Are facts the worst communication tool?
Yes.
Okay, okay… I will elaborate. 👇👇👇
🧠 Our brains love stories
Our brains are storytelling machines. It goes down to their very structure.
Without getting too nerdy about it, different portions of our brains are in charge of different functions.
A good story activates almost all of them: smell, vision, sound, long and short term memory.
Our brains create micro universes with every (good) story we hear or read.
Stories touch every fiber of our cognition.
Dry facts, on the other hand, don’t. They activate mostly the language processing bits of our big-ol’ brains.
“Stories work on multiple evolved systems in the brain and a skilled storyteller activates these networks like the conductor of an orchestra.” ― Will Storr, The Science of Storytelling
🍜 Dry facts? Cook delicious sauce.
So if our brains love stories and not facts, how do we learn anything?
One way is brute force: we repeat certain facts until they get stuck in our brains.
This unsustainable approach can be seen primarily in:
High schools
What some marketers call “performance ads”
Every high school kid can tell you how much they love this approach.
Every marketer can tell you how quickly it burns through media budgets 💸💸💸.
The other way, is to weave the facts into compelling stories.
Stories are the most potent pedagogic tools in existence.
Your mind automatically extracts facts and learnings from stories.
A good story does not merely tell you a fact.
It shows you how that fact is useful and relevant to your life.
🤔 Consider these two scenarios:
You give a basketball to a kid and read them the NBA rulebook.
You give a basketball to a kid and show them Space Jam (the Michael Jordan version, of course 💜).
Which is more likely to get the kid excited about basketball? 🏀
Which is more likely to leave a lasting impression? ⏳
🚗 How to create stories that drive facts?
Understand what your target audience cares about.
Think where the dry fact intersect with what they care about.
Use these intersections as anchors. Build your story around them.
Plan a relatable narrative. Not necessarily realistic, but applicable. Basketball aliens aren’t realistic (sadly) but the hero’s journey is very applicable.