Do you stretch?
I am blessed with great flexibility genetics and so for a long time, mobility was never an issue. But as I enter my late 30's, I'm coming to realize the importance of actually stretching.
Sometimes after a long day, stretching helps loosen me up before I head to sleep. And the other day I actually had a professional stretching session at the gym and like a hard massage, it hurt and felt great at the same time.
So stretching: crucial or whateves?
—Jason
🤔 Announcements
- 📆 This Tuesday: Reboot Your Life: Own Your Story (7-9pm ET)
- ❓Looking for founders who recently pivoted and now need to fundraise
🧠 Apparent Behavior and The 5C's of Stories
Today I want to tell you about what 80 year old psychology study reveals about the human mind and the importance of storytelling. And give you a handy mnemonic to tell better stories.
In 1944, Marianne Simmel and Fritz Heider published a landmark paper called "An Experimental Study of Apparent Behavior" where they showed a silent black & white film (which I've attached below) depicting a series of shapes and lines moving around to a group of participants.
When asked to describe what they saw to a second group of people who hand't seen the film, nearly every single participant described it in terms of a story with characters that had motivations, emotions, and conflict.
Their study has been cited in over four thousand papers for an important reason:
It reveals our very deep and innate impulse to tell stories.
And why does this matter? Because most of us fail to communicate our ideas using stories. Stories help us:
- Empathize with the characters
- Understand concepts better
- Remember and recall information more easily
- Persuade us to take action
You might be thinking—Jason, I'm not a novelist or filmmaker—why does this apply to me?
The truth is, we encounter opportunities to tell stories all the time. We meet someone at a party, we're on a first date, at a job interview, or simply connecting with a new colleague at work. These are all moments where a short, simple story can be important.
As I've mentioned a few times, I'm hosting a storytelling workshop on Tuesday night Jan 24th where you'll get to use my storytelling framework to craft a stronger narrative for your own life. But here's the gist:
I've found it helpful to break stories down into 5 elements that all start with the letter "C" (hence the 5C's)
- Context—the background info necessary to understand the story
- Character—the protagonist of the story (usually you!) and any other important people
- Conflict—your main objective in the story and what keeps you from getting it
- Choices—the choices you make and how they get you closer or further from your goal
- Change—the external outcomes and internal growth that emerges in the aftermath of the story
And because we're conditioned to see our lives as one big story, it's important to note that this framework doesn't have to be applied to your whole life, or your post-grad life in a professional setting.
It's better to think of your life as a long running TV series, with individual episodes and seasons that have both continuity and thematic shifts over time. In most settings, we are telling the season recap of our most recent arc.
Telling your story isn't easy and we often have a distorted view of what happened, what's interesting, and what's worth sharing. As a coach, I'm actively working with several clients on telling their stories as they enter the next phase of their lives.
Anyway, hope this makes you think more about how front and center storytelling should be in your life. And join me on Tuesday if you want to do more live!
👉 Links
- Courage / Risk ⚡️ VC-backed startup vs 16th century expeditions (just don't be like Magellan!)
- Relatable 🏋 The highly underrated life hack of taking mental health walks
- ADHD 🧠 Remember that productivity strategy is just cycling through various tactics until they wear out and then switching.
- Systematic ⚙️ How to use product thinking to solve any problem.
- Generative 🤖 Teaching ChatGPT the fundamentals of cognitive behavior therapy so your kid can unpack why she doesn't want to eat her vegetables
- Togetherness 🫶 Tips to make sure my future kids learn to speak Mandarin, my heritage language (#3 they need a reason to speak it!)
- Creative 👁️ "When a topic is complex, stories are like leverage. Stories get diverse people to focus attention on a single point." — Morgan Housel
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Jason Shen
Jason Shen
Jason Shen
