeing Mr. Rhody popping up on Facebook was a total kick — that guy was always so cool. And then connecting him to you, and you and I to this tiny town in South Jersey was wild.

I’m in touch with all many of my favorite teachers and mentors still. Last year Perri Geller-Clark (the advisor to the school newspaper) invited me to speak to a few of her classes at about storytelling and journalism; I’ve done the same with my nephews’ sixth and third-grade classes as well. In the past four years I’ve probably done more than 500 interviews and 50 live events, but there’s nothing been as scary, and amazing, as talking the third graders about storytelling. The class later sent me their own book of Six-Word Memoirs, Not Quite What We Were Planning: Six-Word Memoirs by Mrs. Nixon’s Class, which I digitized and posted on SMITH. It’s the most amazing document I have from the SMITH Magazine journey.

Entry by Kathy Hansen. Learn more.

Just a reminder about my revamped links page:

• Links to Interdisciplinary Storytelling Resources
• Links to Organizational Storytelling Resources
• Links to Storytelling Platforms, Tools, and Prompts
• Links that Relate to Storytelling and Career
• Links about Memoir-Writing, Journaling, and Personal Storytelling
• Links to Blogs that Relate to Storytelling
• Links to Other Cool Blogs

Be sure to email me to suggest additional links for these pages.

Entry by Kathy Hansen. Learn more.

A year ago today, I previewed a project that was to take place throughout 2010. The project, the3six5, consists of 365 days, as told by 365 different people.

Thought it might be cool to look back at the project now that it’s well under way. In a recent interview on PSFK, one of the project’s founder’s Len Kendall describes the3six5:

[After initial discussion with co-fonder Daniel Honigman], the3six5 was born. A story open to the entire world, in which 365 different spots were made available to create a daily dairy of the year 2010, told by a wide variety of our fellow citizens. Using the networks we had built up over the past few years, we put our project out there and within weeks (and 5,000 entries later) we had filled every day of the year. The stories have ranged dramatically in tone and topic, and so have the authors. Having passed the half-way mark recently, through successes and failures, we’ve learned so much about people we never would have been exposed to, as well as just how intricate managing such a crowdsourced project can be.

the3six5 is a pretty fascinating — and storied — lens through which to view a year. What might historians learn about 2010 by reading these stories?

Entry by Kathy Hansen. Learn more.

When I started this blog five years ago, I imagined I would write an entry about any interesting new story resources I came across. I started out doing so, but it soon became apparent that storytelling resources are overwhelmingly abundant, and I could never keep up with all the new ones I learned about — at least not as blog postings. Many, too, were interesting but not necessarily substantial or relevant enough to fit in with the topics I was writing about.

Until about a year ago, I listed these kinds of links on the sidebar of the blog. But those lists of links got very long, making the load time for readers too long. I had also been told that too many outbound links on the first page of a site makes it seem like a link farm, which search engines don’t like.

So, I moved all the links to the inside pages listed below.

But they were just lists of links in no special order and with no explanation. So, over the last week, I have been updating these inside pages, adding many new links/resources, deleting dead links, re-categorizing mis-categorized links, and adding brief descriptions of each link. I also created a new category of links/resources, Links to Storytelling Platforms, Tools, and Prompts. I alphabetized all the links to make browsing through the lists easier and added “Apture” links to most resources, meaning you can mouseover the icon next to each link and check it out without leaving the page.

I’m sure lots more refinement is possible. For example, Links to Interdisciplinary Storytelling Resources is a large, catch-all category that could likely be broken down into sub-categories. There’s also a fine line between sites and blogs, so I’ve likely transposed the categories of some of those (not to mention the fact that many sites have blog components). Sometimes I had to weigh which was more significant — a site’s “bloggy-ness” or its subject matter. For example, The Elder Storytelling Place is a blog, but its subject matter better suits it to Links about Memoir-Writing, Journaling, and Personal Storytelling.

Among the following pages, you’ll find some that reflect the new style (like Links to Interdisciplinary Storytelling Resources) and some that won’t be refined until Monday:

• Links to Interdisciplinary Storytelling Resources
• Links to Organizational Storytelling Resources
• Links to Storytelling Platforms, Tools, and Prompts
• Links that Relate to Storytelling and Career
• Links about Memoir-Writing, Journaling, and Personal Storytelling
• Links to Blogs that Relate to Storytelling
• Links to Other Cool Blogs

I rediscovered some real gems among these links; I’ll bet you will, too, when all the updated pages are published Monday, Sept. 27. I also became aware of many sites left off these lists. They tend to be sites I posted a blog entry about but then neglected to add them to an inside page. If you or your organization would like a link on one of these pages, please email me. I can’t promise I’ll add it quickly, but I will eventually.

Still have a number of other inside pages that need updating and maintenance…

Entry by Kathy Hansen. Learn more.

I used to be a speechwriter, and one of the first principles I learned was this classic formula for how to construct a speech:

• Tell ‘em what you’re gonna tell ‘em.
• Tell ‘em.
• Tell ‘em what you told ‘em.

Now Helen Coster rejects that formula in an article for Fortune. Citing Steve Jobs’ well-known 2005 commencement address at Stanford University (which has enjoyed 2 million+ views on YouTube), in which Jobs began: “Today I want to tell you three stories from my life.”

“Get right into the story and let the audience know what your talk will be about,” Coster advises. Coster quotes Nick Morgan of Public Words, Inc., a speech-coaching and speechwriting firm: “… jump right in with a framing story that suggests what the topic is without giving it all away, a statistic, a question or some kind of interaction with the audience.”

I look forward to trying this approach next time I write a speech.

Entry by Kathy Hansen. Learn more.

First in a series: Cindy Lovell

Not long ago, I started noticing that some of my women friends had dramatically reinvented themselves, some of them undergoing several reinventions. In these difficult economic times, when reinvention is often the key to finding any kind of success, I thought it might be illuminating to tell the stories of some of these women. I’d like to run one of these stories roughly monthly. I have three reinvented women in mind for starters. How about you?
Are you a woman who has reinvented herself? Do you know a reinvented woman? Email me and let me know.

I met Cindy Lovell in a class called “Paris in the 1920s” at Stetson University. As two nontraditional-age students, we struck up a warm acquaintanceship. I learned that Cindy, a teacher-education major, had a number of passions and interests, including the musicians Django Reinhardt and Stephane Grappelli. I happened to have some old vinyl LPs of Grappelli and Reinhardt that I passed on to Cindy. Because she was planning to take a nutrition class that I had already taken and Cindy co-owned two video stores, we also came up with a swap deal in which I gave her my nutrition textbook, and she gave me some videos I needed for my senior research. (I got the better end of the deal because the nutrition class required a new edition of the text when Cindy took the course.)

Cindy’s matriculation at Stetson was a milestone in her first reinvention. She had grown up in rural Central Pennsylvania, where in grade school, Cindy began a life-long passionate interest in the man who was arguably America’s greatest storyteller — Mark Twain. Cindy married; had two children, Angela and Adam; and eventually relocated to the East Coast of Florida, where she and her husband opened their video stores.

First reinvention
One day, Cindy saw a poster that changed her life. The poster, directed at children, got the wheels turning in Cindy’s brain. She had long wanted to be a teacher, and the poster made her think of all the lesson plans she could develop based on the poster’s subject matter. But she immediately felt a sadness because she could not be a classroom teacher as she did not have a college degree; in fact, she had dropped out of high school. But something had clicked in Cindy’s mind. Well into her 30s then, Cindy began an arduous process to return to school. She earned her bachelor’s degree in elementary education in two years and nine months while working her 60-hour weekly shift in the video business. After graduating from Stetson in 1994, she whipped quickly through attaining her master’s degree, also at Stetson, while teaching elementary school and working nights in the video stores. I asked her if she had any regrets about not implementing her first reinvention sooner.

“Sometimes I think I might have liked taking a traditional path to college,” she replied, “but how could I? I was bored in high school and saw no value in higher education. I wasn’t like the other kids. I had two small businesses while I was still in high school, and I had no interest in college, something I perceived would be just more torturous boredom. We do things when we are ready. We listen to our inner voices, or we should. When I find myself thinking I should have done this or that at some other time I just laugh it off. How could I do something I wasn’t ready for?”

It was at about the point of her master’s degree that I lost track of Cindy for several years. Toward the end of the 1990s, my son took some classes in a program for gifted students based at Stetson but operated out of the University of Iowa. I saw that Stetson’s liaison with the Iowa-based program was Cindy Lovell. I wondered what she was doing in Iowa, to the point of questioning whether she was the same Cindy Lovell I knew.

Second reinvention
The mystery was solved in 2000 when I was teaching at Stetson and also working as a writer in the school’s public-relations office. I had been assigned to write a press release on new faculty and saw that Cindy was now teaching in Stetson’s teacher-education department, having earned her PhD — at the University of Iowa, in just two years.

Cindy’s time as an elementary-school teacher had been relatively brief. One of her Stetson professors felt she had great gifts to offer as a teacher of teachers, and he had encouraged her to earn her PhD so she could teach at the college level. Recently divorced, she had planned to return to the elementary classroom and perhaps teach part-time at a university. But when she was invited to apply for a tenure-track position at her alma mater, Cindy discussed it with her principal and decided to accept the position at Stetson.

So Cindy taught aspiring teachers for eight years at Stetson, and it was at this point that we finally really reconnected 10 years after we’d met. I, too had entered a PhD program, and in fact, Cindy served on my doctoral committee.

Cindy was beloved by her students and enjoyed many aspects of her life on the Stetson faculty. She collaborated with the Belin-Blank Center at the University of Iowa and founded the HATS (High Achieving Talented Students) Program for Florida students in grades 4-9, sponsoring classes around the state. She even established an endowed scholarship at Stetson for these students. Cindy also began writing children’s books and collaborating with the Mark Twain Museum in Hannibal, MO, on teacher workshops and young-author workshops.

Although she had earned tenure at Stetson, Cindy felt a calling to live in Hannibal, the boyhood hometown of Mark Twain. She landed a new teaching job at Quincy University — just across the Mississippi River from her new home in Hannibal.

Third reinvention
Here’s where Cindy reinvented herself in a way that could not have been more perfect. “I moved to Hannibal so I could be near the Mark Twain Boyhood Home and Museum and volunteer my services there in my spare time,” Cindy explains. “I began serving on the board of directors and also volunteered as the education coordinator. Everyone was very welcoming and seemed to genuinely appreciate my enthusiasm for Mark Twain. The director was always positive regarding any ideas or suggestions I offered, and I was encouraged to proceed with all of my initiatives. QU was also supportive of my volunteer efforts because service in our community is one of the university’s priorities.

“One day I was shocked to learn that the museum director had accepted a position on the East Coast to be closer to family,” Cindy continues. “Shocked because I was thinking, ‘Why would anyone want to leave this place?’ The board asked me to step in as interim director while they conducted a search. I was teaching at Quincy and was very happy with the balance in my life — teaching at QU and volunteering in Twain’s town — now my town, too. When the museum board officially offered me the permanent position of executive director, I immediately met with my QU president, who was extremely supportive. He saw it as a good fit. QU has been very generous and flexible with my schedule, and now I have two full-time jobs that I love very much.

“The two worlds merge often,” she notes. “We offer teacher workshops at the museum, for instance, and graduate credits are earned through QU. I also teach writing workshops at the museum. So, it was pure serendipity, both landing my position at QU and becoming director of the museum. Remember, I gave up tenure at my alma mater, Stetson University, to accept the position at QU and live in Hannibal. A lot of folks thought that was crazy, but I never had any doubt that I belonged in Hannibal, and QU has been a perfect fit as well.” [Cindy is pictured above in her role as director of the Mark Twain Boyhood Home and Museum with actor Hal Holbrook, who has portrayed Twain in one-man shows for many years.]

I asked her what she had learned from her reinventions. Naturally, she invoked her idol: “What have I learned? To follow your bliss — Joseph Campbell, right? But Mark Twain said it best in Tom Sawyer:

If he hadn’t run out of whitewash he would have bankrupted every boy in the village.

Tom said to himself that it was not such a hollow world, after all. He had discovered a great law of human action, without knowing it — namely, that in order to make a man or a boy covet a thing, it is only necessary to make the thing difficult to attain. If he had been a great and wise philosopher, like the writer of this book, he would now have comprehended that Work consists of whatever a body is obliged to do, and that Play consists of whatever a body is not obliged to do.

“I was never obliged to volunteer at the museum, but I wanted to,” Cindy says. “I was never obliged to become a teacher, but I wanted to. I ‘played’ school as a kid, and I reread Tom Sawyer so many times that I also ‘played’ out Twain’s characters and scenes. I always told my children as they were growing up: Find what you love to do, and then figure out how to do it for a living. You’ll never go to work a day in your lives. I don’t know if I’ve actually reinvented myself, but I have learned to sift through my priorities and get them in the right order. Volunteering in the schools years ago when my children were young certainly kept hope alive that I might someday be a teacher, and for years I volunteered to share my Twain expertise by giving talks in classrooms, etc. I just kept enjoying these forays into my two areas of passion: teaching and Twain. And as I indulged myself, my expertise grew, my confidence grew, and I enjoyed it more and more. None of it feels like work. Not the teaching, nor the Twaining. Both are now second nature to me, and I’m sure it’s because both have always been my hobbies or passions — whatever you want to call it. Some people think I work hard. The truth is, I ‘play’ hard.”

“Am I likely to ‘reinvent’ myself [again]?,” she continues. “Sure. Does that mean I’ll leave the museum or QU? Not at all. It means I’ll continue to indulge my interests in teaching and Mark Twain. I will continue to combine my passions in new ways. For instance, I’m presently collaborating with my childhood friend, Grammy award-winning singer-songwriter/musician/producer Carl Jackson. We are making a Mark Twain legacy CD in spoken word and song. I know Twain; Carl knows music. So far we have Emmylou Harris, Brad Paisely, Vince Gill, Alison Krauss, Rhonda Vincent, and Doyle Lawson on board recording songs — mostly original compositions — to correspond with story segments I’ve written about Twain’s life. Garrison Keillor has agreed to narrate the project. A lot of talent has stepped forward to help. It’s clear I’m not the only fan of Mark Twain!

“This CD is a tribute to Twain’s legacy,” Cindy says. “It will appeal to music fans, literature fans, history fans, and teachers, I’m certain. What a great way to learn about Twain’s life. But it will also be a fundraiser for the museum’s endowment fund, a need we are emphasizing in this rough economy. I’m indulging my creative side in finding untraditional ways to generate revenue, and I’m having fun. What else might it lead to? I have no idea, but my knowledge base has expanded, and I may build on it in new and different ways without ever leaving my passion for teaching and Twain.”

Cindy says the best part of her reinventions is that “I never really changed. I played school as a child, and I began reading Mark Twain when I was 10 years old. He’s been my favorite author ever since. So, ‘teaching and Twaining’ have always been a part of my identity. The best part is getting to officially share these two passions now that I have attached some credentials to my passion. I recently spoke at the National Steinbeck Center about Mark Twain for The Big Read event they were holding. It’s a beautiful part of the country, and I’ve visited many new places getting to share Mark Twain. That’s always a thrill.”

Cindy was recently awarded tenure at Quincy University and is overseeing a milestone year at the the Mark Twain Boyhood Home and Museum, given that 2010 is the 100th anniversary of Twain’s death, the 175th anniversary of his birth, and the publication year of his long-awaited autobiography, for which he left instructions that it not by published until a century after his death. You can read an excerpt here.

Despite her many achievements and her status as a Twain scholar, Cindy says her greatest source of pride is her two children. “At the end of the day, they remain my number one priority, even though both are grown adults. I didn’t always make the best decisions or the right decisions or the timeliest decisions, but I tried to set an example for them to follow their own dreams and indulge their own passions. It has worked for them. My son is a social activist. My daughter is a writer. Both are creative forces, and both acknowledge the inspiration I provided by setting an example to go after my dreams. The three of us generate a lot of enthusiastic dialogue. We are best friends.”

No regrets … and advice to would-be reinventors
Cindy arrived late to her dream jobs of teaching and directing the Twain museum, but she has no regrets. “Every decision I made was somehow instrumental in landing me right here where I am today,” she says, “a high-school dropout with a Ph.D. teaching at a wonderful university and carrying keys to my favorite place on the planet: the Mark Twain Boyhood Home and Museum. Regret has no value. Every incident in my past is a part of who I am today. I learned from every event in my life — every job, every boss, every volunteer gig. Sometimes I learned what not to do!

“No do-overs,” Cindy goes on. “That’s okay with me. But when people say to me, ‘I’m too old…’ or ‘It’s too late…’ I ask them, ‘Won’t the years go by anyway? And wouldn’t you rather be doing what you love?’ The only time that matters is now.”

This follow-your-bliss advice carries over to Cindy’s suggestions for other women who would like to reinvent themselves: “Listen to your heart,” she advises. “You KNOW what you love. Just do it. Obstacles and brick walls and naysayers are ubiquitous. Go around, over, under, through them. Ignore them. Follow your passion. You’ll find that you don’t really have far to go that way — it’s right in front of you. But it will take you to places you never dreamed of.”

Entry by Kathy Hansen. Learn more.

In yesterday’s entry, I synthesized advice from several marketing/branding gurus on how to achieve a storied brand. All those words of wisdom may have left you wondering what a good storied brand looks like. Today, experts nominate examples of successful brand storytelling:

• Vikki Chowney cites these three brands as favorites: Gatorade’s Replay, Marmite’s Marmati campaign, and the film Coraline. See Chowney’s full post for elaboration on why these are her favorites.

• Robert Clay puts the spotlight on the UK juice brand Innocent “because of the story they tell on each bottle or carton” and Pret a Manger because “their sandwich boxes, bottles, napkins, paper bags, coffee and soup cups … and anything else you might pick up and take away invariably tell a story.” Clay also tells a “classic story” from the early 20th century about brand storytelling at the Schlitz brewery.
• JawboneTV offers a list — with video illustrations — of the Top 10 Story Brands: Who Gets It and Why. Jawbone’s choices include Phillips, Doritos, Absolut Vodka, Honda, Milk, Red Bull, Geico, 42 Below, and Scion.
• Sean Moffitt also cites Innocent, along with these brands:
  • Apple’s clarion call to Think Different
    
  • Lululemon — a manifesto (pictured) for healthier, longer, more fun lives
    (pictured)
  
  • Moleskine — a history of artists and big thinkers
    
  • Icebreaker — the Kiwi performance sustainable athletic apparel and the BAAcode
    
  • Trader Joes — the indulgent neighbourhood store
    
  Soup Peddler — the mobile "soup is love" purveyor of fine broth
  
  • Kiehl’s — the too-good-to-be-true skin-care company
    
  • Nike — who says big companies can’t tell great compelling stories? (and their new campaign)
    
  • Dos Equis — keeping your friends thirsty in a J. Peterman meets superhero manner

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  Entry by Kathy Hansen. Learn more.

   

  

Storied branding has been a hotter topic than ever recently, with marketers and branding gurus writing about storytelling almost daily. Here are some highlights from the “how-to” articles of the last several months. Tomorrow: Good examples of storied brands.

• In 5 Ways to Integrate Stories Into Your Social Media Marketing, Heidi Cohen offers 5 Story-Related Attributes for Content Marketing, 5 Story-Related Metrics to Determine Content Effectiveness, and 5 Ways to Integrate Stories Into Your Social Media Marketing, the last of which I found most resonant. Here are those five ways (see her full article for her elaboration of each way):
  1. Determine trending topics to write about.
  2. Source stories from customers and the public.
  3. Incorporate a human-interest element into your content.
  4. Provide stories that allow for interactions and additions.
  5. Enables easy sharing quickly and broadly.
• Writing that “one of the toughest challenges is telling stories about brands that are not only authentic but compelling and human. Sean Moffitt throws out an interesting challenge:
  “Search high and low and if you scan 100 websites, you’d be challenged to find one good story about the company or brand it supports. … A good story should be there smack dab on the front page attracting you like a mosquito to the nightlight.” Moffitt characterizes the common threads found in great brand stories:
  
  
  - They’re human — they avoid the PR and marketing jargon and articulate conversationally what they’re about
  -  They stand for something — half of the battle is not standing for everything and using words and phrases that don’t make people yawn or worse puke from their over-reaching and beigeness, that’s why big brands  suffer in building them — they’re always worried what the  other half thinks — get a spine and declare your mission
  - They’re simple and clear — they pass the subway ad, I can draw a straight line between what you say you are and what I think you are
  - They’re visual— if a picture is 1,000 words than  maybe you can tell your story  in 15 words with a picture
  - They’re  never fully told -  great brand stories leave room to explore and discover and provide a bit of mystique or mystery
  -They’re consistent with your experience — nothing hurts more than we’re the greenest company ion he world printed on non-recycled paper
  - Unless otherwise justified, they don’t overpromise — in fact, some of the best ones are self-deprecating and don’t take themselves too seriously
  - They are repeatable — they are memetic in nature and simple enough to be remembered and conveyed to others
  - They are empathetic — they are as much about what you can do with the brand than what the brand stands for
  - They root themselves in a cause or mission larger than themselves — they are so much more than the functional attributes of the product and vest people in a world view and mission that is impossible not to accept 

  (Tomorrow’s entry will feature, among other examples, the storied brands that Moffitt recognizes as successful.)

• On Fast Company, Henrik Werdelin tells Why Defining Your Company Narrative and Creating a “Social Object” Is Important. Werdelin explains that the “social object” concept comes from GapingVoid, where it’s defined this way:

  “The Social Object, in a nutshell … . Human beings are social animals. We like to socialize. But if [we] think about it, there needs to be a reason for it to happen in the first place. That reason, that “node” in the social network, is what we call the Social Object.”

  Based on that idea, Werdelin suggests, “Human interaction is widely based on exchanging stories, so if you create a very good narrative of your company or product, it can become just such a social object. A good exercise is to spend some proper time making a good story about your business and try it on a few people. Then wait a few days and ask them to explain to you what your business is doing — and see if you like what you hear.”
• Kathy Klotz-Guest asserts that ” every company should have a video storytelling strategy” and “video today allows for better, richer and more nuanced storytelling than with traditional media.” She adds that “Today, consumers don’t want to just view company content — they want to make their own. They want to be part of the story.”
• On Game Changers (not totally sure who the specific author is), storytelling itself is perceived as having a branding problem: “And the art of storytelling won’t gain mainstream cred with MBA-educated managers and their brands until professional storytelling gets re-branded and re-positioned.” To fight negative perceptions about storytelling, the author says, storytellers need to:
  • Shift the focus from “story” to “narrative.”
  • Share the narrative.
  • Move from scripted to improvised narratives.
  • (Elaboration on each point in the full article.)
• In Why Do Brand Stories Work? The Societal, Cultural and Physical Reasons Why, Stephen Denny draws from screenwriting guru Robert McKee, psychologist Norman Holland, and the late mythologist Joseph Campbell to answer this post’s titular question.
  • From McKee comes this salient bit of wisdom: “When you tell a story, the whole gist is to admit the negative side, then dramatize the positive side of how the courageous little company overcame all the negatives.”
  • From Holland, Denny cites “chemical changes in our brains when we’re under the influence of a compelling narrative” and “neurological evidence that our brains organize experience in narrative sequences.”
  • Via Campbell, Denny explains how we become emotionally invested in stories: “”When the story is in your mind, then you see its relevance to something happening in your own life. It gives you perspective on what’s happening to you… “

  Denny concludes that “Stories — the good, the bad and the inconceivably stupid — are the imperfections in our brands and our actions that make us believable, lovable and human.”

• Melissa Campanelli echoes Denny’s last point when she writes, “the branding or advertising in an online storytelling campaign takes consumers through a narrative, and there’s a compelling emotion associated with it. It touches you in some way and illustrates a human aspect.” Talking to customers about their experiences with your brand will yield stories, Campanelli suggests.

Entry by Kathy Hansen. Learn more.

That event, which stranded my flight-attendant daughter in Europe, has resulted in “an 88-page souvenir of a moment in time when a non-life-threatening crisis hit the world, one for which nobody was to blame, and nobody knew how long it would last. People scrambled to find alternative routes home, any way, any how, or tried to make the best of wherever fate had placed them. It was a moment of unplanned disruption, never to be repeated in quite the same way.”

Magazine creators Andrew Losowsky and Matt McArthur (who’ve never met or talked on the phone but managed to collaborate on this publication) issued this call to strandees:

This is an open call to designers, writers, photographers, illustrators, art directors and anyone else who is stranded by the ash cloud, and would like something to do.

If there’s one thing my ol’ ma taught me, it’s that when life gives you volcanoes, make magazines. And so we shall.

Fifty-plus people contributed to the magazine, called Stranded: Stories from beneath the Icelandic ash cloud.

I can’t tell you much about the contents since the magazine carries a cost, $18.95 + shipping. A digital version is in the works; no word on what cost will be attached to that.

But I’m impressed with the idea of a crowd-sourced magazine of stories sparked by this odd natural occurrence.

Entry by Kathy Hansen. Learn more.

I don’t know how this recording sounds because I can’t bear listening to myself, but you might like to listen to this interview I did with Nan Russell of Work Matters on storytelling in the job search.

Entry by Kathy Hansen. Learn more.

It’s probably no secret that those of us who report on and curate content about storytelling follow the #storytelling Twitter hashtag as one way of keeping up.

Yesterday, I saw that the #storytelling hashtag had been transformed into an online “daily newspaper,” The #storytelling Daily. (I can’t tell who created it; if you’re the creator, feel free to claim credit.)

I decided to similarly create a daily paper from the Twitter list I created of storytelling practitioners. So, the authors of the content in this daily paper are people I consider to be storytelling practitioners. They often tweet about storytelling but tweet about other topics, as well. The daily presents the same content — in a different format — as the “Permanent Entry” widget that always runs as an entry on this page.

Paper.li enables users to create a daily newspaper from the Twitter stream of a given user and the people who follow him or her, a Twitter hashtag, or a Twitter list.

Entry by Kathy Hansen. Learn more.

Back in the spring, Layton Payne wrote a blog entry declaring that Visual Storytelling [Is] Now Mainstream. The blogger was specifically referring to visual storytelling in the form of graphic novels, which are undergoing significant growth. But if visual storytelling in graphic novels is growing, it is also growing in numerous other manifestations and venues. Here’s a partial sampling from the last several months; look for Part 2 of this post on Oct. 10:

1. Online and multimedia storytelling from the 2010 Pulitzer Prize winners, which the site 10,000 Words says, “show that the traditional print stories can be married with multimedia and online projects to create a more dynamic and enticing story package.”

2. Photography of Ryan Schude: “Focusing around a conceptual and narrative framework, Ryan blends a fine art background with a more produced look to create multiple stories within each photo,” says gismullr (Twitter handle).
3. An Atmosphere Excavated by John Becker: “Architecture graduate John Becker’s final project involved creating the future headquarters of a fictional company that sells bottled water harvested from dew. The Columbia University School of Architecture graduate also constructed an invented history of the brand, but based the story on the real-life practice of collecting water in “dew ponds” and set the story in a real location in southern England.”

4. Dialoogle (pictured above) is creative tool to kick-start, renew, diversify and qualify communication in dialogues and group conversations. Dialoogling makes use of a series of picture cards with motives created to stimulate associations, inspire creativity, and facilitate versatile linguistic formulation of feelings, perceptions and ideas.
5. Renee Byer: Pulitzer Prize Winning Photojournalist, on the story telling power of photography. Byer isn’t the world’s most accomplished presenter — she mostly reads her notes, and the video is subtitled, perhaps because Byer speaks quickly — but about four minutes in, her presentation gives way to simply showing samples of her photographs and giving only the titles so that viewers can explore the emotions the images evoke for them.

6. Imaginative Landscape Pictorials: Michael Vincent Manalo’s Wondrous ‘Tales from the Story Teller’ “feature beautiful photographs, some of which have been digitally manipulated to create a unique image,” says the site TrendHunter. “The images feature people with their backs to the camera, staring into their various landscapes.” (sample at left)
7. Voices of Haiti is a photo essay by Jeremy Cowart. who says:

   After the 7.0 earthquake rocked Haiti on January 12th of this year, I was deeply moved as most of you were. For days I watched as the television flashed images of gloom and doom… dead bodies, crumbled buildings… It just felt like a heartless display of numbers and statistics. “How were the people feeling?” I wondered. I was tired of hearing endless reports from strangers that just arrived to this devastated nation. So I decided to go to Port-Au-Prince myself and ask them directly. My question was simply “What do you have to say about all this?” This photo essay reveals the many answers to that question.

8. Florian de Visser’s paper art storytelling. de Visser says his “projects are storytelling and always contextual, at any scale level. I like to look at the world with eyes wide open, to give the ordinary a twist and make it extraordinary. I try to trigger people’s imagination of their environment. Fiction and reality can never be seen separately.”

Entry by Kathy Hansen. Learn more.

If you’re 25 or under, you can help kick off the International Year of Youth by “sharing something about your culture — and your wild imagination — with the rest of the world.” Youthink is running a contest that starts with a supplied story. Contestants are asked to finish the story, adding no more than 300 words and giving the story a title. “Because the theme of the International Year of Youth relates to dialog and understanding across cultures, generations, borders, etc.,” organizers want contestants to include one thing about their culture in the story. “It could be a song, a tradition, a piece of clothing, a verse from a poem.” Deadline is Oct. 15, and the prize is an iPod Nano. You can see stories that already been submitted on the site.

In a much more elaborate contest with an earlier deadline, the Frankfurt Book Fair is promoting Frankfurt SPARKS with a contest that asks entrants to “make use of cross-media storytelling and show how stories are told in the 21st century.” Frankfurt SPARKS is a “digital initiative that addresses the ever changing and converging landscape of the publishing and media industries.”

Contestants are asked to tell/design a story using the media of their choice on any topic and in any genre. “The story can be funny, serious, lurid or subtle, thrilling or dramatic. … The aim of the contest is to demonstrate that, besides the ‘traditional’ way of storytelling in printed or electronic form, stories can also be told across a range of mediums. … choices may include, but are not limited to: pictures, videos, blogs, games, apps, internet forums, events, SMS applications, comics.”

There are two ways to participate at this contest, and given the upcoming Sept. 30 deadline, option 1 might be the way to go for anyone just learning of the contest:

1) submit only a story, a “story spark”. You will need to be able to present it using jovoto’s platform tools.

2) TAKE a story spark and turn it into a cross-media conncept — complete with images, text description and links if necessary to illustrate the concept. For this purpose, The Frankfurt Book Fair co-operates with the “Text-Manufaktur” — a school for authors — whose attendees have stated submitting such Story Sparks for contestants to take up and develop further.

Entry by Kathy Hansen. Learn more.

See a photo of Linda, her bio, Part 1 of this Q&A, Part 2, Part 3, and Part 4.

Q&A with Linda Garbe, Questions 9 and 10

Q: If you could share just one piece of advice or wisdom about story/storytelling/narrative with readers, what would it be?

A: We are all storytellers. To be a great storyteller you have to know what result you are after. Are you trying to entertain? Are you trying to sell your idea? Are you trying to change someone’s mind?

Mary Fisher, humor consultant, says, “If you have a point, find a story. And if you have a story, find a point.”

She is right. You will find yourself in one of two situations when it comes to storytelling. The first is you are looking for a story, as in you have been asked to speak on a subject. The second is you have an interesting experience and you figure out what it means to you and use it in a story.

When you understand this, stories start to appear before your eyes.

A: It always comes down to working with individuals. Even when an organization knows its story, it is up to individuals to tell it. In the most effective organizations, employees can tell the story of the organization by sharing a unique personal story. It doesn’t work for everyone to tell just one story … the company story. Each person needs to find a personal story to convey the meaning of the organization’s story.

My storytelling coaching for business people is about getting a result. They need to tell stories for interviews, team building, presentations, project management, coaching employees, and all the activities of business. It does not matter the job level, all people need to be effective storytellers.

The ability to tell stories is a make-it-or-break-it skill in job-search situations. This is especially true in the interview. Every person selected for an interview should have the knowledge and experience to do the job.

In 38 years in a corporation I did many interviews. Based on the information in the file, I ranked people I planned to interview from the person I thought most qualified to the least. In hindsight I wish I had kept those lists and documented how often I selected the person ranked the most qualified. It didn’t happen often.

Given they were all qualified, it came down to fit and how effective they were at telling stories. The person I selected was generally the person I talked about that night at dinner. They were interesting for some reason beyond the facts of their accomplishments.

In most interviews one of the interviewers will say something like, “We’ve seen your background information and read about your accomplishments. Tell us more about yourself.” This is a pivotal moment in the interview. It is a time when the person being interviewed has the attention of everyone and can direct the conversation. At this moment do not say, “It was a dark and stormy night, a shot rang out, I went to kindergarten….” Telling the linear story of your life will end your chances of being selected.

This is the time when you need to tell a story that shows your passion and who you are. To do this you have to know what is important to you. What is the foundation you stand on no matter what the situation? Most people do not know. When you figure out your core value and find a story to tell, you let people see who you are.

One of my clients said customer service was his passion. When I asked him how that came to be he told a wonderful story. When he was a child, his grandfather grew all the produce sold at his six vegetable stands. He describes working in those gardens and, when he was a little older, working at the markets. He said, “My grandfather taught me how to sell potatoes and how to deliver great customer service.”

After college my client worked at a company that did not value customer service. He told several stories about how awful it was to be in that environment and how pleased he was to now be working in an organization that put a priority on customer service.

After listening to him I believed customer service was his core value. Knowing why came from the stories he told me. They made me believe he knew what customer service was and that it was extremely important to him.

Now when an interviewer says, “Tell us more about yourself.” He says, “I’m the guy who knows that selling a policy or settling a claim is no different from selling a potato.”

When he says that he creates a Paul Harvey moment when the interviewers want to know “the rest of the story.” His story is interesting, it gets the conversation focused on his core value, and it tells them a lot about who he is. The story makes him memorable.

Entry by Kathy Hansen. Learn more.

See a photo of Linda, her bio, Part 1 of this Q&A, Part 2, and Part 3.

Q&A with Linda Garbe, Questions 7 and 8:

Q: Are there any current uses of storytelling that repel you or that you feel are inappropriate?

A: Years ago when the Internet was new, I took a three-hour class where I learned the Internet is like the world with all kinds of places and people in it. The instructor said it was up to us to determine what neighborhoods we visited in the world and on the Internet. I look at storytelling the same way. There are harmful stories, which can lead to bad places just as there are stories that inform our lives. It is up to each of us to determine which ones we pay attention to.

This Cherokee legend says it all:

An old Cherokee is teaching his grandson about life. “A fight is going on inside me,” he said to the boy.

“It is a terrible fight and it is between two wolves. One is evil — he is anger, envy, sorrow, regret, greed, arrogance, self-pity, guilt, resentment, inferiority, lies, false pride, superiority, and ego.” He continued, “The other is good — he is joy, peace, love, hope, serenity, humility, kindness, benevolence, empathy, generosity, truth, compassion, and faith. The same fight is going on inside you — and inside every other person, too.”

The grandson thought about it for a minute and then asked his grandfather, “Which wolf will win?”

The old Cherokee simply replied, “The one you feed.”

Q: If you could identify a person (such as a celebrity) or organization who desperately needs to tell a better story, who or what would it be?

A: The Catholic Church and British Petroleum.

Entry by Kathy Hansen. Learn more.

See a photo of Linda, her bio, Part 1 of this Q&A, and Part 2.

Q&A with Linda Garbe, Questions 5 and 6:

Q: The culture is abuzz about Web 2.0 and social media. To what extent do you participate in social media (such as through LinkedIn, MySpace, Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, Second Life, blogs, etc.)? To what extent and in what ways do you feel these venues are storytelling media?

A: This past year I made a commitment to learn more about social media … it about killed me. For a long time I was road-kill on the learning curve. Now that I understand more about it, I find the most critical step is “finding your water tribe.” This term comes from an article by Martha Beck who described the world of information as an ocean, which we are dropped into in a kayak. The trick is to paddle through this ocean to find your water tribe. I don’t think I have found mine. It is easy to flip over in your kayak, because there is so much to paddle through to get to where you are going.

Social media has brought a lot more information to us a lot faster. When I look at each message I read, I try to understand if it is adding value for me. Trying to weed out the lesser-value messages is difficult. I am on Facebook, Twitter, and Linkedin. I follow a few blogs and have considered writing one but am concerned about the time it would take.

Q: How important is it to you and your work to function within the framework of a particular definition of “story?” (i.e., What is a story?) What definition do you espouse?

A: Throughout my life I have found using broad definitions works for me. The more you limit a definition the more debates you get into. I have actually seen people fight over the definition of storytelling. I’d rather create and use stories and enjoy them in their many definitions.

Entry by Kathy Hansen. Learn more.

My friend Sarah McCue (of The Remembering Site) turned me on to a very inspiring project taking place on Oct. 10 (10-10-10).

One Day on Earth is “a documentary and new-media project about the amazing diversity, conflict, tragedy, and triumph that occurs in one 24-hour period on Earth. More than a film, One Day on Earth is a multi-platform participatory media project. The flagship of this project is a 120-minute documentary to be released theatrically. Across the planet, documentary filmmakers, students, and inspired citizens will record the human experience over a 24-hour period.”

Organizers say that participants in this historic event will help capture the diversity of life and culture on this planet and create a document that is “a gift to the world.”

You can sign up to participate here.

Entry by Kathy Hansen. Learn more.

See a photo of Linda, her bio, and Part 1 of this Q&A.

Q&A with Linda Garbe, Questions 3 and 4:

Q: The storytelling movement seems to be growing explosively. Why now? What is it about this moment in human history and culture that makes storytelling so resonant with so many people right now?

Q: To answer this I will share some items from my vast collection of storytelling quotes.

“We are in the twilight of a society based on data. As information and intelligence becomes the domain of computers, society will place more value on the one human ability that cannot be automated: emotion. Imagination, myth, ritual — the language of emotion — will affect everything from our purchasing decisions to how we work with others. Companies will thrive on the basis of their stories and myths. Companies will need to understand that their products are less important than their stories.” — Rolf Jensen, Copenhagen Institute for Future Studies, author of The Dream Society

“The past few decades have belonged to a certain kind of person with a certain kind of mind — computer programmers who could crank code, lawyers who could craft contracts, MBAs who could crunch numbers. But the keys to the kingdom are changing hands. The future belongs to a very different kind of person with a very different kind of mind — creators and empathizers, pattern recognizers and meaning makers. These people — artists, inventors, designers, storytellers, caregivers, consolers, big-picture thinkers — will now reap society’s richest rewards and share its greatest joys.” — Dan Pink, author of A Whole New Mind

Our cultural distrust in creativity goes back to the Enlightenment when we discovered the awesome power of rational thinking. The movement became so successful that rational thinking became the only thinking — at least the only thinking you could trust. Yet in spite of our continuing reverence for rationality, we don’t really do many things by logic. Our best thinking depends more on the “illogical” skills of intuition and insight, which may explain why logical argument rarely convinces anyone of anything important. — Marty Neumeier, author of The Brand Gap

Q: What people or entities have been most influential to you in your story work and why?

A: While I have always been a storyteller, I actually started studying storytelling about 25 years ago when I read an article read an article on the front page of the Wall Street Journal. The title was: “Jay O’Callahan Makes His Living as a Storyteller.” That article caused me to join a local guild; go to the national storytelling festival in Jonesborough, Tennessee; take courses from Eastern Tennessee University; spend a week with Donald and Merle Davis in their first storytelling class; read books by Annette Simmons, Steven Denning, and many others; and experiment with using stories to get results.

Through all of this I was looking at storytelling from the point of view of an individual who writes and tells original stories as well as the view of a corporate executive leading the Creative Services department for a major corporation. The ability to create a good story was equally important in both areas of my work.

Entry by Kathy Hansen. Learn more.

I came across Linda Garbe during my regular research travels on the Web and was struck by parallels between my passions and her interests/background in graphic design and working with words. I am so pleased to bring you this Q&A with Linda, which will run over the next five days.

Bio: [From her Web site] Linda started to talk before the age of 1 and soon after started asking questions, and asking questions, and asking questions. This intense curiosity and constant gathering of information never went away. Much of the information gained found its way into stories.

Storytelling has been the key to Linda’s communication success from Plum Grove, the one-room school she attended in first grade, to State Farm Insurance, a Fortune 500 company where she was the caretaker of creativity.

As assistant vice president, she was responsible for designers, writers, producers, directors, photographers, and technical experts who developed communication solutions for nearly 70,000 employees, 16,000 agents, and millions of customers.

Her unique understanding of communication and the power of storytelling is a result of her experience as a graphic designer, writer, and leader of creative groups.

Q&A with Linda Garbe, Questions 1and 2:

Q: You talk a lot about “mixing” — images and words, fact and story. Your Web site says: “Your ability to mix fact and story in just the right proportion for each situation will determine your success.”

Two-part question: How do you go about determining what is just the right proportion of fact and story? And can you share some examples of how you’ve mixed words and images?

A: Early in my career I was a graphic designer, deciding what image to use to convey an idea. Everything about that image made a difference. Later I was a writer and that was about choosing the right word. Every word makes a difference.

Mark Twain said it well, “The difference between the almost right word and the right word is really a large matter—it’s the difference between the lightning bug and the lightning.”

Words create images in the reader or listener’s mind. Being sure you have the right words to get the image you want and the result you are after is very complex.

Years of watching people succeed and fail taught me a lot about communication. I came to believe successful communication was a two-ingredient formula.

Content (Facts)+ Context (Story) = Successful Communication.

The trick is to determine how much of each ingredient you need. You must know your audience in order to make the right choice about how much of each ingredient to use. If you are speaking to numbers people who love data, focus more on the facts. If you are speaking to people who have an emotional investment in your subject you need to add more stories. In the business world it is rare to have an audience where you would want to use only one of these ingredients. By contrast, if the purpose of your communication is to entertain, it is possible to succeed using only stories.

Recently I worked with a group of executives who had just heard about a very challenging goal that had been set by top management. These were the people who were going to have to lead the organization to this transformational goal.

I talked about the tremendous power of the story we tell ourselves. They each needed to think about their leadership story and what they were telling themselves about how they lead.

I shared my leadership story. This is not a story I tell people I lead; it is a story I tell myself. I was shared it as an example so they would then create their own story.

For me, the audience for this story, it is a vivid combination of pictures and words that express what I aspire to as a leader.

Here is the story I told.

The inspiration for my leadership story is a man I never met and whose name I do not know. I heard about him from Bruce Nelson, a guy I worked with in Creative Services.

Bruce decided he wanted to run a marathon, and so he joined a group of runners up at Lake Bloomington to train. He told us lots of stories about his coach and the other runners. After months of training Bruce decided his first marathon would be in Alaska. It was a charity event. We all made pledges. We cheered Bruce on as he left for Alaska, and we gathered to hear his story when he returned.

He said the excitement was great and his expectations of success were high as he waited for the start. The place was beautiful and the air crisp. He experienced pure enthusiasm at the starting line and for many miles into the race. As the miles dragged on the going got tough. Enthusiasm tuned to doubt. With two miles and a couple of hills ahead he was not sure he could make it.

As he struggled on, his coach ran out from the crowd along the road and came up next to Bruce. Without a word, he set a pace and Bruce matched it. Another mile down the road the doubts were back. Realizing this the coach said, “Keep your eyes on my back and I will take you up the hill.” And with that, he ran in front of Bruce. Bruce watched his back and kept running. As they neared the finish line, the coach disappeared leaving Bruce to his victory.

After the race, Bruce learned his coach had run back down the hill to bring the next runner up. The coach did this for everyone who needed help.

This is leadership at its best. I want to be like that coach. I want to train and help employees so they have confidence they can make it on their own. I want to realize when they could use encouragement and run up next to them. And when I see they need more, I want to be the kind of leader they trust enough to follow up the hill.

Q: How did you initially become involved with story/storytelling/narrative? What attracted you to this field? What do you love about it?

A: Creativity has been my passion since I was very young. I was always telling stories in the rock collages I made, the plays I wrote, and the way I talked about everyday life. My intense curiosity made me to want to know more about people, places, and things. I do not remember a time in my life when I was not a storyteller.

I love storytelling because feelings hijack facts. It is a mistake to think of storytelling as some nice, sweet, interesting but unnecessary skill. Storytelling is the most powerful skill in the world. History is full of great storytellers able to tell a future story so convincingly people rallied to their causes both for good and evil.

I love storytelling because it is a thrill to find the perfect story, the one that makes the connection and communicates to one person or an audience of hundreds of people. Stories get things done. They inform, encourage, teach, thrill, reassure, and make a difference. Facts alone rarely get things done. A story provides the context and acknowledges the feelings related to the facts.

Entry by Kathy Hansen. Learn more.

I recently attended a meeting of Toastmasters and plan to join the organization. I intend to blog about my Toastmasters experiences occasionally as they relate to storytelling.

I have been wanting to join Toastmasters for about 15 years. Some people join the organization because they are terrified of public speaking. That’s not my issue; shy as I am, I am far more comfortable speaking to hundreds of people than I am with, say, meeting one-on-one with a casual acquaintance, making a phone call, or attending a party. I’ve done a bit of presenting in my time, and, of course, as a college instructor for more than six years, I honed my speaking skills a bit. But I know my presentation skills could use a lot of improvement. I use far too many “pause words” (um, uh), for example.

I was curious about the extent to which storytelling would be emphasized in the Toastmasters instructional materials and how story-rich members’ speeches would be. I don’t yet have the instructional materials that come in the New Members Kit, but material about members’ expected first speech, The Icebreaker, is included in the application packet I got. “Once you have the highlights of your talk in mind,” the piece reads,” weave them into a story, just as if you were telling it to friends around the dinner table.” I also did a search on “story” on the Toastmasters.org site and got 233 results; the first page of results looked promising, with articles about, for instance, how to put storytelling to work in your organization and how storytellers and Toastmasters can learn from each other. The site also offers a section of funny, embarrassing stories about speaking experiences. So I was happy to see that storytelling is well represented in the organization.

Almost all the speeches delivered the first night I attended were indeed story-rich. The first story of the evening was especially effective. A meter reader for the local power company delivered it, and she told tales of life as a meter reader that would not occur to most of us. The meat of her talk was about how she learned to keep dogs on her route from biting her, a particularly traumatic notion because a dog had bitten her in the face when she was a child. She wove fascinating tales of the techniques she has developed for fending off dogs in a humane way.

Would I have shunned Toastmasters had it turned out not to be a storytelling haven? Probably not, but I’m very glad that stories are exalted here. As I become a member and plan my first speech, I’ll blog again about my experience.

Entry by Kathy Hansen. Learn more.

The future of Ground Zero and commemorations of 9-11 are about more than just buildings, but this remarkable video from the New York Times tells the story of building for the future.

Entry by Kathy Hansen. Learn more.

My friend Larry Smith of SMITH Magazine turned me onto a very uplifting project called 10Q, “inspired,” Larry writes, “by the traditional 10 days of reflection between the Jewish holidays of Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur. It works like this: Login to the 10Q site and answer one question a day in your own secret 10Q space. One year later, your answers will be sent back to you for private reflection. From there, you can decide to keep your answers private or share them with the world. … You don’t have to be Jewish to love 10Q. The project is a great way for anyone to look back at the year that’s past, look ahead at the year to come, and take stock.”

This year, 10Q is partnering with SMITH Mag by adding an 11th question: “In just six words, what will the next year bring to your life or the world overall?”

On the site, you can see how questions have been answered during the previous two years of the project, including by celebrities, such as screenwriter Diablo Cody and Glee actor Jane Lynch.

The project should be of interest to story fans because most of the questions are phrased in a way that they could be answered with stories, whether stories of something that has happened this year, or future stories of what you’d like to see in the next year.

Sample question that could elicit a past story: Describe a significant experience that has happened in the past year. How did it affect you?

Sample question that could elicit a future story: Describe one thing you’d like to achieve by this time next year? Why is this important to you?

Today is Day 3 of the project, so it’s not too late to catch up.

Entry by Kathy Hansen. Learn more.

I’m a little late on this, but what kind of self-respecting applied-storytelling blogger would I be if I didn’t give a shoutout to Eric James Wolf’s new project — Applied Storytelling, “a seven minute weekly podcast examining every aspect of the application of storytelling in life, business and culture.”

Info from Eric:

This project will publish weekly but only the first of episode published each month. The other three episodes produced each month will publish inside the members-only section of the International Storytelling School’s Website.

The transcript and audio of the first show are available here.

Entry by Kathy Hansen. Learn more.

In a blog entry back in the spring, Tony Hirst suggested some interesting story prompts that spring from data.

For example, map-based journey: “Given a trail, what can you tell about the journey that was taken and what happened on that journey?” Hirst asks.

This notion happened to resonate with me because I had recently wanted to express to my social-media friends the challenge of a particular bike ride Randall and I like to do. It’s a very steep hill with several switchbacks, but I didn’t feel I successfully conveyed the elevation and challenge of this ride. Photographs failed to communicate how high up we were. I used a Google satellite map that showed the switchbacks, but I still think I missed the mark.

Hirst suggested MapMyRide for telling the story of the ride. I’ve used the site before, but this time I fiddled with it for about a half hour and could not figure out how to show the route I wanted to show. Same for Hirst’s other suggestion, EveryTrail, which seems to work best with a GPS device. (However, if you look at the images in Hirst’s entry, you can get a sense of what I might be able to show of our ride if I weren’t a dunce using these sites.) Interestingly, “Tell a Story” is one of the tabs for constructing an EveryTrail route. So, given my ineptitude with these two apps, the best I could manage was a terrain map of the route (right), showing that we bike to an elevation of 2,000 feet.

But the twist Hirst suggests for these journey-related is to look up routes mapped by others and speculate on the story of the trip. He discusses the site GarminConnect, “where folks share all kinds of personal data:”

Running a Google search for site:http://connect.garmin.com/activity/ should turn up all sorts of results pages, which leads to one possible data driven storytelling assignment — given a Garmin connect data journey, what happened to that person on their journey?

Similarly, Hirst suggests Daytum, a personal data-logging site. In finding someone’s Daytum information, “what story can we tell about a day in the life of this person, inspired by what they spend their time doing?” Just as he suggests searching for the journeys of others to prompt stories about them, Hirst proposes performing the search site:http://daytum.com/ to “turn up a random selection of public data profiles around which we can ask: what’s this person’s story? (Or we may go one further: pull down two random profiles, and tell a story about their life together, how they met, etc etc.)”

Hirst shares a few data-driven story ideas from others:

• Tell the story of where you grew up using maps and Google Street View photos. See the bottom of this post for a street view of the house in which I spent my first five years in what was then Haddonfield, NJ, and is now Cherry Hill, NJ. I remember rolling down the small hill in front of the house and throwing up on the front lawn on my birthday after eating a tuna sandwich and Kool-Aid way too fast.
• Map your memories.
• Create a neighborhood “digital story using Google Street View and Jing, or any other screencasting tool”
• Tell a story with a timeline or graph, such as this annotated line chart of a day in the life of hashtag that went bad… #cashgordon. (Hirst recommends CrappyGraphs). I should add that X Timeline is a good timeline tool; here’s my life timeline, which needs a bit of updating.

Another way to integrate Google Maps and your childhood home into a story-like experience is with the recent viral video project, The Wilderness Downtown, featuring the song “We Used to Wait” by Arcade Fire (“The lyrics of the song refer back to the days before instant communications when we used to write letters and the anticipation of waiting for them to be delivered,” notes the the blog for the company Delvinia). Other bloggers have suggested that readers view the video before reading more about it, so if you haven’t experienced it yet, you may want to try that before reading further. (Supposedly, the video needs to be viewed on Safari or Chrome; when I tried it on Safari, it was still only 97 percent loaded after 4 hours — yes, you would think I would have given up sooner — but loaded in about a minute on Chrome). NPR and Delvinia describe the experience:

As the video plays, browser windows open and close, sending a flock of birds scattering to the movement of your mouse. You’re invited to interact with the video, writing postcards to your younger self and sprouting vines from your cursor. [Delvinia: “After drawing the message with your cursor, the animated birds fly in to roost on the type before flying off into another one of the panes.”] … Type in the address of your childhood home, and Google Street View personalizes the video for you [“a Google Maps satellite view and rotating Street View images appear based on the address chosen,” notes Delvinia]. … As the music swells, a browser window opens, showing a young man running down the street. It closes and reopens throughout the video. [Delvinia: “The song climaxes with animated trees exploding into view on the paved streets within the Street View image captures. The experience continues by ‘Sending your Postcard Downtown’. The digital postcard has a unique URL that the user is asked to bookmark, this is where they will receive digital postcards from other users. The postcards will also be used as live concert visuals during Arcade Fire’s tour. Some postcards will be made into printed cards on special paper that contains birch tree seeds and distributed at concerts. Plant the cards and a tree grows.”

Delvinia states: “The term ‘transmedia’ has been adopted to describe these experiences, as stories are presented across a number of media platforms with multiple paths, entry and exit points available to the viewer.” I’m not sure The Wilderness Downtown is quite at the transmedia level, but it is certainly an interesting, high-tech storied use of data.

Entry by Kathy Hansen. Learn more.

When I first started this blog five years ago, I imagined that I would blog a lot more about storytelling and blogging than I turned out to do. I don’t see a lot written in the blogosphere about storytelling in blogs.

I know that when I sometimes tell stories about my own life in this space, I feel self-indulgent and as though I am foisting something trivial and uninteresting on readers. Yet, those life-story entries are often the ones that get the most response from readers.

Last week, Kimberly Turner offered a good reminder of the value of storytelling in blogs. Using Regator (a site “designed to help you find quality blog posts … by using highly selective human editors to find well-written, topical blogs on more than 500 topics then a combination of semantic algorithms and user interaction to find the most interesting, timely, and noteworthy posts from those blogs”), Turner identified 10 blog posts (from among blogs on trending topics) representing good storytelling and analyzed the characteristics that resulted in their compelling stories.

“Telling a story in a more narrative form adds emotional impact, suspense, interest, and imagery,” Turner notes. “People communicate in stories every day and, used sparingly and appropriately, they can add a lot to your blog.”

Here are the 10 storytelling posts Turner isolated:

1. Huffington Post’s My Whole Street Is a Mosque
2. The Seminal’s On the Luxury of ‘Coming Out’ When You Feel Like It
3. Devil Ball Golf’s The complete Tiger Woods timeline, from Escalade to divorce
4. Bors Blog Haircuts in Herat
5. Ad Age’s How to Almost Sabotage a Dinner Party With Facebook ‘Places’
6. Jalopnik’s I Sold Everything To Buy A Lamborghini And Drive Across The Country
7. TV Squad’s Oops! Most Embarrassing Emmys Moments
8. Journeys to Democracy’s Personal Note: Flood Relief in Remote Kohistan
9. PopWatch’s Miss Universe: Help me convince myself to watch
10. Warming Glow’s Oh My God, ‘The Walking Dead’ Trailer Is Amazing

And here are some of the characteristics that make these good storytelling blog posts, in Turner’s opinion:

• Good stories have enough details to help readers form a visual.
• Use your own personal experiences and stories to connect with readers on an emotional level but be sure your story ties in with your post’s goal …
• Stories are essentially a sequence of actions that create a plot.
• Make your story captivating and interesting…in other words, not something that your readers experience in their everyday lives.
• Depending on the purpose of your story, it may or may not be necessary to give a great deal of detail about the characters. Keep your focus on what’s relevant.
• Use quotes and images where appropriate to add detail to a story.
• Stories don’t have to be long.
• The best stories have their fair share of suspense.
• Stories can be used to establish camaraderie with readers rather than to create tension and suspense.
• Move beyond text to visually tell a story.

Entry by Kathy Hansen. Learn more.

Last week, Gabriella Evelina Britth (pictured), fulfilled her promise to tweet her resume (albeit an unusual resume) over five days.

The final tweet links to a spreadsheet on Google Docs that catalogs all the preceding tweets, gives the links contained in each tweet, categorizes each into “personal” or “professional” (the tweets are almost evenly divided between professional and personal), and tells the type of site or medium each link represents. Most tweets have a hashtag.

Britth’s artifacts include: Her birthplace; her resume (on LinkedIn); items from her portfolio; what she likes; what she sings in the car; pictures; an infographic depicting how she likes to work; her admiration for fictional agent Ari Gold; a video clip from a concert; a blog she follows; her portfolio; information; Web sites that inspire her; a map of where she lives; a to-do-list; video clip from movie, a video of a monkey “fighting for what he wants,” which Britth likens to herself; a “case movie of greatness;” baking instructions; a map of where she’s been; music; an infographic about how to brainstorm; links to sites she likes (such as Mashable); a slideshow speculating on what kind of animal, color, TV character, and so forth, she would be; a video in memory of her father; the food she likes; map of her first kiss; a disembodied video of Britth speaking (I didn’t hear any audio); a clip from the recent World Cup, a smiley face, which Britth consider to be “the true face of evil;” an infographic with Britth’s predictions for the future; and infographic with numbers about Britth’s life (number of days lived, footsteps taken, etc.); a slideshow telling her future story; quotes by Britth or others; her business card; checklist for the storytelling experiment; the spreadsheet that gives links + explanation of the project; plus a few others that seemed redundant, inexplicable, or where I got tired of clicking links.

My observations:

• When I first blogged about Britth’s project, I objected to the fact that the artifacts were tweeted instead of presented simultaneously and gathered in a single venue. Now that the project is complete, the artifacts are presented simultaneously in both Britth’s Twitter profile and the spreadsheet. While that’s an improvement over the tweets, I think there may be more engaging and unified ways to present the information; for example, commenter Cheryl suggested the artifacts can be gathered using Prezi or other presentation tools, resulting in something like the slideshow resume I wrote about a while back.
• The even mix of personal and professional tweets in the project helps to tell Britth’s story. We really get a good idea of who Britth is, albeit in a fragmented, postmodern way. She comes off as clever, whimsical, creative, and in possession of a good sense of humor. But many employers wouldn’t like such a heavy dose of the personal. (The file name of the graphic at left is “virginity.jpg.”)
• For practical purposes, this kind of resume is problematic for the same reason video resumes are. All are time-consuming to digest, Britth’s especially so since it requires clicking on 50 links. I was very motivated to see Britth’s links, and I still grew tired of clicking on them. Here’s where the tweeting concept does work; the audience may be more inclined to click on the links over five days.
• Britth shows that she knows her way around the Web and social media.
• While not the perfect storied resume presentation, Britth’s experiment offers lessons to others seeking to tell their stories to employers. Job-seekers would do well to consider many of the types of artifacts Britth deploys. If I were an employer in Britth’s field, I would certainly be intrigued enough to want to learn more of her story.

Entry by Kathy Hansen. Learn more.

Why have I never encountered David Hutchens until recently? I was captivated by his article, Applications of Narrative and Storytelling as an Organizational Discipline; or Why Organizational Communication in the 21st Century May Find its Salvation in Talking Animals, which he initially created for the 10th Anniversary Edition of Outlearning the Wolves, one of his series of Learning Fables.

Why did this piece knock my socks off?

• Because it is exceedingly well written.
• Because it weaves didactic and essay-like writing with actual stories.
• Because it presents brilliant ideas.

This piece is just the tip of the iceberg in terms of what Hutchens offers those interested in organizational storytelling and related concepts. He presents the article, Telling Stories, Making Meaning, his Learning Fables, simulation games with story elements (used to teach management concepts), and a charming story of himself and his career.

But let’s talk a bit about Applications of Narrative and Storytelling as an Organizational Discipline; or Why Organizational Communication in the 21st Century May Find its Salvation in Talking Animals.

Hutchens talks about how hard it is for corporate types to tell stories (“Storytelling is innate and intuitive, and yet I encounter a lot of people who feel anxious about it.”) and speculates on the reasons:

So what is it about the corporate setting that often makes it an inhospitable environment for narrative? Would telling stories simply have taken too long for this group of time-crunched executives or perhaps left them too emotionally vulnerable? Would their open-ended tales from the trenches have been too ambiguous for a culture that demanded precision and correct answers? Or have the PowerPoint body snatchers finally assimilated all of us so that we can now speak only in bullet-pointed reductionism?

One of the sticking points, Hutchens notes, is anxiety over which is the right story to tell. That’s where his Storytelling Matrix comes in. He describes four kinds of stories (read the article to learn the role of the storyteller, role of the audience, and examples for each of these four):

• Literal Stories: Descriptive stories that exist in the present reality with buried connections.
• Allegorical Stories: Stories that take place in a distant reality and have buried connections. They include fairy tales and movies such as Star Wars.
• Transformational Stories: Stories that take place in the present reality with the connections made explicit.
• Aspirational Stories: Stories in a distant reality with the connections made explicit.

I highly recommend you read Hutchens’s article and spend some time poking around his site.

Entry by Kathy Hansen. Learn more.

The site Women’s Memoirs is offering a free 22-page book, Journaling Essentials: Everything You Need to Know to Start by Amber Lea Starfire.

Here’s what’s in the guide includes: 
Seven Wonderful Benefits of Journaling: Each benefit comes with an exercise and space to conduct the exercise. The benefits Starfire discusses are:

1. Self-Care
2. Catharsis and Emotional Healing
3. Clarity
4. Making Meaning of the Meaningless
5. Personal Growth
6. Holding Onto Memories
7. Sharing Memories: Writing for Others
8. Enhanced Creativity

Starfire offers chapters on Getting Started and Staying Started, with exercises for both, along with a piece called Schedule a Time Just for YOU.

Noting that there are really no rules, just guidelines, she offers guidelines in a chapter called Rules of Journal Writing.

My favorite chapter includes 20 Writing Prompts and also offers Inspirational Quotes

Finally, Starfire provides a small collection of links to The Journal Writing Community.

Download the guide here. (Look for a box with the book cover on the right side of the page; enter your name and e-mail address to download the PDF.)

Entry by Kathy Hansen. Learn more.

Through a blog post from my colleague Karen Katz, I learned that Mitch Joel had declared personal branding dead. Though his headline was “Personal Branding RIP,” he actually said personal branding as a concept has lost its way — and, as I didn’t realize until later, he made this statement back in February.

The kinds of criticisms Joel leveled at the way some individuals brand themselves could be addressed through storied branding. For example, he says that “Those that were doing it well, were doing it authentically and with true passion.” Given that one of the best ways to express passion and authenticity is through story, it’s possible those Joel admires are telling their stories well in their branding messages.

However, Joel asserts that “we’re moving ever-closer to the point where most individuals are expressing their Personal Brands in ways that make them look more like sterile and plastic TV news anchors than original thinkers. … there is an ever-growing group of those who come off as fake, insincere, and simply out for their own personal gain. In short, they seem and feel like plastic and taste like vanilla.”

A major part of Joel’s critique — as well as that of the many commenters to his post — is that people are not being themselves in their personal branding.

But as one commenter points out, Joel’s argument suffers from a lack of examples — a lack of stories, if you will — of both those who are communicating their personal brands well and those who are doing it poorly.

By contrast, Josh Hyatt, in an article in the Aug. 16, 2010, Fortune, offers stories of folks who are branding themselves well and those who’ve made mistakes. The specific thrust of these case studies is folks who are striving to build a “brand within a larger brand,” in other words, within their employers’ brand. This set of stories about personal branding is a bit unusual — and refreshing — in that Hyatt barely quotes any experts on personal branding and simply presents the stories.

Among lessons learned by the protagonists of these stories:

• Be sure the values expressed in your branding align with those of your employer.
• Choose discretion over self-promotion.
• Be sensitive to changing priorities.

But getting back to Joel’s post and the many, many comments it received … Most of the critiques lodged against current personal branding could be addressed with storied personal branding:

• Commenter Martin Lessard cites Tara Hunt, who substitutes “personality” for personal branding. The implication is that expressing your personality is the best kind of personal branding. One of the best ways to express your personality is to tell your story.
• Ryan Henson Creighton observes that “we wear social masks to hide our personality warts (and in some cases, our real warts … know any Facebookers who use their baby pictures or high school grad photos as their profile pics?) … People are too afraid to look foolish, to appear selfish, or especially to posit an opinion that later turns out to be wrong.” Ulp, guilty as charged. I often use childhood photos of myself in profiles. Although I like them better than adult photos of myself, I don’t think of myself as so much hiding as paying homage to my dad and the wonderful black-and-white photography he did. I’m also wary of expressing my opinion, not so much out of fear — in our very politically polarized society — of being wrong but out of fear of offending someone. I do not have enough courage of my convictions. I like Creighton’s parting words: “Be ugly. Be wrong. Make mistakes. Show your warts. Generate healthy and helpful debate. And be brave enough to admit your mistakes…” In other words, tell your story.
• The comments to Joel’s post contain an undercurrent of disdain for all the “experts” who write didactic posts on such topics as how to Twitter properly and how to blog properly. Paul L’Acosta writes: “Twitter asks “What’s happening” and if John Doe wants to say “I’m eating ice cream. Man, this thing is cold!”, JUST LET HIM DO IT!” I so agree. Every time I see a blog post telling folks how they should be doing social media, I read it as the author saying, “This is how I do social media, and you should do it this way, too.” Indeed, Ryan Rancatore notes, “some of the strongest personal brands out there today have been created unintentionally and organically by people who’ve never heard or cared about the term.”
• Ramsey Mohsen cites a wonderful Joseph Campbell quote: “The privilege of a lifetime is being who you are.” You can express who you are through story.
• Scott Scanlon offers his report, Personal Branding is a Joke.
• Will Burns asserts, “The word “brand” should be no way near the word ‘Person’ (or any derivation therein) ever. It cheapens our humanity.” Perhaps “storytelling” is less cheapening.
• Kevin Dees says, “The people who follow me .. don’t see me as a ‘name’ or ‘brand’, basically something you buy from the store. They see me as an experience or a memory or someone they can relate to…” Experience/memory = story.
• Dennis Van Staalduinen argues that “brand is by definition IMPERSONAL.” Not when it’s storied, I assert.
• By way of promoting his company’s “platform for folks to build their brand with,” Josh Fendley cites Kevin Dugan, who uses this platform for his personal brand. It’s a clean, attractive site that nicely aggregates Dugan’s social-media presence. But I get no sense of who Kevin Dugan is or what his story is.

So, how do you create a storied personal brand? Just a few possible resources include:

• The branding chapter of my book, Tell Me About Yourself.
• Michael Margolis, who is all about storied branding.
• Bernadette Martin’s new book, Storytelling about Your Brand Online & Offline: A Compelling Guide to Discovering Your Story.

Entry by Kathy Hansen. Learn more.

This week NPR presented a two-part piece on “Our Storied Lives.” The text of the story (part 1 and part 2), written by Jon Hamilton, engagingly juxtaposes a preview of an upcoming book by Antonio Damasio with the story of a storyteller trying to make it in Los Angeles after many delays in reaching for his dreams.

The Damasio book, Self Comes to Mind, Hamilton writes, is about “how our sense of story influences our lives.” Hamilton characterizes the views of Damasio, a behavioral neurologist at the University of California: “… although we may not be aware of it, each of us thinks of our life as if it were a story in the making. … [W]e use stories to gain a perspective on our own lives.”

The way Hamilton structured the piece inspired me to juxtapose my life/story with Damasio’s research about story. Not because I think my story is fascinating but because I think this kind of analysis is useful for anyone, especially anyone interested in how story influences our lives. Here are some of Damasio’s findings (in italics) and my responses.

… we frequently model our own life stories on a story we’ve seen on stage or at the movies.

I don’t think so in my case. My favorite movies are achingly romantic, and I definitely wanted romance in my life, but I don’t believe I modeled my life after any one fictional story. Possibly the biggest pop-culture influence of my youth was comic strips. Perhaps I did model my story a bit after the life of Brenda Starr, the beautiful reporter whose story was filled with romance, intrigue, and adventure. But she was a working gal, and more specifically, a writer. That’s what I wanted to be.

My parents’ stories, however, influenced me more than those of pop culture. I decided early on to be a writer, in large part because my father was a writer. But I had a parallel ambition: I was rather obsessed with being a mother. Also the idea of being pregnant. As a child, I voraciously and precociously read reams of material about pregnancy and parenting, writing the story in my head of what a wonderful mother I would be. In 1964 (I think), the Ladies Home Journal ran a story about the Fischer quintuplets of Aberdeen, SD. This was back before fertility drugs, so quints were very rare; in fact, the Fischers were the first American quints to survive. I cannot tell you how many times I read that article.

My mothering fantasies were fed by my perception that my mother was a perfect mom completely dedicated to mothering. It wasn’t until I had children of my own that I learned my mother was not living the story she wanted; one day, she loudly and emphatically exclaimed that she had never wanted children. She had played the role of devoted mother to the hilt because she considered it her job, and she always gave 100 percent to her jobs. But the story she really wanted probably involved horses and being outdoors in nature. The saddest part is that I turned out much the same way. I believed my story would be one of fulfilling and nurturing motherhood but was shocked to discover — as much as I adore my children and do not in any way regret having them — that I was much more fulfilled by the Brenda Starr side of my life than by the Fischer quints side.

Setbacks aren’t unique to humans, but … our response to them probably is. We see them as changing the plot line of the life story we thought we were writing, and we cope by coming up with a new narrative.

The biggest setback in my life, the one that shaped my story for many years, was discovering — at the last possible moment — that my father had used my college money to start a PR firm specializing in petroleum companies — during the energy crisis of the 1970s. Needless to say, that venture was doomed to failure. I had been accepted at three great colleges, including Boston University, my dream school. But my dad told me there was no money to send me. I had grown up never having one shred of doubt that I would go to college. I had earned good grades so I would be accepted at a good school. My parents’ expectation for me was that I would go to college. If I had known they wouldn’t be able to finance my education, I would have approached going to college differently. And that’s what I ended up doing. I rewrote the narrative so that I alone was responsible for my education. I worked for a year after high school to save money, apply to cheaper state schools, and line up loans, grants, and scholarships. But my college self-sufficiency plan derailed after just over a year at a state university. I dropped out for reasons I didn’t understand then, but that I now recognize as depression. I’m sure my money struggles played a role, but they were not the entire cause. And I had to rewrite my story again. During the next 18 years, I worked my way up through a series of retail and clerical jobs, always looking for a chance to go back to school. I made a couple of false starts but managed to sabotage myself. I finally finished my undergrad degree at age 39. My setback story is not unlike that of Shaun Parker, the protagonist of Hamilton’s story on NPR. He, too, postponed his goal for nearly 20 years. Both of our stories turned out the way we hoped. But I know I can’t help wondering whether my story would have contained more success and prosperity if I had finished college at a more traditional age.

Humans never stop looking ahead to something better. … Because we know our own life is a story, we are able to look ahead to the part we haven’t lived yet and start writing those chapters.

Today, my next-chapter story is influenced by my mother, but in the opposite way from the way it shaped the story of my younger years. Hers is the story I don’t want. I love my mother dearly, but I do not want to be the lonely, bitter, pessimistic bigot she is. She has given to everyone else at the expense of living her own story. As selfish as I sometimes feel, I can’t be like that.

I’m happier than I’ve been in a long time. Life is very, very good. But, yes, I still have chapters to write, including literal ones. I have at least a couple more books in me, including a novel. I would love my story to include teaching again. I want to pursue creative avenues like crafts projects. And perhaps play a small role in guiding my children to fulfilling stories for their lives.

Humans have a unique awareness that our lives are stories that begin when we’re born and end when we die. And because we know we’re going to die, … we are not satisfied with merely surviving day to day. We want our personal story to mean something.

I want to be remembered. Many aspects of my story have pointed to the meaning I have sought, this desire to be a memory. It’s why I’ve written books, though none (yet) timeless enough to be propel my memory for very long after my death. I have left many artifacts — writing and more — all over the Internet in the hope of leaving a bit of a legacy. I was a teacher. Some of my students from 15 years ago remember me, and I hope some will after I’m gone.

How has your life been influenced by awareness that you are living your story?

Entry by Kathy Hansen. Learn more.

Gabriella Evelina Britth, who offers expertise in concepts, design, and storytelling, has declared in her Twitter profile that she plans to produce “50 tweets in 5 days. A Storytelling Experiment where I will share myself n [sic] my resume. Manifesto: Honest. Ironic. Sarcastic.” (I’m not sure if that’s meant to be “in my resume,” “and my resume,” or something else.) She started tweeting two days ago.

Britth had posted nearly two dozen tweets at the time of this writing. Most are creative ways of showing glimpses of her story, her lifestream, if you will. The first tweet, for example, is on PinintheMap and shows where in Stockholm, Sweden, Britth was born. In other tweets, she links to her LinkedIn profile, samples of her work, pictures of schools she’s attended and companies at which she’s worked, a video of a song she likes to sing while in the car, snapshots, a flowchart of how she likes to work (pictured), the Facebook profile of fictional Hollywood agent Ari Gold, a Lady Gaga video with art direction Britth admires, a blog she admires, a Survey Monkey quiz about herself, a Google street-view map of where she lives now, and a clip from Pineapple Express, the movie she considers the funniest ever.

The tweeted story/resume is clever and whimsical, and it does provide a good glimpse of Britth’s story. I’m not sure it work for employment (at least not in the U.S.) because it contains a few mildly risque elements.

I’d love to see job-seekers adopt some of Britth’s ideas for artifacts to link to as they seek to tell their stories. But tweeting the story doesn’t do much for me. I’d like to see some of these elements integrated into some other form of online resume.

[Thanks to Gregg Morris for alerting me to this tweeted resume.]

Entry by Kathy Hansen. Learn more.