Up The Mood Elevator with Larry Senn
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Episode Summary
Today’s guest on the successful pitch is Larry Senn, the author of Up the Mood Elevator. He has some great insights on how you can shift from being angry and irritated to being grateful. He said that really is the key. He’s been called the Father of Corporate Culture so he knows how to get people and teams to work really well together, and of course that’s the secret to being successful. His whole premise is if you maintain a gratitude perspective, everything shifts, and that companies have value systems just like people do. He’s got so many great nuggets that I can’t wait for you to hear how he tells people to ask this question, “Do you have winners or whiners on your team?” Enjoy the episode.
Listen To The Episode Here
Up The Mood Elevator with Larry Senn
I am honored to have Dr. Larry Senn on my show today. Larry is someone that you probably don’t realize what an impact he’s had on your life and your business. He is a pioneer in the field of corporate culture and has literally been called the Father of Corporate Culture, so we’re going to ask him about that. He really has a vision to create a process to allow leaders to create a healthy and high performance culture. Of course, if you’re trying to get your startup funded, that’s one of the key factors as to whether it’s successful or not. Investors are always asking you, “What kind of culture do you have here?” From his Doctoral dissertation, Organizational Character as a Tool, he’s played a key role in really helping people for the last 30 years. He’s got a book out called Up the Mood Elevator. I can’t take you on a ride literally but since I’m all about helping people with the elevator pitch, we’re going to have a lot of fun talking about that. Larry, welcome to the show.
Thank you. I’m delighted to be here. It’s great to be with the famous Pitch Whisperer. There’s actually some mysticism in being a whisperer. I’m anxious to learn more about how you really create that deeper connection, which is such a key. I also think we’re aligned in the notion that nothing happens until you can sell something, whether it’s funding, an idea, a product, a vision. That’s what makes life move. Nothing happens until that happens, so it’s a wonderful art to develop.
We all have to “pitch” ourselves all the time. Even if we’re starting our own company, we have to pitch our vision to get the right team, we have to pitch to get clients, and if you want to pitch to get funding, it’s a skill that everybody needs to learn. Part of it has to do with being comfortable with who you are. That comes from defining your own culture even if you’re a one man band or one woman band at the time. If you wouldn’t mind, Larry, can you take us back to your own story of origin. There’s a story behind how I became The Pitch Whisperer, as you alluded to. I’m really fascinated to hear the story of how you became known as the Father of Corporate Culture.
I followed what my father told me to do initially, went off to engineering school. I didn’t come from a wealthy family so I started my first commissioned work selling flowers on street corners at eleven. As I started college, I started a business with kids selling flowers on street corners. Then I found that they didn’t sell flowers that time in supermarkets, so I started a second business selling flowers in supermarkets. By the time I was eighteen, I was driving a Jaguar XK120 and doing pretty well for my businesses. I said, “Maybe I’m more a businessman than engineer.”
When I finished engineering school I went on to get my MBA at UCLA. What I found is that I loved case studies. I love to try to understand businesses and what made them tick. Early on, I decided I want to be consultant. With the help of a professor and a kid named Jim Delaney, that’s why it’s named Senn Delaney, after the two of us, we started an early day retail, more of a process improvement firm. What I quickly found was that it was easier to decide on change than to get people to change. Most organizations were a bit like dysfunctional families. They had politics and turf issues and trust issues. I got my epiphany. We actually were hired, Delaney and I, to help Sam at Walmart, create the original supply chain for Walmart. It was a dream job. He was like an evangelist. Talk about a Pitch Whisperer, this guy just could charm you in. He had this vision of bringing low-cost goods all over America. He really lined up all the financing to build that organization and to grow it. Working with him was a dream. At the same time, we were trying to do something similar at Woolworth in New York. I would fly from Bentonville, Arkansas into New York and it would be like going to the morgue, just a bunch of old guys and there were old guys sitting around the table. Their only purpose seems to be to maintain the status quo. I said to myself, “That little company in Arkansas is going to take over the world and this one is going to die.”
There something about them, it’s almost like they have a different personality. I need to understand that. I realized that companies are like people, they have value systems, they have habits, they have character and that’s what corporate culture is. The name didn’t exist back then. This is in the 60s. I found a professor at USC who’d written a book called Readings in Organizational Character, just people commenting on the phenomenon. I went to him and I said, “Dr. Wolf, I’ve got to understand this thing because it has more to do with success in any company, even my own company as a startup, than anything else.” He said, “People have talked about it. No one’s ever studied it. What if we paid your way through the doctoral program and you study this phenomenon?”
You hit on a big problem there and you got a big solution for yourself out of it, what a great story.
That was really what led to ultimately writing my Doctoral dissertation as the world’s first research on the concept of corporate culture, then starting the world’s first firm devoted to shaping corporate culture. It’s those two things that got CEO Magazine to name me the Father of Corporate Culture.
The big takeaway for me is when you said companies have value systems like people. I love that so much, Larry. I think people sometimes aren’t even introspective enough to figure out what they value. Then if they’re starting a company they certainly don’t think of it like a person, so they don’t really even think that they need to define what the values are. You’re saying you really better have it, otherwise you won’t succeed.
In fact, for anyone who’s creating one, there’s a series of essential values that exist in any healthy individual leader, team or company. One of those, for example, is called the performance value rooted in accountability because I think in life we have winners or whiners. If you really want to make it, then you really want to be highly accountable. Then you also have to have a collaborative value because you can’t do it all alone. Unless you can partner with others and bring people on board and have healthy relationships, you can’t be successful, so that’s a second of the essential values. There’s a set of values that we all have if we’re successful, even if we haven’t thought about, but we have them. We are accountable. We are collaborative. We are open to change. We do have integrity.
[Tweet “You either work with winner or whiners.”]
You speak in such great sound bites and nuggets, I can’t get enough of you. That’s great stuff. It’s memorable, it’s got a good hook, and it really is an a-ha wake-up moment for people who are running their own company, and then also if you’re at all willing to look at your own growth as a person and as a leader. You can take a minute and go, “What do I have to do the majority of the time?” If I find myself whining or complaining about something that’s not really important, stop it.
I think that life is partly about energy management. What’s your energy like? If you think about it, one of the great drains of energy is moaning, complaining, blaming, being in wait and hope as opposed to the energy created by having a bias for action and results orientation. Energy is drained if you have politics in your company, no matter how small or large, people not getting along, that’s another energy drain. If you have people who are aligned around your purpose and going for the same goal with healthy relationships, then you have this clean positive energy that really does move you forward. That’s just a part of any person or organization.
That’s a really interesting way to distinguish it because from a metaphysical standpoint, quantum physics, you look at everything as energy. Certainly, when I’m working with people on crafting a great pitch and telling them the importance of using stories to pull people in and literally become magnetic, being magnetic, being charming, that is an energy that is created between people. You either repel or you’re attracted to want to work with people or not and have them as clients. All that stuff comes into play. If we can take the perspective you just gave us and say, “The better I manage my energy, then the better I’m going to be as a person and the better I’m going to be at being magnetic to my ideal clients.” I just love that. That leads us right into managing our energy on upping the mood elevator. How did you come up with Up the Mood Elevator: Living Life at Your Best? How did you come up with that title?
[Tweet “Companies have values like people.”]
We got to thinking about these essential values. In fact, one of the values is positive spirit. What became clear to us is that when people are at their best, when people are their best selves, at the top of their game, they tend to be more accountable, collaborative, creative, innovative. They have better energy. If you think about even yourself, when you’re at your very best, what are the kinds of feelings you have? For example, when I’m at my best, I’m more optimistic, I’m more hopeful. I feel more resourceful. I feel more confident. Those are some of the ways that I feel. I feel more loving as a father or a spouse. I feel more creative, more energetic. Those are feelings I have. On the other hand, think about those times when you’re really off your game, when you’re at your worst. For me for example, I tend to get more bothered and impatient easily, more irritated and bothered. I can become more judgmental. I can worry. I can become more self-righteous.
If you think about those things, you can put those on a scale that you call a mood elevator. At the top of the mood elevator is grateful. That’s an overriding emotion we have. When we’re seeing a sunset for seeing the birth of a child, there’s no thinking, it’s just positive, just embracing emotion. That’s at the top. Then you come down to feelings like being forgiving or being creative. Those are all higher states of the mood elevator, then you go all the way down to depressed at the bottom. Every moment of every day, we live somewhere on this thing called the mood elevator. Wouldn’t it be great if you know how to press a button that could move you up? What if you learned how to not do damage when you’re down? For example, have you ever said something to a loved one you wish you could take back? Where were you in the mood elevator? You were down there because when you’re down there, your thinking is unreliable, you say things you don’t mean, you sent emails you shouldn’t have sent. It’s just learning to know that you’re thinking’s unreliable in the lower mood states in the mood elevator and not acting on them, it really can change relationships, it can change companies, it can change many things. I remember one of the CEOs said to me, “Larry, I can’t always be up the mood elevator but I can learn to do no harm.” His mantra is, “Do no harm when you’re in a bad mood.”
[Tweet “Don’t do damage when you’re down the mood elevator.”]
If you’re at the bottom of this mood elevator that you so brilliantly created where are your depressed and angry, because typically behind depression is anger that’s unexpressed from my experience, is it possible to just jump right from that to being grateful or do we have to slowly move ourselves up? Like let’s just get a little where we be just maybe realizing we’re not depressed but a little irritated and then maybe we can start to find some humor in the situation so that we can start? Can we jump from depressed to grateful?
Let me give you an example. Let’s say that you’re sitting there at home one evening and you really are down that mood. One of the goals you had in your life is you wanted desperately to see Hamilton. It’s impossible to get tickets and you’re sitting there depressed. Your friend calls up and says, ” John, I just scored four tickets to Hamilton and I want you and your spouse to come with me. In fact, I know a member of the cast, we’re going to get to go backstage. We’re going to have dinner beforehand across the street. Would you like to come with me?” Now where would you be in that?
You instantly jump up.
The Mood Elevator: Take Charge of Your Feelings, Become a Better You
Let me tell you what happens. Our thinking creates our experience of life. Our thinking creates our reality. We’re talking about how someone can immediately shift as in the case of learning about going to Hamilton. The fundamental principle in understanding the mood elevator is that we create through our thinking. Worried thoughts create worried feelings. Grateful thoughts create grateful feelings. Every moment it’s like we’re creating a movie and we’re the producer and we have all the Hollywood sound effects to go with it. There are times where we will be stuck for a period of time in the lower levels. Just to know it’s our thinking though helps a bit, but there are things you can do. There are pointers to being up the mood elevator.
One of those is if you can do a pattern interrupt, and what I just described is a pattern interrupt, you were thinking very depressed and all of a sudden you are thinking Hamilton. A pattern interrupt can be as simple as taking a walk, walking with the dog. I pick up the phone I call Bernadette, my soul mate of four years, because just talking to her raises my spirits. I call one of my kids and just listen or maybe pick up the phone and call the grandkids. There are things you can do. I can read a book and get lost in the book, go to a movie. If I can change my thinking, I will change my mood.
We found that there are two things that scientifically shift what you call your set point on the mood elevator. One of those is pretty obvious but people don’t do it, and that is take better care of yourself. We don’t get enough sleep. We don’t take enough breaks. We don’t eat right. We don’t exercise. It’s scientifically proven that if you really get run down, you can catch a cold more easily. The fact is if you get run down, you catch a mood more easily. If you’re physically fit, taking care of yourself, you are much less likely to slide down the mood elevator. That’s one basis. That’s in my book, The Mood Elevator, that’s actually chapter nine, Shifting Your Set Point: The Wellness Equation.
Let’s take a moment and acknowledge that you walk your talk, because a lot of people can say, “Exercise, eat right, take breaks.” You literally do it. Can you just tell us a little bit about what you do to stay in shape?
Yes. I am nationally ranked and undefeated in the 80 and over sprint triathlon category. I just won the Long Beach triathlon two weeks ago in my category.
When he says 80 he means 80 plus years old, not 80% of something. I wanted you to really own that because you are walking your talk and it’s such an inspiration of how not only live better at any age but how to live better in our third act. I just think it’s so inspiring there are people out there like you. We know people like Carl Reiner maybe and other people or Norman Lear that are even older than you are that are still out there creating and making a difference. When you say something, it has a whole different level of credibility than somebody who’s just saying it, I don’t know, 30 or 40 years old. Thank you for that.
I want to also ask you, because this is one of my passions, is to help people get off the self-esteem roller coaster, especially if they’re in the sales position of only feeling good about themselves if their numbers are up, and feel lousy about themselves if their numbers are down. Let me tell you, it goes up and down multiple times in a day sometimes. I love your example of you can go from depressed to grateful if suddenly something wonderful happens, like getting tickets to a show you want to go to. Do you have any insights either from your own personal life or within the mood elevator of how can we shift our mood without having to have something outside of us come in and shift it?
[Tweet “Maintain a gratitude perspective.”]
That’s a deep question. What’s interesting is that we are so attached. We just learn in life that we think we are our results. The most significant factor that can help someone with the mood elevator is this notion of maintaining a gratitude perspective. I might have lost this sale today but my wife loves me. I have five wonderful kids. I can still run a triathlon. I’m so blessed in many ways. What can I learn from that sale? What did I do there that I didn’t do as well as I could? How do I turn that into a learning experience? The ability to maintain perspective in life. Whenever we get depressed and down, we’ve made the thing too big a deal. We’ve lost our perspective. All of us here and anybody who’s listening to this is in the small fraction of a percentage of people in the world based upon how fortunate we are, where we live, the fact we have a job, the fact that we’re learning and growing by turning into something like this. All of those things are wonderful things and yet we sweat the small stuff too much.
It’s Maslow’s hierarchy, isn’t it? You’ve got the basics handled and you know where your next meal is coming from and you’ve got a place to sleep, anything above that and the self-actualization stuff of constantly trying to make things perfect will drive you crazy and you won’t have any peace of mind. I’ve been fortunate enough to interview thought leaders, business experts like yourself. I interviewed Isaac Lidsky who happens to be blind, and wrote a book called Eyes Wide Open and runs his own company and looks at his blindness as a gift. I’ve interviewed Sam Morris who is known as the Zen Warrior. He was hit by a drunk driver 16 years ago and he’s paralyzed from the waist down. He tells me, “My brain’s not paralyzed. I’m helping other people transcend their physical.” Whenever I start to get a little mopey or frustrated or overwhelmed like, “Why isn’t this happening as fast as I want it to?” the impatience button, I go, ” I can see and I can walk. Let’s start there.” This maintaining the gratitude perspective is brilliant. I just love it so much.
I want to do a little bit of a shift if we can because you’re such an expert and you have so much information. One of the things that you are the master at, Larry, is helping companies that have merged two different types of cultures figure out how that team is going to get along. Can you tell us when example of what you’ve done so people can know to go to you for that in the future?
In any relationship, look at your differences as complementary.
Yes. Actually two companies merging is almost like two people getting married and all they have is their bios. They just met each other. It’s this phenomenon called cultural clash when two organizations come together. A famous example is a very costly one. Sprint when they tried to buy Nextel, it cost them $20 billion of market cap because of cultural clash. Most of the problems that United had. Continental was a pretty good culture and United was a terrible culture. The culture there was a clash. These things can happen. Some of the very successful mergers, CVS and Caremark, Boeing and McDonnell Douglas, all those we’ve been a part of. It’s really about really understanding the culture of the two firms and getting really to respect and value the differences as opposed to judging it. I think in any relationship, a marriage or anything, if you can look at your differences as complementary, if you look at them as helping one another as opposed to being opposing or critical.
The key thing we do, in fact, right now we’re working with a company called CenturyLink and Level 3, a gigantic $34 billion merger. We just did a two-day off-site seminar with the new eighteen-person team about half of each company. We just spent a lot of time really getting to know each other and tell our crucible stories about where we came from, what our values are, what our aspirations are, what we want to have as a joint vision for the future culture of this organization. At the end of that two days is like they’ve been together ten years in terms of trust, openness. A term we put out there is it’s very useful in life to assume positive intentions in others, not assume motives. We so often assume motives. What happens in mergers is we assume motives. It’s believing that each person’s doing what makes sense to them even if you don’t agree with it. It’s not malicious. It’s just how they see things.
We bring these wonderful concepts like the mood elevator and assuming positive intention and accountability and collaboration. We play a fascinating game that they can only win if they cooperate. Initially, they compete and don’t win, but then they finally figure it out and they say, “We’re so much better together than we are apart.” There’s an interesting thing we call an insight or a-ha based learning methodology we use that many people describe our two-day off-site event as a life altering event. That’s part of our magic.
One of my favorite expressions is when you’re healed, you’re not healed alone. When you fix something inside yourself, you’re in an ecosystem or your family or friends or in corporate situations, where if one person can get that a-ha moment of, ” I don’t have to go it alone. I don’t have to assume that everyone’s out to get me or get me fired,” and come from this place of trust. I work with people all the time that there are three unspoken questions people have when they hear you pitch. The first one is, “Do I trust you?” If I don’t trust you, I’m not ever going to hire you, buy from you, fund you, any of that stuff.
You really have delved down into a great way for people to start trusting each other so that then the client could say, “This team gets along. They’re trustworthy.” Just to double-click for a minute on the United Airlines example, which didn’t have a good culture, as you said, those things leak out. That’s the controversy that happened with the passenger being dragged off. Then the way they responded to it wasn’t the ideal scenario according to the majority of people who looked at that. You’ve got to own your stuff when you make a mistake. Putting principles above people never works. That’s what I saw happening there. I’d love your take on if you agree with that or what your perspective is.
I do. One thing that can drive all that is to have a purpose or noble cause. For me, both working today at my age and writing the book all has to do with a purpose. Taking care of myself is my purpose of being around for my family. I have a seventeen-year old son in high school still, kids ranging in age from 17 to 52. The book really, my personal purpose is to help more and more people live life at their best mentally, emotionally, physically, and spiritually. When I formulated that, I said, “I need to write a book about living life at your best.” The original book I wrote in 2012 was Up the Mood Elevator: Living Life at Your Best. The new book that just came out is called The Mood Elevator: Become a Better You. It really is my way of communicating things I’ve learned about living life as your best self more of the time. That’s what I hope to get to the world through the seminars that tens and thousands of people attend every year and through the book and ways like that. To any of your listeners, if there’s any way it’s helped any of them with their startup or their idea or anything, then I feel as if I’ve made a difference.
People can follow you on Twitter @TheMoodElevator. Larry, do you have any last words of wisdom? Obviously, you’ve led an incredibly productive, looking from the outside-in, very fulfilling life. Do you have any insights for people on how to do that? Almost like if you could talk to your younger self, what would you say?
Find your passion in life, the thing that really inspires and motivates you and creates energy for you, and then go about doing it being your best self. Be really accountable for the shadow you cast. Know that your mood affects others and that you are accountable for how you show up every day. You’re accountable to the world for that.
You cast a shadow wherever you go. That’s about being conscious, isn’t it?
Yes.
How else can people follow you?
There are some great videos I’ve done on The Mood Elevator and some great articles on TheMoodElevator.com. They can reach me at [email protected] also.
Thank you so much for inspiring us to find our passion. Stay healthy, stay active, and most of all figure out ways to get up when you’re down by using your mood elevator. Wonderful stuff. Thanks, Larry.
You’re welcome.
Links Mentioned
- Larry Senn
- Up the Mood Elevator
- Dr. Wolf
- Isaac Lidsky
- Eyes Wide Open
- Sam Morris
- Up the Mood Elevator: Living Life at Your Best
- The Mood Elevator: Become a Better You
- TheMoodElevator.com
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Show Me The Money with Leigh Steinberg
Posted by John Livesay in podcast | 0 comments
Episode Summary
Today’s guest on The Successful Pitch is Leigh Steinberg who was the inspiration for the character Jerry Maguire. He has a fascinating story of where that famous line, “Show me the money” came from, so you’re going to really want to listen to hear how that came about. Leigh is also very interested in making a difference in the world, not only with his own business but for the athletes and coaches and newscasters that he represents. He’s all about making sure that people know about anti-bullying as well as the issues of concussion with football players. He has all kinds of tips on how to take what you’ve learned as an athlete and apply it to the business world, whether it be courage under pressure or the self-discipline that you learn from sports and applying that to being a business leader. He said when you ask the right questions, you draw people out, and that’s really the secret to negotiating a great deal. Enjoy the episode.
Listen To The Episode Here
Show Me The Money with Leigh Steinberg
Today’s guest is Leigh Steinberg who is the CEO and Chairman of the Board at Steinberg Sports and Entertainment. He has two core values that I am really resonating with and excited to bring you, about treasuring relationships and making a positive impact in the world. Leigh represents professional athletes that are willing to serve as role models. He can retrace the roots to high school and collegiate programs and scholarships. He has represented eight players in the Pro Football Hall of Fame. He represents boxers like Oscar De La Hoya. He represents literally 40 television news anchors, sportscasters and coaches. As if that’s not enough, he was a creative consultant on Jerry Maguire, to name a few. Leigh, welcome to the show.
Thank you, John.
I’m always interested to ask my guest to tell me and our listeners the story of origin. In other words, I know you went to Berkeley and got your law degree there and actually taught legal things. How did you get from being so involved in the law into becoming this guru for sports and entertainment?
Show Me The Money: Leigh Steinberg was the inspiration for the character Jerry Maguire.
I went to Berkeley in the tumultuous time of the late 60s and early 70s, ended up Student Body President when the Governor of California was Ronald Reagan. I learned all I needed to know about negotiating from interacting with Governor Reagan as we were on the streets protesting the war in Vietnam and he was crushing those protests. I became a dorm counselor in an undergraduate dormitory. Working my way through law school, they moved the freshman football team into the dorm, and one of the students was Steve Bartkowski. In 1975, he became the very first player picked in the first round of the NFL draft. There really wasn’t sports agencies then. Players mostly represented themselves or have their parents represent them. He asked me to represent him and we got the largest rookie contract in NFL history. Berkeley was laid back when it came to sports, and so was Southern California where I’ve grown up.
We got back to Atlanta, their Klieg lights flashing in the sky like for a movie premier. A huge crowd was pressed up against the police line and the first thing we heard was, “We interrupt the Johnny Carson Show to bring you a special news bulletin, Steve Bartkowski and Leigh Steinberg have just arrived at the Atlanta Airport. We switch you live for the interview.” It was really then I saw the tremendous idol worship and veneration that athletes were held in communities across the country, how they were movie stars and celebrities. I thought if I could take those core values and have athletes go back to the high school community and retrace their roots by setting up a scholarship fund or working with the boys and girls club or church and then go to the collegiate community and endow some form of a scholarship, and then set up a charitable foundation at the professional level where the leading business figures, community leaders, and the political leaders with chairs and advisory board and set up a foundation that enhance the quality of life. They really could serve as role models, show the qualities of their character, and make a profound difference in the world.
It’s not enough to just be famous, I don’t think. You still want to make an impact in the world. In fact, one of the people I think that does that really well is Judith Light. I am fortunate enough to know her on a personal level. She’s won two Tony’s and an Emmy and all kinds of great stuff. She uses that fame to support causes that she believes in. It sounds like that’s what you’re doing for the athletes that you represent.
Running back to Tampa and Atlanta, just flipped 161st single mother and her family into the first home they’ll ever own by making the down payment and having the output. We have athletes who are working on causes from dyslexia to endangered species, from at-risk kids. Warren Moon has sent hundreds of kids with scholarships to college through his Crescent Moon Foundation. Troy Aikman has enriched children’s hospitals. The athletes pick something near and dear to them and then go ahead and make a difference. While they’re doing it, they’re learning skills other than athletic ones and they’re networking. It also can be messaging. I had the boxer, Lennox Lewis, cut the public service announcement that said, “Real men don’t hit women.” He was able to permeate the perceptual screen that especially rebellious adolescents put up against authority figures in messages and make more of a difference on an issue like domestic violence than a thousand authority figures ever could. Steve Young and Oscar de la Hoya, “Prejudice is foul play.”
[Tweet “Build Trust Through Listening”]
There’s so much to unpack there. First of all, the irony of having someone who’s a boxer talk about not bullying people and then realizing that a lot of people somehow don’t see color when they see a star athlete. Then that athlete as a person has still experienced some form of racism and can be the person to speak out and say, “This is not okay.”
We use the cultural symbols to try and deliver messaging in a way that triggers imitative behavior. It could be Bruce Smith, all-time sack leader in the NFL being part of The Impression Virtual Environmental Law March on Washington. It can be Warren Moon and I posing for an ad for one of the environmental organizations. You’re able to take an athlete like Rolf Benirschke, who did a program with the San Diego Zoo called Kicks for Critters, which raised millions of dollars and exposure for the concept that many species are endangered and they can be saved.
I think having athletes who have a shelf life much like a dancer, for example, ballet dancers or somebody like that, you know you’re only going to be able to do that for a certain amount of time. It sounds like you really help them have other focus besides just how much money you’re making and what team are you playing on, to start broadening their horizons while they’re in their peak so that that they can transition into possibly being a co-host of a talk show or whatever else they might want to do from being known for more than just being the athlete. Is that a fair statement?
We’re trying to stimulate both the most positive values and priorities with them, but also prepare them for a second career that will be just as fulfilling as what has come before. We have three players who are now minority owners of actual NFL teams, players who own parts of luxury hotels or head of construction companies, or run hedge funds or very involved in broadcast. No longer the greeters in front of Las Vegas hotels; these athletes have brand. Everything they learn in the athletic experience, whether it’s pushing off present gratification for future success, self-discipline, mastering complex information and applying it in real time, courage under pressure, team work. All these skill sets are completely applicable to business, media, coaching or anything else that they like to be involved in.
Self-discipline from sports can be transferred to business career and this concept of courage under pressure, which you will face whether you work for yourself or someone else, that there will be pressures and you have to dig deep. If you have that frame of reference, I think that brings a lot of credibility to what you’re doing. You wrote a book called The Agent: My 40-Year Career Making Deals and Changing the Game. Tell us about some of the stories from that.
The Agent: My 40-Year Career Making Deals and Changing the Game
What I try to emphasize there is that the real skill in life is listening. People think that it’s suasion, but allowing a space and trust to be built up so that you can peel away layers of the onion in another human being and be able to understand their deepest anxieties and fears and their greatest hopes and dreams, and bond with them at a deep level and see the world through their eyes. If you have that skill, you can gracefully navigate life. It’s not as important what your feelings are in the situation, whether it’s recruiting someone, negotiating with someone, trying to get to a solution. Being able to understand the other person’s priorities and goals so you can craft a win-win scenario is critically important. It’s listening and being able to draw out another human being and understand not what they’re telling you on the surface but what their real deeper agenda is, and seeing if you can figure out a way to accomplish your own goals while doing the same thing.
I negotiate contracts and the time frame of it is critical because there’s nothing that the athlete can do better with his life than to play for that team. Time works against us; time to be late to training camp or time to miss. The point is that what you fear is deadlock. When two people feel like somehow good faith has been offended, they can lock their positions in and self-destruct and just takes over. They’ll lock in and lock in. When you think things can’t get worse, in a deadlock they always can. The question is, how can you work out a paradigm of cooperation and not have that break down, and to be able to somehow identify points of commonality where resolution could be reached?
You’re the renowned expert at negotiation. I think people would be surprised to hear that your real tip on negotiating is not being typically aggressive but the listening and the empathy skills that you just iterated there. I think that’s a nice a-ha moment for everybody to say, “If I really want to be a good negotiator, I should become a good listener.” Am I on the right page there, Leigh?
Yes, and you also need to understand how to ask the right questions that could draw people out. The same skill is true in recruiting, in trying to make a sale, in every area of business. Making the assumption that you’re pre-set pitch is going to be effective assumes that every human being has the same priorities and the same personalities. What’s really important is to focus in critical situations that someone have the power to exclude all extraneous stimuli, to ignore the fact that the consequence of not making a sale or not negotiating this deal may be apocalyptic. To be able to tune that out, tune out extraneous noise, focus on the moment and elevate your level of performance to come through in those situations. So often in life, there will have been mistakes made or the situation may have grown dire. You may be facing pressures or temptation to quit or to see the situation as dire and unsolvable will be there at all times. It’s having the ability to tune all that out and focus on solution and be creative and perform in that moment that’s critical.
[Tweet “Ask The Right Questions When You Negotiate”]
You are the “real life Jerry Maguire,” super-agent, that’s what your book is really about. The director, Cameron Crow, of Jerry Maguire said you were the primary inspiration for that. Did you ever have a client ask you to do what they did in the movie about “Show me the money” and all that stuff?
No. It’s funny. Cameron called me up back in 1993 and asked if he could shadow me to pick up the atmosphere for a film that will involve a sports agent. He followed me to the 1993 NFL draft where I had the first pick. He came up to a press conference in New England with Bill Parcells, went to USC Pro Scouting Day, came for a week to league meetings, came into my office, Super Bowl parties, games, and I told him lots and lots of stories. The line, “Show me the money,” comes from a player named Tim McDonald who was out in Palm Springs. It was at the league meeting as I was showing him off to different teams to try to get them to sign him as a free agent. One night, Cameron went up to Tim’s hotel room and said, “What are you looking for in this experience?” Lou Dobbs in Moneyline was on in the background and Tim gestured towards the screen and said, “I’m looking for someone to show me some respect. I’m looking for a team to show me some winning. I’m looking for a team that shows me some money,” and Cameron wrote, “Show me the money.”
I love the story behind that. It’s such an iconic moment. Thank you for sharing that. You also have a story about how you decided to pass on representing Peyton Manning. Can you tell us about that?
That was one of my genius moves of the 20th century. There had been a situation where there were two quarterbacks coming out in ’93, Drew Bledsoe and Rick Mirer. Everyone thought Rick Mirer was more prolific in college, Drew was a better natural talent. I took Drew, we went on to Pro Bowls and to play in the Super Bowl, and Rick was not quite as successful. The same paradigm looked like it was going to happen in 1998, and that was Peyton Manning and Ryan Leaf. Ryan Leaf was really gifted athletically. Peyton Manning was really prolific in college. Ryan had to decide earlier, I took him. Peyton goes on to be one of the all-time great players and Ryan had a very fore-shortened career.
Do people pitch to you all the time to represent them? What do you look for when you hear a pitch like that?
I’ve represented in football 61 first round draft picks and the very first pick in the first round eight different years and in baseball practice, basketball practice. You’re looking for a talent level that’s going to enable our practice to stay on the cutting edge and give us role models who will really make an impact. In football, we have a quarterback-centered practice. This year, we have a quarterback Patrick Mahomes II who’s shooting up the first round with Texas Tech and last year. Paxton Lynch who hopefully will start this year for the Denver Broncos. You look for good values, first of all, and you’re looking for someone with a sense of self-respect, who understands the importance of nurturing family, who wants to be part of the community where people care for each other. Then you look for a work ethic and then that capacity, the ability to transcend the moment to perform in critical situations. All those things. Hopefully you have a strong family there but that’s sometimes not possible to have a nuclear, two-parent family. You look first for the character and personality qualities. There are many talented athletes. Every time you represent someone, it involves cutting up a little bit of your own life, which you have a finite amount of. You want to make sure you’re spending it on young men or women that truly you’ll be proud of.
What’s interesting to me is you not only represent the athletes but news anchors and sportscasters and sports coaches. I assume that same filter applies to them as well, yes?
It does. If you’re meeting people who have a heart, compassion, social conscience, a sense of a larger world, they’re going to use their craft and they’ll do more. They’ll find a way to use their profile to make a real difference. You get the same impact from people who are on television really in any capacity. Some of the coaches are as well-known as the players. They have longer careers, so do the news anchors, than athletes do. Again, every form of celebrity affords the opportunity to influence other people. A news person can do it through a well-crafted story or a story that’s got some passion or illumination to it. I think it’s all equally compelling.
The other thing that you’re doing that I’m really interested in is this creation of a virtual studio where you’re producing sports themed movies and TV and video games. Certainly, in the startup world, these internet apps and fan interactivity, the second-screen involvement, is really the hot button right now. Can you tell us about how that came about and what you’re doing with that?
We learned very early that the representation of athletes took us into the creation of content, and being involved with technologies. Back in the 90s, I have developed a company called Athletes Direct which was football, baseball, basketball players’ writing weekly diaries talking about their charitable foundation, e-commerce application. This was when you still have to go to AOL to get on the internet. We germinated it and sold it a couple of years later for a massive multiple. These projects where we can develop a sports themed reality show, a competition show, are dramatically scripted where we can consult on a sports themed motion picture. Then in technology, can we find the next new app, the new startup that brings fan experience closer, the next new website, the next new way to deliver content and be an adviser to that?
We have a group called Steinberg Ventures that looks at all forms of new technology development and looks for good startups.
I’m an adviser to a company called Desk Site where if you live in Los Angeles but you grew up in New York, you want to follow the New York Giants football team, you can get 30 hours of high-def over your computer, all the highlights, all the analysis and everything. It’s just like you were there. It’s got a demographic feature where you can tailor the advertising on a subscription basis to women or men or younger people or older people, as opposed to the scatter shot that happens when they’re advertising trucks on NFL games to an audience that’s 41% women. It’s a new concussion helmet that uses coil and compression to attenuate and dissipate the energy that comes into the head by as much as 50%. We have a group called Steinberg Ventures that looks at all forms of new technology development and looks for good startups.
Let’s talk about one of your other passion projects besides preventing bullying is working on concussion awareness and prevention and potential cures. You touched on that a little bit with Steinberg Ventures. Using technology to prevent some of these head injuries, obviously it’s a big topic right now. If the damage has occurred sometimes it doesn’t show up for a while. Anything else you want to tell us about what we can do as people who care? Is there a charity or something?
First, awareness. The reality of the situation is that, for example the sport of football, every time an offensive lineman hits a defense lineman with the inception of a play, it produces a low-level sub-concussive event. It turns out that an offensive lineman can walk out of the game with 10,000 sub-concussion events, none of which has been diagnosed, none of which has worked. It could happen as many as 10,000 times. The aggregate will almost certainly produce ALS, premature senility, Parkinson’s, chronic traumatic encephalopathy and depression. This danger exists not simply in pro-football or college and high school, in field hockey, in AYSO, in hockey; anything that involves collision. People need to be aware of that and understand that the collisions and concussions have especially devastating effects on younger people.
Looking at the age someone should start a collision sport, it takes longer for that adolescent brain to heal. Keeping track of the amount of concussions, finding ways to play collision sports more safely, protective helmetry and other devices. These are all things we need to focus on. We know that athletes who play collision sports may turn 40 and have problems bending over to pick up their child. It’s another thing not to be able to identify that child. We’re talking about the brain, which makes the concussion issue different than any other type of injury.
[Tweet “Show Courage Under Pressure”]
Any final thoughts, it’s just been a pleasure having you on, that you want to leave the audience with?
My dad used to tell me, when you’re looking for someone to fix a problem or deal with a situation in the world, and you keep waiting for the amorphous ‘they’ or them to fix it: the government, older people, someone else. He would say to me, you can wait forever. He would look at me and say, “The ‘they’ is you, son. You are the ‘they’.” It’s about individual responsibility and people believing that they have the power to affect the world around them and make a difference.
Don’t wait for somebody else to make a difference. You do it. I love it so much, Leigh. Thanks for sharing your insights and even the secrets of where, “Show me the money” came from. It’s been a fascinating interview. Thanks again.
Links Mentioned
- Leigh Steinberg
- Steinberg Sports and Entertainment
- Pro Football Hall of Fame
- Crescent Moon Foundation
- Kicks for Critters
- The Agent: My 40-Year Career Making Deals and Changing the Game
- Desk Site
- Steinberg Ventures
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Winning The Story Wars with Jonah Sachs
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Episode Summary
Today’s guest is Jonah Sachs, the author of Winning The Story Wars: Why Those Who Tell (And Live) The Best Stories Will Rule The Future. Jonah talks about the difference between inadequacy marketing and empowerment marketing and how to story to get people engage with your vision. He goes into great detail on whether or not we can use myths to our advantages or not; the myths that we’ve had around for years in our story telling. The more digital we become, he says, the more important storytelling becomes. He said, “If you want to get people to trust you, tell them a story of why you’re so passionate about what you’re doing.” Most importantly, he said if you want to be interesting, he has some real secrets on how to tell an interesting story that makes people want to learn.
Listen To The Episode Here
Winning The Story Wars with Jonah Sachs
Today’s guest is none other than Jonah Sachs, who is the cofounder and Chief Storytelling Officer of Free Range Studios in the San Francisco Bay Area. Jonah is internationally recognized as a storyteller, an author, a marketer, a designer, an entrepreneur himself. He’s got a column coming out in Fast Company. He’s written a wonderful book called Winning the Story Wars and has a new one coming out later this year that he’s going to give us a sneak peak on. He literally has helped hundreds of brands and social causes break through with this empowerment marketing approach that fuses storytelling techniques with digital media. That is really the secret to what he’s doing.
For the past sixteen years, Free Range Studios has brought key social issues to the attention of millions with really funny viral videos like The Meatrix and The Story of Stuff. He’s worked with big brands like Microsoft and Green Peace and American Civil Liberties Union. His book, Winning the Story Wars, has won all kinds of awards. He literally talks about drawing case studies from his own body of work. Jonah, welcome to the show.
Thanks for having me, John. I’m glad to be here.
When I first heard about you and first started reading the book, you instantly pulled me in with your story of how you got to play a version of Darth Vader. Would you mind sharing that story? It just made me instantly like you, remember you, and make me want to read the whole book.
Winning the Story Wars: Why Those Who Tell (and Live) the Best Stories Will Rule the Future
I was seven years old. I had just met a new friend at school who had a video camera at the time back in the early 1980s. I’ve never seen a video camera before. He told me that if I wanted to, I could be in his shot-for-shot remake of Return of the Jedi. Nothing could have been more thrilling than doing that. We joined on. We looked at masks. We scouted locations. We dreamed up of how we’re going to shoot every scene. Then, lo and behold, one day, I was cast as Darth Vader, which is, of course, the dream part. Then, when we got to shooting, he pulled me aside and said that while I was doing a great job on the set, he was going to have to dub my voice because I was too squeaky to be Darth Vader, a very crushing piece of information.
At that time, I thought about ending my relationship with this new friend. But strangely enough, we wound up forming a business together fifteen years later. That became Free Range Studios. We’ve been working together on and off ever since. That was a first experience actually with the power of storytelling, because what kid didn’t want to live in Star Wars? I would later come to find out that Star Wars is based on these ancient myth templates that still move people today, in terms of stories that make us care.
The fact that this was going on when you were a young lad, and now you’re certainly not old but a lot of time has passed and it’s still more relevant than ever. That really shows the timelessness of it, doesn’t it?
Yeah. Nobody could have obviously predicted from the 1980s to today what would have happened to our media landscape. It is so different. In some ways, because people have this ability to communicate with each other directly, with brands directly, and decide what media they take in and what they share and what they comment on, in some ways we’re returning to a much more oral tradition-type society; the way we used to communicate. We’re back to everyone owns ideas. Everyone passes them along. They change along the way. That’s how human beings have always communicated. When you go back to our roots of communication, you actually move back towards storytelling and away from some of those broadcast mentality that grew up over the last hundred years, which is really a perversion of the way that people love to communicate. The more digital we become, I believe the more stories become important.
[Tweet “Story Wars: The more digital we become, the more important it is to tell stories.”]
It’s great because you intuitively might think the opposite, but to really be connected to people digitally, the storytelling doesn’t. In fact, in your book, The Story Wars , you talk about Winning the Story Wars, that all wars are story wars, which is such a clever play on words with Star Wars, Story Wars. What is going on in Story Wars? You talk about people have this belief that they want to be part of something, that we’re all in a quest. Is that really the essence of a story war?
The idea is that while we may fight over policies or land or ideology, really what draws people together to give us a sense of us are the stories that we share and the stories that we tell. The stories are these amazing tools for transmitting values, for teaching our children, what do people like us do, what do people like us think? Anthropologists across time have been able to say that the key stories are really what define of tribes or a group sense of us. Without an “us,” there can be no “us versus them.” Then we come up against other groups who have other sets of values, and other stories that they live by. When those stories come into conflict, that’s when we can both feel righteous. We can both feel like we’re on God’s side and yet get into conflict with each other.
Story Wars: Marketers should realize that there’s a battle out there for ideas.
I mean that literally. People have gone to war over these core stories of what our great nation means, who our enemies are. I mean it a little but more figuratively. We fight it out at the ballot box. We fight it out in our brand choices based on, what kind of person am I? What stories do I want to live by? How then can I take actions that make me feel like I’m living that story every day? I think that without a story, it’s pretty hard to get people to go to war. I’m certainly not advocating that we start more wars with stories, but I am advocating that marketers realize that there’s a battle out there for ideas. If you want to win that battle, you have to understand the story that you’re telling.
That battle continues, if you want to get hired, if you want to get your customers to pick you versus all the other choices, or if you want to get investors to pick you to fund your startup. This concept of storytelling and pitching is intricately tied together. We’ve established the need for being a good storyteller a little bit. Can you break down? You talk about peeling away the layers of things to avoid, you call them “story-killing sins,” that you need to really be tangible, relatable, immersive, memorable, and most importantly to me, emotional. Anything you can talk about as it relates to those things, I think would really help people start to understand how they can craft their own story when they pitch.
I think that we have gotten it into our heads, because we have all grown up in this broadcast tradition, or most of us have grown up at least in this broadcast tradition mentality, that if you had the money to be a professional communicator, if you have the money to get on the radio or get on the TV, then you had some authority over the audience. You’re above them. You could spout a bunch of facts at them. You could tell them what to think. You could make claims about what was so great about your product. They figured, “If that guy’s on the radio, he must have some credibility.” That type of communication gets us to talk about the facts and the features and big proclamations. Nobody really gets drawn in to believe that.
Storytellers have always known that if you just get up and yell the moral of the story at people, that’s not going to make it stick. You actually have to put it into a scenario. Show what it’s really like on the human scale. It’s harder work for sure, but really bring it down to that human scale. What emotion is involved here? If you want to rely on your own sense of puffed up authority or just using a little bit of humor to get a cheap laugh, that’s a real 30-second spot broadcast mentality.
If you want to hook people in and make them feel like, “I know this person. I trust this person. This person is someone that I want to do business with.” Telling your personal story, telling the story of how your product came to be, telling stories of how your users will actually come to ultimately engage with the product is all incredibly powerful. For my new book, I’ve been studying. Actually investor intuition is one of the topics I’ve been studying. There are some amazing studies that are pretty new now that are coming out about how much investors make decisions based not on financial data, market data, industry trends, but just on this one question of, “Do I trust the entrepreneur? Is the entrepreneur someone I want to do business with?”
[Tweet “Story Wars: If you want people to trust you, tell your personal story.”]
There’s a lot of data that shows that. That trumps even when the market data goes the other direction. How do you make someone think that you’re someone you want to do business with? Of course, you dress nice, you smile, all that kind of stuff. You show them your resume. Tell them a story that they can relate to, that they can put themselves into. That’s going to create a huge bond. I think that information really backs up this idea if you want someone to invest in your business. You certainly need to tell a story.
What’s the title of your new book?
Story Wars: How do we actually change the way that we behave to adapt to a changing world?
It’s called Unsafe Thinking. It’s about how in changing environments, old ways of operating no longer work. How do we actually change the way that we think, change the way that we behave to adapt to a changing world? So, no particular methodology. I invested in this storytelling methodology quite a bit. I traveled around the world talking about storytelling. One of the things I learned is that becoming an expert in something is awesome. It’s fun. It gives you something to talk about. You meet a lot of people. But it actually slows your learning down. It gives you this idea that if you got a giant hammer, suddenly everything looks like a nail. Storytelling is a great tool, but in some ways, I actually got stupider by becoming an expert about storytelling.
At some point, I had to realize I’m less curious. I’m less interested. I’m growing less because I’m only thinking about one thing. That led me to this idea of, “How do we simultaneously invest in our brands and who we are in the world and our footprint and our expertise, and still remain beginners and learners?” That’s caused me to investigate all kinds of stuff, like the fallacy of expertise, the failures of experts, like intuition and counter intuition, like ideas about values, who are we willing to communicate and collaborate with? Who do we call outsiders and how does better products come from working with people that we find somewhat repugnant? All those things. How do we get out of safety and into that unsafe zone so that we can really succeed?
Expanding our comfort zone is what keeps us growing, yet maintaining our expertise. It sounds like what you’re really saying you can do both simultaneously, not one or the other.
That’s definitely a part of it. There’s this myth that the beginner comes in and changes the field. That actually is a myth. You need to build up. You need hard work. You need deliberate practice. You need to get those 10,000 hours in what you’re doing to really change a field that you’re in. At the same time, there’s this huge trap that you face. That the better you become at something, the less able you are to adapt when the landscape changes. Of course, the landscape is changing. If you’re just playing chess, where the rules never change, you just keep practicing. But life is not like chess. Certainly, the technology market is not like chess. That’s what I’m working on now.
This intuition of investors, making a decision with their gut emotionally and then backing it up with the left brain logic, I love. One of the key ways to get anybody, whether it’s an investor or potential customer, to trust you is to be able to tell a story of why you’re doing something or why you’re so passionate about something. That is where the emotional component comes in that most people don’t know how to do. Is there any tip you have on how to generate a story? You have this really great chapter in your current book, where you’re talking about, “For God’s sake, be interesting.” What are some key tips we can do to at least be interesting when we tell a story?
Story Wars: Put characters in situations on the surface that played that story out in real life.
Let me answer a couple of ways. First of all, a story is really constructed by taking some truth. Something that you know is going to teach your audience something; that your audience is going to say, “That’s what I believe too. But I never thought to say it that way.” It’s some kind of core truth or moral of the story, but illustrate it not just by saying it, but by having characters on the stage that are playing out a drama. At the end, you’ll realize, “That character succeeded because cheaters never win. That character failed because greed always leads to failure. We believe in the power of hard work. That’s what this story is about.” Know what your story is about. Put characters in situations on the surface that played that story out in real life.
If somebody is saying, “That story really comports with my values and my world view,” you’re going to make that hard connection. You’re going to make that emotional connection. How do you make that story interesting? The problem with so much professional branded corporate storytelling is that we don’t want to take chances. We want to go from “the world is bad” to “I use this product and the world is good.” That’s so boring. If you went to a Hollywood movie that was just climbed up on a gentle curve to betterness all the way, you think it’s a horrible movie.
If you want a story to be interesting, how do you set it up so it’s not obvious? You expose mistakes you’ve made along the way. You show some amount of fallibility. You don’t make it so that the solution is obvious. You need some level of surprise, some level of twists and turns, the non-obvious to make it stay interesting. That’s one thing I always coach people on: No one’s going to listen to your story if they know where it’s going from the beginning. Sometimes, that means starting your story in the middle. Don’t just start at point A and go point Z. You’ll start at point M and then flash back, talk about the real trials that you’ve been through, get a little bit vulnerable. Those are some tools along the way. I think definitely, keeping people guessing is what keeps them tuned in.
[Tweet “Story Wars: No one will listen to your story if they think they know where it is going.”]
No one’s going to pay attention to your story if they think they already know the ending. The element of surprise is what keeps a story interesting. Let’s give some examples. You have so many great ones in your book of different campaigns that people have probably heard about. You’re talking about Listerine, the moral of that story is bad breath makes you undesirable, but there’s a core need that’s being celebrated there by being desirable and having good breath.
I use that Listerine story because it’s one of the first examples of where marketers learned to stop just talking about their products and start telling compelling stories around them. In the 1920s, the story behind it is there was this pharmacy antiseptic that was Listerine. They didn’t know what to do with it. They called Madison Avenue and said, “What could we do with this product? We want to sell a lot of it.” They said, “This is good for halitosis.” They’re like, “What’s halitosis?” No one even knew what that meant. They’re like, “Halitosis is bad breath.” They’re like, “Is that even a problem?” “Yeah, we can make it a problem.”
They ran these ads. They’re called the Sad Edna ads where you have this spinster. She’s old and unmarried. At the time, that’s 27 years old or something like that. She’s never going to be married, why? Because she has a problem that she could never know she has. No one’s going to tell her she has. It’s bad breath. Always a bridesmaid, never a bride. There she is looking lonely and sad. This was an enormously successful advertising campaign. Women all over the country reading Ladies’ Home Journal started wondering if maybe they had bad breath. Suddenly, a multi-billion dollar beauty industry was launched on this campaign. I point out in the book that an approach like that is very traditional though. It’s a story. There’s a hero. There’s a damsel in distress. The hero is, of course, the product. The damsel in distress is the consumer. That works when you are flipping through by yourself at home, a magazine, and feeling who do you talk to about how you feel about this?
Imagine sharing on Facebook, a message to all of your friends, “I think you guys all have bad breath.” No one would go for that. This idea of, “You suck, you consumers suck. This product can make you acceptable,” was what I call inadequacy marketing. It’s just the basic underlying premise of most marketing for most of the broadcast era. What I call empowerment marketing is really flipping that script. Instead of saying, “You suck, this brand can make you better,” you say, “You, customer, can do great things. You have a great potential. It may be hard. You might have to fight to get there. It might not be convenient and easy, but you have a great destiny. We can help you get there.”
Story Wars: Don’t make people feel bad. Make them feel good.
That is the change. Don’t make people feel bad. Make them feel good. Don’t tell them how much they lack. Tell them how to reach for those higher values, not just fitting in or making money, or gaining convenience, but having a meaningful life, transcending values on Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs. That’s the kind of work that I did to tie in patterns of ancient myth that really do that with the new marketing landscape. Perhaps a little bit theoretical, if you’re just sitting down to write your next tweet. I find it very inspiring to think about the difference.
We can absolutely take away how to use that right off of that, because if you’re pitching an investor, let’s say, to fund your startup and you’re painting a picture with your story of what your vision is, that not only is that investor going to make money, but there ideally might be some social impact, making the world safer or better or somehow, that there’s a reason as opposed to just focusing at all the problems you’re solving. Once we get this, for example, if we can prevent drunk driving or if we can keep the schools safe or whatever the problem is that you’re solving with your startup, then the investor’s saying, “I’m making money but I’m also making the world better.” That’s a much more emotional connection that we talked about earlier that good stories have.
You can do that for sure; make the investor feel that they’re a potential hero. You can show how your product makes your everyday users heroes. That means not that just they’re able to get their laundry detergent 25% cheaper but that they’re actually able to better care for their kids and live their higher values. I often liken it to this: imagine you’re at a party and you’re standing next to somebody who basically the subtext of everything they’re saying is how great they are. How long would you stay in that conversation? Imagine you’re standing next to someone, and after five minutes of talking to them, you start to feel really good about yourself. How do you feel about that person? Very different.
You talk about this concept of the myth gap, do we have not anymore myths? I really want to do a little dive into that because there are four elements to a good myth. You talk about there’s an explanation, there’s a meaning, and a story, and most importantly, the ritual of how do we take that into our life. Can you tell us about the myth gap and is there a gap in today’s society? Do you feel that there is still a way to use digital connections with keeping the myth alive?
The basic idea of a myth is not to think of it in terms of fact versus myth. It’s not a lie or a misconception as we often think of it. The first idea is that myths are meaningful stories that all societies have always lived by. Without myths, we don’t really know what we value and who we are. That’s what anthropologists, including Joseph Campbell and many others have said, if you look at a society, you want to understand it, you look at its myths.
Now, these myths combine four things, as you said: explanation, this is how the world works. God created the world in six days and rested on the seventh. That’s how the world came to be. Meaning; it doesn’t just tell you something, but it makes you understand your place in the cosmos, your place in the tribe, your place in society. God made the world, so it’s his world. I should obey him. Story; it doesn’t take place yesterday or in your neighbor’s backyard. It takes place in some mythological other symbolic, creative realm, where anything’s possible. Ritual; The Garden of Eden story, of course, takes place in this forgotten time that you can never go back to, in this lost Garden of Eden. This ritual; how do I live this story out in my life? These stories are not useful if we can’t enact them ourselves. That’s what a myth is.
Story Wars: In our hyper-rational, scientific, technological society, we don’t share those myths like we used to.
In our hyper-rational, scientific, technological society, we don’t share those myths anymore like we used to. We don’t all believe the same thing. We don’t all share these same meaning stories. Carl Jung in the 1920s and 30s started to really worry that we would be the first society without myths and that world war and violence, and all these things that were happening around him were the result of man losing that meaning based on myth. There’s been a clear belief that we are this first society not to have shared myths. I wrestled with that in writing the book. What does that mean? I came to believe actually that we do have myths. But hose myths are now being created by marketers.
Example that I use is the Marlboro man. The Marlboro man came along in the 1950s. Classic storytelling marketing campaign. Philip Morris wanted to introduce a filtered cigarette for men. That’s an entirely new product. Filtered cigarettes used to be only for women. What do they do? They talk about that it’s more healthy. Did they talk about it tastes better? Did they talk about, it’s cheaper? No. They picked a symbol of basically a broken myth. They picked a symbol of this cowboy. At the time, Americans were really wrestling with American identity. Are the cowboys the good guys? Maybe America isn’t good. We’re in the middle of all these conflicts. The way that we’ve treated Native Americans, how do we see ourselves? This is broken myth of the American West. Marlboro comes along and shows us this cowboy smoking a Marlboro cigarette, reinvigorates that exciting myth of the American Frontier.
What does he do? Give us an explanation. There’s a new way to smoke filter cigarettes for men. Meaning; you don’t have to be a cowboy to take on this identity. When someone pulls out a pack of Marlboro Reds, we know what that means about them. That they’re rugged and rebels and all that stuff. Story; nobody walked by those billboards and said, “That guy is not real. He’s just an actor.” We know he’s not real. It’s okay. We still buy it. Rituals are some way to live this story out. Of course, we just go to the store and we buy a different kind of cigarette. These kinds of stories really fill that myth gap in a lot of ways for people. It really said maybe we don’t have legends anymore like we used to, but we can express our identities and ourselves through the products that we buy.
I made the video series, The Story of Stuff, which really talks about how problematic that is to just spend money and consume things as a way of deciding who we are. It is an enormously powerful tool if you can create new myths to get people to do anything from take more pro-social actions to buying your product and using it in a way that makes their lives better, to identifying with an online community. If you could help create new myths, and right now, a lot of our myths are broken. We saw in the last election how the death of the myth of the American dream really opened up a lot of space for new stories to come through. Donald Trump spectacularly capitalized on people’s feeling that that myth is falling apart and offered to bring a new story in its place. You see how powerful it remains to this day.
That, again, may seem overwhelming. But if you break it down into four pieces, am I offering people a real explanation of how life can be better lived or how the world works? Am I giving them an identity, a community to be part of by engaging with this story? Am I using story? Am I not just talking about the rational here and now, but setting it in a fantastic, exciting world, where more is possible? Ritual; is it clear for them how they can get involved and do something that makes it part of their lives? Any marketing effort or pitch can be better if you think along those lines.
You have, at the very end of your book, a whole graphic, you give people a story strategy map. Can you walk us through that very quickly so that people can start to figure out? Obviously they need to buy your book, but if they can start to say, “I understand I need to tell a story when I pitch. It’s going to build up trust and credibility with the people I’m pitching. I know that my story has to have some myth and emotional involvement in it. Now, the basics of storytelling, you’ve given me, but how do I start?” Your three things at the top there would be really helpful from who’s the brand hero etc.
Story Wars: The core insight is your brand is a story.
I build the five-part model essentially that helps people start to figure this out and how do they build their brand as a story. The core insight is your brand is a story. It’s not being told at a single YouTube video. It’s a story; every chapter is being written every day by your audience, by you, by what you say, what you do. You don’t get to control that story but you get to create the coherence for it, the ideas for it, and then let it play out in the world. What I ask people to do is think, at the heart of all stories are core values, what are the values that your company stands for and lives out and that you want to communicate and share with your audience that will matter to them? Don’t just pick the most basic values like the need for convenience or safety or security, but values that can help people live their best lives.
What’s that moral of the story? If your brand is a story, what’s the moral? What’s that core truth that you’re standing for in everything you say and do? Figure that out and you’ve got some real good consistency in your messaging. The other three pieces are, one, don’t think of yourself as the hero in this grand story that you’re telling. Really think about how are we making heroes out of our customers? Two, if we’re not the hero, who are we? When you think of yourself as the mentor, we haven’t really spoken too much about the hero’s journey today, but I use that model. You’re not Luke Skywalker, you’re Obi-Wan Kenobi, inviting someone on an adventure. Obi-Wan Kenobi doesn’t just tell people what to do. He speaks. He creates connection. If we’re a mentor, what’s our human voice? We use brand archetyping, like many people do, to figure out. If we were a person, what kind of person would we be? Whose voice do we speak in?
Finally, the thing that the mentor always gives the hero to bring him on this adventure is some magical gift. What is that gift that you’re giving to your audience, that innovation, that differentiation, that new thing, that makes this interesting, exciting journey actually seem possible? You think of those five things. What are your values? What’s your moral of the story? What’s your brand gift? Who are your heroes and who are you as a mentor? You could maybe not read the book and just go right at it. The book obviously gives lots of tips and tricks for not only how to build that strategy for what your brand is but also then to tell stories to implement it.
You’ve certainly given us a magical gift on how to become great storytellers and the importance of it. I can’t thank you enough. You’re going to be writing a column for Fast Company soon. People can also follow you on Twitter. Would you mind giving us your Twitter handle?
Obviously, if people want to engage you professionally, let’s let them know about your agency and who your ideal clients are that you like to work with at Free Range Studios.
You can find us at FreeRange.com. Anyone who’s got a world-changing vision and wants to do purpose-driven communications or innovation, we’d love to connect. Let us know if you want to help figure out your new story or how to live that story in the real world.
Thank you so much, Jonah.
Thanks, John.
Links Mentioned
- J Robinett Enterprises
- John Livesay Funding Strategist
- Jonah Sachs
- Winning the Story Wars
- FreeRange.com
- @JonahSachs
- Fast Company
- The Story of Stuff
- Unsafe Thinking
- The Meatrix
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